Why Do Gadgets Break? 554
TurboTurnip writes "A post on the Crave blog at CNET asks: Why are modern consumer electronics so easily broken? It argues that the 21st Century is 'The Age of the Flimsy' where 'your gadgets will simply break within the year.' Post author Chris Stevens talks about how computers are fast enough for the average user, and the only way to make consumers upgrade is 'increasingly poor build quality ... Engineers have built obsolescence into mass-produced technology since the 1920s. There are two kinds of planned deterioration in a product: one is technical, the other is stylistic.' The writer compares the build quality of a 20 year-old IBM XT to the modern Motorola Razr phone and concludes that modern gadgets are 'delicate, beautiful supermodels that can't go the distance.'"
Supermodel Gadget. (Score:5, Funny)
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What're you saying again?
upgrading... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Because (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you tell a good company from a bad company?
The bad company tells their customers what to do with the stuff they buy, and yells at them when they complain.
The good company pays attention to what their customers do with their purchases and upgrades so that the next version will be able to do it better. That does NOT only mean 'more memory'. It also means shock resistant case and water proofing, and batteries that don't wear out (or explode).
Which makes it more expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of products have a dropproof/waterproof/dustproof alternative, at an increase in cost. People opt for the cheap model. The consumer makes the choice in the end.
Re:Which makes it more expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you have the WalMart effect, where they've beat their suppliers wholesale prices down to the point where the suppliers are forced to do the same thing, buying and building cheap just to stay in business.
End result? You "saved" five dollars buying a flimsy POS, and you'll get the chance to do the same thing a year from now when it breaks down and dies.
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Except (Score:3, Insightful)
Markets aren't 100% efficient and only support a finite # of suppliers. They often can support fewer suppliers than there are permutations of consumer demand
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Ditto. People drive twenty miles to save five dollars on a $500 TV. As such, too many companies compete on price, and buy the cheapest possible components to do so.
Oh, completely.
And consider the things we've lost as a result of that or "environmentalist" pressures to reduce consumption (which somehow completely ignores the consumption required by more frequent replacement thanks to shorter product lifespans):
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Thank God they don't !
The thing is, most everything made 10, 25, 50 or 100 years ago was *also* crap. It's just that for obvious reasons people remember the item that still works 30 years later, but have forgotten about the item that died in its first year decades ago.
In actual fact, the average modern car goes significantly further with significantly less service needed than cars did only a few decades ago. Yes, there where a few exceptions. A few cars built in
Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately the field I'm in is a little less competitive. For my latest products, I opted for powder-coated steel enclosures when most are using plastic or sometimes aluminum. Yeah, it's more expensive, but you can drive over one (which has happened to previous models) without harming it. But aside from that, it makes a big impact when I'm showing them off at a convention. People smile when they pick one up - it doesn't feel cheap or flimsy, and it's immediately obvious that quality is a major concern with the product. Same goes for the internals, with gold-finished PCBs and higher quality parts than are strictly necessary. It all adds up to an extra few bucks for a $65 product - more than worth it from my perspective.
Besides, I can't afford to hire a tech support / rework staff - if it breaks, I'm the one who has to fix it. Now THAT is a real incentive for quality!
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Quality, Affordability, Usability... Pick Two.
Re:Because (Score:5, Informative)
Also, for some very very odd reason, after around 18 months, the solder joints begin to somehow grow little spikes and cause pins to short out.
Ah, tin whiskers. [wikipedia.org] An extra-special gift [wikipedia.org] from our European friends.
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>problem. Damn Apple for skimping and not using super
>future battery technology. I mean come on, this
>criticism is slightly baseless.
Ah, but it *IS* an easy problem to solve. All it takes is somewhere between two and four screws and an extra part number with which one can order replacement batteries.
Making the bits which will fail first easy to replace isn't a particularly subtle design goal. The people who manufactured my wristwatch, pda, cell phon
Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to own a print-shop, and with that came printing presses of course.
Most manufacturers designed their printing presses with 4 or 5 'weak points'. These would be gears, cams, or other parts on the press that were made of aluminum, copper or some other weak metal that was sure to break. And break they did. In fact, a good 80% of the time when I needed to get a press repaired, it was one of these pieces that would break- frustrating the hell out of me.
So the repair guy would come out and replace the part, charging me a few hundred dollars, and keeping us out of production for a few hours. Obviously I asked him, "Why the hell do they make these things out of aluminum, when all of the other pieces are made of steel?"
I was ignorant, but his answer made perfect sense. The manufacturer would put these weak parts on the outermost parts of the press, where they could be easily accessed. Also, one of these parts would be part of each important system on the press. So, when something went wrong- a bad paper jam, or rollers stuck together, or something fell into the press (like a hand), then these weak points would break, and thereby protect the rest of the press. So instead of the repairman coming out and tearing apart the entire press; taking days and tens of thousands of dollars; he would come out and replace one simple part in just a matter of minutes.
I wonder if there could ever be a similar way of engineering electronics.
Replaceable batters on MP3 players would be a good start....
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Which is a pretty horrible thing to do, because that's just wasteful and has a negative impact on the environment. Nicad and NiMh batteries are already worse on the environment. buying batteries to throw away just multiplies the effect. The responsible thing to do as a human is to use the LiOn and use it for as long as possible before replacing it.
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Fuses and MOVs serve this purpose. Fuses open when too much current pass through them. A MOV will short when the voltage is too high, which in turn opens the fuse. A lot of electronics are cheap enough that the whole board/product gets repla
Re:Because (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of this is just good practice, some means more money must be spent, some means a lot more money must be spent.
In 1980, a new VCR cost $700 at a bargain store. It was heavy because it had a high quality machined cast-aluminum chassis. It was good until the heads wore out or the belts failed. Now, a new VCR costs $50 and has many more features. It's light because it's mostly plastic. Technology has advanced; what was transistorized in 1980 is now integrated. Recordings are better due to video processing tricks and better tape. The machine will last until the heads wear out or the belts fail.
Designing electronics so that cheap, easily replaceable parts fail is generally not an option, with the exception of adding fuses and circuit breakers.
Never Heard of Shear Pins? (Score:3, Informative)
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Stupid and careless (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me relate to you a story about my Rogers cellphone, and I'll ask where would you reasonably draw the line...
I obtained a Motorola phone from Rogers Wireless a bit over a year ago, and almost from the start I found I could not get good signal strength on most occasions. I thought it was just crappy coverage from Rogers but then a friend of mine notices we got the exact same model of phone from the same pro
Re:Because they're cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
Now I finally have a heavy-duty nylon holster with a sturdy velcro flap. The only negative is that the belt clip is still plastic (although thicker) instead of metal. If it breaks, I'll get a metal clip and retrofit myself.
The larger problem is the Walmart syndrome. Walmart demands lower prices from manufacturers, who make up for it in reduced quality. Now, because of walmart, you can't get a good quality product from ANY store that carries that manufacturers goods since they are all made to the walmart spec. Walmart, for example, demanded that Matel lower costs by 20% one year or they wouldn't carry their products at Walmart which forced Matel to shut down all US plants and drop quality. Remember when Tonka toys were sturdy? No longer. The quality of toys for kids these days is horrible. Nothing lasts more than a year - many things are broken in shipping before they even get to the store.
I can do a "ditto" with snow shovels. Walmart, Kmart, Lowes, and Home Depot all carry the same shitty chinese shovels. My local hardware store (which just closed this past summer due to competition from Lowes and Home Depot that moved in) carried shovels made in Canada, which are awesome. Now I will have to travel 30 miles to the next dealer just to get a fucking snow shovel that works (when the canadian one wears out in a few years.)
By the way - did you know that if you buy a DeWalt drill at Lowes or Home depot they come with PLASTIC gears? If you go to a contractor tool store, you get the metal gear models for only a few dollars more.
I've had enough of the big-box stores. I buy local / regional whenever possible, then mailorder, and if all else fails, will finally try a big box store as a last resort.
Cost savings? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's more than you think (Score:5, Insightful)
However if you want a $400 computer from Dell, which would be about $200 in 1983, well don't be surprised if there's some compromises made and it doesn't last all that long.
Also something people seem to forget is that the examples of old things around today that we see are the good ones by definition. Sure that XT that still works today is reliable, but what about the ones that failed? Well you don't see them because they are on the trash heap. Just because there's a few examples of old items that have survived doesn't mean they were all well made, may have just been some that were particularly lucky.
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Keyboards (Score:5, Funny)
--
BMO
Re:Keyboards (Score:4, Funny)
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Use a bit of care... (Score:2)
Examples:
- Powerbook: 4+ years
- Palm: 3 years, no problems
- Cell phone: 2+ so far
- iPod: almost 4 years. Battery is shot, but that's a physics issue, not a quality issue.
Re:Use a bit of care... (Score:5, Insightful)
My mp3 player takes standard rechargable AAA battries, I can even replace the battery in my mobile. I think having the battery build in is a clasic quality issue ment to force people to upgrade their ipods every few years
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If something fails in an unexpected manner, that's a quality issue. For instance, one expects a multi-hundred dollar TV to not die after 2 years. When there is a known, guaranteed bit of obsolescence (sp?), such as a rechargeable battery, the only quality issue is not if it fails at all (since it will), but if it fails before it is expected to.
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The problem comes in when the manufacturer designs for months, but the customer expects years.
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I LIKE built in batteries, so long as they're not just AAAs or AAs bundled with a proprietary connector. The lithium battery in an iPod is longer lived and faster to recharge than anything available in a standard size. And replacements are readily available when you need them.
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Building a device that has a specialized battery pack made up of soldered in NiMH AAs is annoying too. There's no reason for it. Cordless phones still do that, and notebook co
Re:Use a bit of care... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it used standard sized NiCd or LiIon batteries and the back was easily removable, any putz with a screwdriver would be able to replace them. Sealed devices are silly unless there's a compelling reason to seal them (water pressure resistance or something).
-b.
Re:Use a bit of care... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not shure what's most scary. The fact that a properly taken care of powerbook will only last 4 years, or the fact that you are happy with this. I have a pair of boots thats lasted me 4 years, used regularly for long hiking trips in rough terrain, wet terrain, rough and wet terrain, and so on... How many times can you jump on your powerbook? (Of course, the (modern) gore-tex liner lasted only a few months...)
My mothers old washing machine lasted 26 years before giving up. When I went and bought a new washing machine for myself 5 years ago, I was expecting it to last for at least 10 years. It lasted 3! And I'm single, have no kids, etc...
I've almost given up on cell-phones. Even if I buy one specifically marketed as sturdy (e.g. Nokia 514), it is almost guaranteed to fail within two years (usually within a year). I would be willing to pay a lot more to get a phone where I don't have to worry about random breakage any time I fall on it.
The thing with gadgets is, I'm not interested in "being careful" with them. I'm interested in getting something that works. If I buy a mobile phone, it's because I want to bring it with me to become mobile, not to keep it inside original packaging with temperatures between 15-25 celcius and low air humidity. If I buy a washing machine, I want it to wash my clothes, not randomly fail. If I buy a car, I want it to keep driving, not require expensive maintenance, and having expensive parts fail all the time. And if I buy a laptop, it should survive a little rain, being dropped on concrete, being dropped in salt water, having someone fall on it, etc, all common things happening to transportable items.
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And please, don't compare boots to electronics. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
Re:Use a bit of care... (Score:5, Funny)
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but you are not willing to pay for that, otherwise you would own a panasonic toughbook that CAN withstand all that.
What?? you dont want to pay $4000.00 for your laptop? well then take this piece of crap fragile Dell for $1500 and shut up.
Not being rude, but most of you that whine about it refuse to pay for the dur
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After 4 years, the new state of the art in mobile computing will be such that you won't WANT to use that old notebook computer anymore, even if it works as well as the day you bought it.
My mothers old washing machine lasted 26 years before giving up.
And for maybe half of that time, I'd bet she was wasting more energy (and therefore money) running the old machine instead of buying and using a new
Re:Use a bit of care... (Score:4, Funny)
Every time you fall on it?
Man... that just sounds weird. Do you fall that much?
Re:Use a bit of care... (Score:4, Funny)
They want you to buy a new one in 2 years (Score:4, Insightful)
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I see it this way. If I make a good product that lasts 20 years, and my competitors' products only last 5, then I'm going to market the hell out of that. I'll end up outselling my competitors because I simply have a MUCH better product. Less sales for them, more for me.
Sure, I don't make as much money, but neither will they. All those people with my 20-year product aren't just not buying from
Digital TV forced "up"grade (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you Michael Powell (of the FCC). You did this!
RAZR is just a modern Startac (Score:3, Insightful)
Some phones I guess are like clothes, they come in and go out of fashion. RAZR is just a remake of the classic older design. The design of the Startac and the RAZR are timeless.
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The StarTAC came out in 1995! Isn't it a bit premature to declare as "timeless," something that has existed for only a decade?
I still have an XT - 3 of them! (Score:5, Funny)
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>to hold up my 1962 Jaguar XJ12
Speaking of beautiful, but seriously flawed engineering... All 50's and 60's Jags and Triumphs seemed to conform to the motorcycle rule: drive them one hour, work on them two hours. (Don't know about MG's. I never owned one.)
Easy answer (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does Walmart import tons of cheap Chinese goods? Because customers want them.
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There is nothing intrinsic about something being Chinese that makes me want it.
Walmart imports tons of Chinese goods because that's the country to where our manufacturing base has been transplanted by market forces for cheap labor. Customers do not buy Chinese goods because they are seeking them out. Even though I try to avoid Chinese stuff, most recently purchased stuff in my house was made in China because that's all they w
Oh yeah? (Score:5, Funny)
There was not a scratch on it, and it worked just fine after a recharge.
This guy must be using one of the pink ones- those are sissy phones.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you compare my new washing machine to a 20 year-old umbrella, you'd reach the opposite conclusion. How about comparing the Razr to a Walkman or a Swatch, not to a cinderblock of a product from a mainframe maker?
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny you should mention it. I have made several repairs on my five year old washing machine. I also have a double folding golf umbrella I purchased in London nearly twenty years ago from James Smith & Sons, Umbrella Makers (est. 1830). The umbrella is quite complex; it is nearly golf size when extended but it has extra joints to fold down very small. Given the extra complexity this involves, the ubrella ought to be somewhat prone to break down, but it's in perfect shape. As for being blown inside out, I'd probably fly off like Mary Poppins before that happened.
The issue isn't a general decline in craftsmanship; its a decline in the willingness of people to pay a premium for well crafted items. I don't remember exactly, but I think I paid between £40-50 for mine, which in 2006 dollars would be aroun $150. Naturally, I expect a $150 umbrella to last longer than one I bought from a street hawker for $10 during a rain squall. On the other hand, I bought my wife an even more expensive Smith & Sons lady's umbrella, which I regretted because she left it on the subway a week later. But odds are somebody is still using it.
Folks want them cheap. (Score:3, Interesting)
When I bought my DVD player, I got a *really* good deal, and spent $400 on it. I don't even know HOW many years it's been (10 or 11 years, if I recall), and it still works just fine.
These days, people spent $35 on one, and whine when it breaks in a year. C'est la vie.
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They're up by 15 bucks, not counting for inflation.
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The funny part (Score:5, Funny)
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yes, I do. It was caused by a typically reputable manufacturer stealing a [potentially deliberately] flawed recipe for capacitor electrolyte.
no way one could have seen it coming. lots of people were already using their parts and simply got burned when the next load came in with faulty electrolyte.
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and I have a stack of Popular Science magazines from the 40's and 50's.
vacuum tube tech was easy to service because vacuum tube tech needed service often.
even the smallest of towns could support a repair shop.
in fifteen years I have replaced one ethernet card and a drive belt on a VCR. up next will be a DIY replacement for an aging hard drive. total labor cost $50.
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only computer motherboards I've ever had die were an actual IBM motherboard (back before they even formed Aptiva), and a Soltek Socket A that fell victim to cap explosions (which were an epidemic at the time). Otherwise, my tech has all been replaced due to gross obsolescence rather than actual breakage (which is a shame when you're waiting for a Matrox G200 to die so you can upgrade your video card, and eventually just have to buy a Geforce 5900 because the new motherboard didn't support high voltage AGP).
There is a caveat here: When I buy stuff I don't buy it if it feels flimsy or is a cheap knockoff made by a no-name company. Perhaps the lesson for the author is: Stop buying cheap crap and maybe it will last longer?
Break By Design (Score:2)
1. Design specifications intentionally limit durability
2. Business decision to make the device fail. If I can't sell any more widgets, then how will I stay in business?
3. No consumers want something to last for decades.
Stories like this are an embarrassment of riches.
Weight? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just gadgets... (Score:2)
Proper rebuilding techniques like polishing the crank (Ok stop the snickering) and other things that are SUPPOSED to be done in engines when building them are not being done.
Thus cars dont last very long or handle stress well and break easy.. same for gadgets. they are made as cheap as possible to get the highest profits possible.
Almost nothing is
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Many engines that supposedly need a rebuild, actually don't, though, and taking the whole motor apart and "rebuilding" it can make things worse if the rebuilders isn't both skilled and obsessive. Case in point: 3 years ago, my Volvo 245 started making a clanking sound and running on 3 out of 4 cylinders. I took it to the mechanic: "probably thre
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Re:Not just gadgets... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually everything but the body is much more durable, but auto body is much harder to repair today, at least in some ways. Back in the olden days people used to do metal finishing on cars, which means that there's no filler used whatsoever. This is still fairly common on show cars, but on nothing else. Basically any damaged metal is either beaten back into shape (stretching and shrinking as necessary) or cut out and a patch welded in. If the body man can't repair the damage with hammers, dollies, and a torch from that point, then if anything, lead is used to smooth out surfaces.
The new way to repair auto body is to get it within 1/8 to 1/4" (hopefully closer to 1/8") and then use body filler. Depending on who you talk to the filler is either spread over bare metal or primer. Either way it seals itself to the body in a way that lead doesn't. Then you prime the hell out of it because any non-plastic filler (plastic filler is expensive) is hygroscopic and attracts water.
Okay, so with all that said; modern automobiles are made of a much harder steel than old ones. I'm not sure when the first 100% high strength steel car was made, but I know Mercedes did it in 1981 if that's any help. Today basically every vehicle that is not a full size truck uses a unibody design consisting of 100% high strength steel. Besides its various other characteristics which are not very important right now, HSS is hard. The harder steel is, the harder it is to work, and the more brittle it is. It's also easier to push it past its elastic limit, which is the point at which deformation becomes permanent to some degree. This makes metal finishing of modern vehicles all but impossible which is why we have to use filler.
But on top of that, they're all unibody vehicles. If you get a chance to inspect a modern vehicle which ran into something fairly straight at high speed, open up the trunk and lift up the carpet. Odds are you'll see deformations in the floor of the trunk area. When a unibody vehicle takes a serious impact, the force is spread throughout the vehicle. This is what makes a unibody car so much safer than a full-frame vehicle like, for example, a 1963 Lincoln Continental. Oh sure, that continental might weigh 5000 pounds, but it won't crumple when it hits a wall unlike a 2000 pound honda civic; furthermore, the stress is not distributed throughout the car. These two things combine to make it as if YOU had simply hit the wall, in comparison to being in a unibody vehicle with crumple zones. The unibody is so successful at transmitting force that up to 40% of the force of a front-end collision can be transmitted to the back of the car through the windshield.
Anyway, repairing banged up sheet metal is literally twice as hard as it used to be, if not more. Repairing torn up plastic parts costs just as much as buying new ones - the plastic weld compound is quite spendy and you need to use a special primer to get anything to stick to a polyurethane part. This is not the problem. The reason it costs $5000 when you hit a deer is that the body shops are continually getting away with insurance fraud. For instance, I rear-ended someone (I know, I'm an idiot) with a silverado. I bent his bumper and the brackets. The body shop ordered a complete bumper kit instead of the bumper metal and the brackets. Because they bought all the plastic bits that weren't even damaged, this raised the price of the job by $400. They also charged four hours of work to replace a bumper. This is a job that would take me maybe half an hour.
I took two years of auto body and paint classes from a body man who has been in the business long enough to have repaired cars with lead back when it was simply the way things were done...
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I have a Buick Park Avenue, 25-30mpg and a good 250.000 miles on the odometer. The only things I had to repair were the usual O2 sensors, lights and EGR valve and I am not an old-man's driver, I usually go 5-15mph over the speed limit for hours on end.
Then you have those 50-60mpg Japanese cars with 3 cylinders being sold here in this area, that is just laughable. Even 4-cyli
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Been relatively imressed with gadget quality (Score:3, Insightful)
I still have 4+ year old PCs happily working and other electronics that live a long life....
The quality of most devices is extraordinarily high.
Really? (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I've noticed a trend... (Score:2)
Seems to be stamped on my crappiest gadgets. They have improved quite a bit, though. Still, I actively look for "MADE IN JAPAN", "MADE IN KOREA", "MADE IN USA", or "MADE IN MEXICO" preferentially and in that order. Sometimes the same model will be available from two or more source factories, even if it's a bit pricier. "MADE IN KOREA" used to be bad, but now is as good or almost as good as Japan, so presumably the Chinese stuff will improve as well and we'll have to get our cheap crap somewhe
Be Responsible, and It Won't Break (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an electrical engineer. While there may be system-level/market-level planned obselescence (based on outdated protocols, DRM, or style -- think iPod G1-4), there certainly is not one at the component-level (chips/ICs). Microprocessors are reliable as ever.
This essay lacks references. And, following argument is groundless: "The electronics industry has clearly spotted this problem, and
Explain.
One one hand, he has a point... (Score:2)
Yes, the original IBM PC (from which the XT differs only at the motherboard and power supply level - the case is identical) was a tank. I had one. It had a ~60W power supply (same size as the 600W and 800W supplies today) and a couple of internal 5.25" floppies. The case was probably three times as heavy as the aluminum case that my last PC was in.
This is precisely my point - consumers don't want big heavy tanks. At the same time, almost none of my electronics
Oh noooooesss it's a conspiracy! (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand the original IBM PS2 tower (which the article doesn't mention by name, but was of that same era) was marked "Two person lift" complete with nifty stickers of people injuring their backs on it. It wasn't supposed to be light and pretty, it was meant to
To Serve Man (Score:3, Interesting)
Replacement for wearing out offers the chance to get a new one with some incremental features, and the newer styles that have so much social value.
The hidden cost remaining in these gadgets is discarding them. Either labor-intensive recycling, or environmental pollution plus increased scarcity of materials. The original seller doesn't pay most of that cost, so it doesn't show up in the sale price. But it costs the consumers in increased aftermarket costs and labor.
We should take the flimsiness that economics encourages to the next step: biodegradeablility. Make them flimsy not just to human mechanical use, but to our ecosystem, including bacteria. Or even feedable to our pets. That will cut the costs of discard way down. Which will leave us more money to buy new ones.
Until we can get those little buggers to reproduce themselves. Eventually, they'll be recycling us.
Summary (Score:2)
My name is Chris Stevens and I like to whine because I dropped my Motorola RAZR and it broke.
Get over it. If you wanted durable, you wouldn't have picked the RAZR. It's pretty obvious to everyone else that it wasn't meant to be durable. Why don't you get a cell phone the size and weight of your precious IBM XT and tell me what you think.
Flimsiness? It's more about cost pressure. (Score:5, Interesting)
The #1 reason that modern gadgets break is because market pricing pressure makes then that way. They are cheap cheap cheap. While a
I work in the hardware industry and pricing pressure causes manufacturers to do crazy/dangerous things to reduce the cost of every single component in a 1000 component product. Farm out calls for 1000 parts to the lowest bidder and you can pretty much guess what the total end result will be on the quality.
ISO 9000 has pretty much gone out the window in the last few years as being just too expensive to implement and manitain by the entire supply chain. Thus we are now constantly (Yes, still even today) dealing with capaciters that explode after 100 hours use, switches that break after 100 presses and an almost infinate variety of unplanned but inevitable hardware failures.
And in the end, if that means that someone has to buy a new phone and a new keyboard every year well, the companies that make them could have worse things happen than selling another product to the same customer. Even if the customer gets mad an never buys from that company again, it doesn't matter, pissed off customers of the competitor will come running back to THEM. As long as their quality is not significantly worse than their competitiors anyway.
But in the end, the age of the flimsy is mostly the end result of the age of extreme consumerism where everyone must have everything and it must all cost 12.95 or less.
PROTIP: Want a durable phone? (Score:2)
Finite Element Analysis (Score:2)
I love overbuilt gear, too, but a RAZR built with 14 gauge galvanized steel would weigh a pound and cost as much as your old XT did when new. I for one welcome our cheap-gadget-engineering overlords.
-Isaac
I'd reply with a comment... (Score:2)
Over Engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
...Because people keep buying them (Score:3, Insightful)
The companies are laughing all of the way to the bank. They have mindless drones buying everything that they release, no matter how shitty, and the people come back and buy more! With so many stupid people buying these pieces of crap over and over, the only incentive that the manufacturers have is to make cheaper crap that breaks even quicker, because they know that no matter what, people will buy them again, and again, and again...
Oh yeah. This was typed on a IMB XT keyboard that I bought at a thrift store for one dollar. It was manufactured in 1993.
More rugged products are available. (Score:3, Informative)
There's good hardware out there. You can buy more rugged phones, especially for Nextel's network. The Motorola i530 [amazon.com] meets the MIL-STD-810F [army.mil] ruggedness specification. It has all the usual stuff (camera, Bluetooth, web browser, etc.), it's much tougher than most phones, it's about the same price as most phones, and it's not much thicker. Available in black or bright yellow.
Shuttle PCs [shuttle.com], the little breadbox units, are very well made mechanically, with good internal rigidity, support for cards on multiple sides, and a liquid cooling heat pipe system that really works in high ambient temperature environments.
You don't have to buy the crap.
Money is more important than quality. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which leads me to the second problem. Too many American companies seem to have given up on producing quality products and instead have focused on being cheap. This means that they are no only outsourcing manufacturing, but design as well. So instead of having products that are thoughtfully designed and aestetically pleasing we're getting an overwrought messes that aren't particularly easy to use. How many American companies are left that are actually involved in every step of the design and manufacturing process for consumer products. One of the few is Apple and they do an amazing job. But look at Dell, or HP who are essentially sticking their logo on someone else's product.
These companies are going with Chinese suppliers because they adhere to the same principles of cheap manufacturing. The end result, of course, is something that doesn't look very good and isn't particularly reliable. The Chinese don't yet have the product design experience that the Americans should have, and the Japanese and many Europeans definitely do have.
The problem ultimately is that American companies seem to have gotten obsessed with making money first and foremos. Pride in quality products has taken a back seat. There are American companies out there that used to produce respected products that now only offer crap products. They want to do things that require a minimum of effort but produce a maximum of income, hence the apparently popularity of web-based businesses. The Koreans, by contrast, have done quite well because they have a lot of nationalistic pride. They want to outdo the Japanese in every way they can. The Chinese are also quite ambitious so although they're still well behind most of the world they're making a lot of headway.
The Taiwanese also produce excellent products, but there in a similar situation as the US. They lack a lot of the pride other asians have and they continue to try to stick to the easy way of doing things. The problem is that the Chinese can do what they do more cheaply. So their chance for success is to move upmarket much in the way Japan did in the 70s and the Koreans more recently, pushing their own brands and improving quality.
That's an important point... It's why the Japanese and some Europeans to a lesser extent thrive. They're not competing for the bottom of the barrel. They're producing higher quality products which offer both technological innovation and design sophistication. They care about making quality products. To many American companies seem to be stuck producing the same old crap and constantly reminiscing on the supposed glory days of the 50s and 60s.
Here's a example I face on occassion. I walk into a Staples looking for office supplies. Because I'm in design I care about having a space that actually looks appealing. But all I see at office supply stores in the US is garbage. Complete and utter garbage. Completely uninspired and bereft of any design sensibility. It's all industrial-looking transparent crap. Why? Couldn't they hire some damn designers and an engineer or two to put a little effort into something that feels durable and looks good? Contrast that with when I was living in Taiwan and I could walk into any of a number of Taiwanese or Japanese supply stores and find some neat looking stuff that actually worked well. Some of these products even had ingenious little features.
I guarantee you, however, t
How much quality can you afford to create? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a house full of PCs which will probably be the last MS OS code I ever buy. Buy the time it comes to replace the machines, which I'm in no hurry to do, the hardware costs for whatever is MS code current at that time will be too costly for my taste. So I will go with down level machines and run something else like Linux or perhaps just scrap them all and buy cheap mini-Macs. But if I was the kind of person who slavishly followed MS's lead and ran out and bought new machines just to run Vista, I'd find myself in an endless upgrade cycle to keep pace with all of the MS requirements. So it's entirely probable that my 'old' hardware would only have to work for 2 years or so. Given that most hardware lasts for more than two years and the vendor gambles that x% of their market churns their machinery every two years then the value I place on having that hardware last reliably longer than two years is almost zero. I can use cheaper parts, purchased on commodity market with little or no QA or standardization. I can assemble it in the cheapest factory I can find and I will make more money not less even if a large percentage of the product fails between 2 years and some arbitrary date but less than a 'reasonable' period of time.
I addressed this earlier in another post that was flamed when I suggested that MS be assessed a recycling tax for every turn of the OS version crank based on ever increasing hardware requirements that drive needless hardware sales. If they want to sell more software then they need to absorb the cost of churning the old hardware. If they want to pass that cost on to the consumer then we'll see just how receptive the consumer is to the real cost of bloated software. It's really the flip side of the same issue.
The nice thing is that. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
A while ago, in my search for a small, dedicated word processor with a long battery life, a big screen and a proper keyboard, I bought an HP Jornada 820. It's a great little machine with no moving parts and a flashcard port rather than a hard drive. Awesome. I use it all the time for writing on the go in ways that make regular lap-top and palm users go, "Wow! I wish I had something which served me as well. How much did you spend? Really? Wow. . . If I gave you some money, could you get one for me also? eBay scares me."
The problem, and I was told to anticipate this, is that the screen on the Jornada 820 likes to break off after a period of use.
So when mine did, I pulled it apart to see why. It's pretty amazing! I discovered inside a set of re-enforced bolt holes in the chassis where some scrupulous engineer figured the screen hinging system ought to be attached. But somebody, somewhere, made the call to ignore those bolt holes and instead use these single, weenie screws in a rather less than strong part of the chassis. A ploy which was clearly designed to have HP's cute little Jorna break with ease. And they do. Thank you so very much, HP!
But since planned obsolescence is a given these days, I was overjoyed!
I simply drilled out the never-used re-enforced bolt holes and employed proper bolts to re-attached the screen. (And because I like to do a really good job, I used some spring-steel and washers to make the whole thing even more rugged. Barring accidents, the screen will never come off again.)
So now I have a computer which by design was supposed to be dead several years ago, but which works just fine for me. And unless the (evil) designers were able to sneak any other time-bomb flaws into the device, my little word processor should last me for a very long time. This makes me happy!
The moral of the story? Learn how to fix things or get used to spending hoards of cash because several somebodys over at HP and similar companies are spineless villains.
-FL
The Shoe Event Horizon! (Score:3, Interesting)
From Wikipedia:
In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.
SO YOU BUY MORE OF THEM... consumers (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Very, very bad example. With flash prices, a 4GB iPod nano 7 years ago would have cost about as much as your car (a 16MB memory stick cost $66 in 1999, so $16,896 worth of flash parts alone). Flash density was dramatically lower, so it would have been significantly larger than a full size iPod (think "Newton" or maybe even "laptop"), would have cost orders of magnitude more than a full size iPod, and would have held 1 GB less than a full size iPod.
Why sell one player at an exorbitant price that almost n
Re:people don't wan't to hold on to a phone 5+ yea (Score:2, Insightful)