We are still talking about low quality or standard of design and/or fabrication leading to early failure.



This is still off the topic of planned obsolescence, where the equipment is still functional, but discarded for other reasons.

So I am offering some examples where manufacturers have promoted premature discard.

Firstly in the electronics industry the shift of printer manufacturers to become primarily ink suppliers. I am sure everyone is familiar with the present situation in this market.

Secondly in the automotive industry where a culture of annual or at most biannual car replacement is promoted.

Finally more generally in the clothing industry, particularly for women, the idea that last year's (months?) fashion is not chic, even if the garment is still serviceable.

There are very famous Normal Rockwell works of art on the theme of "Still Good" that put the other side.

The topics you listed are completely different than what was being argued that designers intentionally build in failures to occur at specific time points to force replacement. That simply does not occur. Nobody disputes that they encourage replacement in various ways: they "stagger" release of improved performance features as in cel phones to make the new models so attractive people will throw away perfectly good units.

I agree that printer makers gouge people on ink cartridges: when I bought my PC, they gave the printer with it FOR FREE..... and the two cartridges cost about $50 each (retail) so they planned to make a bundle over the lifetime. I started refilling the ink myself after getting sick of paying the ridiculous cost.

Cars may encourage buying new models (obviously) but the fact is that just about any car given excellent maintenance will last 150k miles or more. I have a 92 Saturn that has at least that many miles and it runs like new. FYI: the reason new cars will be having shorter engine life is because the EPA mandated the removal of a wear inhibiting chemical called ZDDP from motor oils to make the catalytic converters last longer. That chemical greatly reduces internal wear and now that it's gone, engines will fail sooner but probably still in the range of 80k - 100k so it is certainly not a two year life span.

The clothing industry really is unrelated to this topic: styles change every season so that women are forced to buy new clothes. Many refuse to be duped by that, my wife doesn't. That industry is built on the concept that a fool and her money are soon parted and they make good money at it. The clothes done' have built in timed defects.

 

We are still talking about low quality or standard of design and/or fabrication leading to early failure.



This is still off the topic of planned obsolescence, where the equipment is still functional, but discarded for other reasons.

That's because it is ON the topic started by the OP.

You are mincing words and basically telling the OP that a strict interpretation of the words he chose to use defined the topic of the thread, and not the content of the OP's OP, dictate what should be discussed in the thread.

(Of course, if you are going to do that, you need to use the definition of "Obsolence" and not "Obsolescence")

The use of the term "planned obsolescence" is widely used to refer to the intentional design of products to have short lifespans in addition to designing products (or, more commonly, marketing strategies) to encourage people to replace them with newer versions before their useful life is expired.

Firstly in the electronics industry the shift of printer manufacturers to become primarily ink suppliers. I am sure everyone is familiar with the present situation in this market.

How is that planned obsolescence? If a printer manufacturer wants to primarily sell ink, wouldn't it make sense for them to want me to keep using their printer for years and years and years so that I keep buying ink from them?

Secondly in the automotive industry where a culture of annual or at most biannual car replacement is promoted.

Finally more generally in the clothing industry, particularly for women, the idea that last year's (months?) fashion is not chic, even if the garment is still serviceable.

Here you need to make the distinction between product design and marketing strategy.

The car or dress is not designed to become obsolete, but rather the marketing strategy is such as to try to render it obsolete in the consumer's eyes.

A product designed to become obsolete while it is still perfectly functional might be along the lines of early mobile phones wherein you might get a phone and within a few years ago that phone would no longer work on the network because the network had changed.

But would that be really be planned obsolescence? Did they sit down and say, "Let's design a phone that we can sell knowing that we intend to render that phone useless in two years by changing the network?" Or was it simply a consequence of rapidly evolving technology that went down paths that made maintaining compatibility unreasonable?

 

Gosh what a fierce response.

This subject must strike some deep chords somewhere.

Printers and inks:

When I bought my current printer I was informed that the maker only had one type of cartridge (although obviously different ink colours) and had carried it through several generations of printers so that it was not like "those others that introduce a new cartridge with every new printer" as their policy was against this type of planned obsolescence.

Guess what

They now have several types of cartridge and those for my perfectly serviceable printer are "obsolete sir" and becoming very difficult to source.

I would say that is planned obsolecscence without any doubt.

 

What's so fierce? You're the one that is trying to insist that the topic of the thread change away from what the OP intended.

As for the printer cartridges, don't you see a disconnect between saying that the manufacturers only want to sell ink and not printers and then saying that they change ink styles for the sole reason of forcing their existing printers to be obsolete?

 

I bought a laser printer when I found out their cartridges don't dry out.
It was costing me as high as $50 a page because I only print a page every few months. The ink cartridges would be gummed up every time!

The starter cartridge for my laser printer lasted 4 years. I am now using a, "full size" toner cartridge. When that runs out, I probably won't be able to buy a new cartridge because the printer will be 12 to 16 years old.

ps, did everybody miss my post about the General Motors engineer telling me his job was difficult because he was tasked to design car parts that wear out in a certain range of miles? That seems to me like it fits the subject matter of this thread, intentionally designing things to fail, or, "planned obsolescence".

 

ps, did everybody miss my post about the General Motors engineer telling me his job was difficult because he was tasked to design car parts that wear out in a certain range of miles? That seems to me like it fits the subject matter of this thread, intentionally designing things to fail, or, "planned obsolescence".

I didn't note that post.

I agree with studiot that this isn't properly called "obsolescence" as "obsolete" and "fails to work" are not the same thing. But that's semantics and it's clear what you are talking about.

If someone came to me and asked me to design a circuit (or anything else) that would fail, with high likelihood, after so many hours or miles or whatever, I don't frankly know that I could really do it. Sure, I could use all the tabulated data to design something on paper that, given a narrow set of operating conditions, would be most likely to fail at that moment, but there are so many variables that are not taken into account that the I would expect a huge variation in when parts actually fail.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's so fierce? You're the one that is trying to insist that the topic of the thread change away from what the OP intended.

I'm not trying to insist anything.

However I know the difference between obsolescence and premature failure of goods designed with deliberate weaknesses so they will not last.

The only thing I am 'guilty' of in diverging from the title of the thread is suggesting (some) non electronic examples.

So here is an example of electronic obsolescence.

I possess an old valve radio. It still works perfectly.

Shortly it will be unable to receive the BBC transmissions since they will be going digital.

So it is obsolescent.

Ditto an old 405 line television set.

I have an old dial telephone.

It will not longer function with some modern exchanges.

It is obsolescent.


Having said all that, I have no beef with widening the discussion to include inbuilt weaknesses by design.
Just that it seemed to me to be being discussed to the exclusion of truly obsolescent electronic equipment.

 

This is how a manufacturer can get you to spend $800 after a certain number of copys in a photo copier. Its the heated roller assembly which hardly ever fails. If you know you can get the counter to reset. For it to reset you use a quick blow 63Ma fuse fited to the wiring loom. At switch on it blows reseting the counter. To me that's planed obselesence.

 

I possess an old valve radio. It still works perfectly.

Shortly it will be unable to receive the BBC transmissions since they will be going digital.

So it is obsolescent.

Ditto an old 405 line television set.

I have an old dial telephone.

It will not longer function with some modern exchanges.

It is obsolescent.

Are you suggesting the original designers of that equipment foresaw the digital future and designed those systems to work with the, then current state of technology anyway?

People buy vehicles a lot sooner than me because they "want" a newer vehicle and they "want" to have an asset (trade in) worth money to offset the price.

Is there really a need for everything to be "backwards compatible" ... I don't think so.

In the early 90's, my computer had a DSP modem. It did not recognize the "dial tone" from the local exchange switch.

I complained to the phone company. Prior to talking to the engineers, their technician used their "ears" and said ... yes, there is a dial tone. I talked to the engineer and explained my problem, asked them if they ever did a spectral check on the dial tones to ensure they were within specifications. He reminded me that the exchange was very old technology. sidebar ... just a year earlier we were dialing 4 digits and we just changed to dialing 7 digits to make a call. ... end sidebar

So, the programming of the DSP's to the specifications of the dial tone, it never detected the dial tone until they replaced the whole exchange, about a year later. Was that planned obsolescent or advancement in technology?

 

This is how a manufacturer can get you to spend $800 after a certain number of copys in a photo copier. Its the heated roller assembly which hardly ever fails. If you know you can get the counter to reset. For it to reset you use a quick blow 63Ma fuse fited to the wiring loom. At switch on it blows reseting the counter. To me that's planed obselesence.

What's that component exactly? Thanks, guys we need more pictures of planned design failures.

 

If someone came to me and asked me to design a circuit (or anything else) that would fail, with high likelihood, after so many hours or miles or whatever, I don't frankly know that I could really do it.

You nailed the whole issue dead on the bullseye. In electronics, it would be infinitely more difficult as well as EXPENSIVE to try to design in a failure mode at the very precise window you would have to hit to make sure it got out of warranty but died soon after.

The whole thing is ridiculous.

I did not read an article from a GM designer lamenting how hard it was for him to design parts that fail at a predetermined mileage, but I would take any such comments with a gigantic grain of salt because I don't believe it.

 

Sure, whatever. In 30 years I only worked with a couple.... like Apple, HP, Samsung, Cisco, IBM, Sony, Sanyo, Acer, and about a hundred more whose names my brain didn't bother to store.
...

I respect that you have years of inside experience from some big companies.

But you seem to not appreciate the wealth of knowlege regarding appliance failure and design that someone gets from many years working at the other end. Seeing inside 100+ dead appliances a week, seeing exactly WHAT failed, and WHY. And seeing decisions made my the designers, particularly in regards to future models where they may have chosen to fix flaws they were fully aware of, or chosen to NOT fix that flaw or even make it worse.

Like I said in an earlier post I have had back/forth laison with their design departments discussing the failure mode and what they would do about it.

You need to show some respect too! For someone who has spent a great many years doing something you haven't, experiencing things you haven't, and learning things you haven't.

Over years their attitude as consumer goods manufacturers has headed towards; "We know 20% fail in 8 months, another 30% fail in 18 months, and we just don't care". That is DELIBERATE "designed to fail". They deliberately design it so 20% fail in 8 months. And they allow it to continue when notified of the failure modes, and design it even worse the following year.

CEO's are extremely aware of the importance of repeat sales. Short product life gives increased repeat sales. This is a hard business fact.

... so that my Trinitron would last 18 years...... and none of the other things I bought exhibited the self destruct mode. ...

1. Sony Trinitron was a high end product from a good company, not exactly applicable to designed failures.
2. 18 years ago the problem was much less than it is now. 18 years ago many companies still made things to last.
3. Your logic is a non-sequitur and in error anyway. The fact that YOUR ONE product did not fail does not follow that ALL similar products will also not fail. The same non-sequitur logic error that you keep promoting where just because YOU did not see designed failure it cannot exist.

Debe raised a good point in post #108 about photocopiers with designed failure. They take this to extremes in printer ink cartridges which have a PIC microcontroller that counts the number of copies and then refuses to operate the machine until you buy a new cartridge. The consumer appliance industry is driven by repeat sales!

I recently had an experience with a PC UPS, this had an internal microcontroller timer, where the entire UPS "failed" with a fault light after 3 years. This was a controlled timer, and not repairable. The manufacturer said it was a safety feature to stop people using an "unsafe" UPS once the SLA battery had exceeded its design life. (The battery tested fine, and would have been easy to replace anyway.)

In short, someone who has NOT seen something happening should not try to sound like an expert saying it "never happens" in front of someone who has seen it actually happening (and getting worse) year after year. You're like a person that's never been mugged telling a multi-times multi-year mugging victim that "mugging doesn't exist". Insistence that there is no designed-in failure in modern appliances is hurting your credibility here.

... If someone came to me and asked me to design a circuit (or anything else) that would fail, with high likelihood, after so many hours or miles or whatever, I don't frankly know that I could really do it. Sure, I could use all the tabulated data to design something on paper that, given a narrow set of operating conditions, would be most likely to fail at that moment, but there are so many variables that are not taken into account that the I would expect a huge variation in when parts actually fail.

I could do it easily, after decades of seeing what failed, how and why it failed and how long it took to fail. Caps that will shut down the unit if ESR is high, placed next to heatsinks that dry out the cap and cause increase in ESR per month. Depending on range of ambient temperature you can get it down to X months for Y percent of product fails. And things like insufficient heatsinking and airflow casuing semi failures, weakened linkages and mechanisms, etc.

That can't make all products fail in exactly X months (apart from the examples like printer cartridges and UPS fail timers) but for general appliances they can engineer with confidence to get 20% fail in X months, another 30% in Y more months, and then they don't care after that because the new year's products are out picking up all the repeat sales.

Designed-in failure causes repeat sales, which is very important. Do you really think they are totally blind to something that can bump sales figures by 20 to 30% easily? A CEO that stupid would need to be sacked.

 

Over years their attitude as consumer goods manufacturers has headed towards; "We know 20% fail in 8 months, another 30% fail in 18 months, and we just don't care". That is DELIBERATE "designed to fail". They deliberately design it so 20% fail in 8 months. And they allow it to continue when notified of the failure modes, and design it even worse the following year.

As a repair technician, do you recommend to people not to repair an item because it becomes cost prohibitive or do you just repair it and demand your fee?

Component failures keep electronic technicians in business. Lumping various systems with poor designs into one overall failure rate is playing loose with the facts. The mere knowledge that product X has 20% failures within Y months does not indicate the same component in the same circuit failed in all the cases. Drying capacitors causing increased ESR could happen in alot of circuits, given the proper amount of time. Poor layout can cause failures, as you have illustrated.

CEO's are extremely aware of the importance of repeat sales.

As are owners of consumer electronics repair shops who need "repeat" customers who require repairs.

Short product life gives increased repeat sales. This is a hard business fact.

True, except in the cases where the consumer becomes disenchanted with the manufacturer or service provider. There is a finite number of people who buy or repair things. If you can't increase market share, your former clients must become repeat clients for you to maintain your cash flow. That works the same in every business ... even the repair business.

I am a technician.

As a technician, your goal is to repair what is possible. You settle for repairing what is economically possible from the consumer's prospective.

As a hobbyist, your time is worth nothing to you. As someone who requires money to survive, you have a per hour rate.

 

Are you suggesting the original designers of that equipment foresaw the digital future and designed those systems to work with the, then current state of technology anyway?

People buy vehicles a lot sooner than me because they "want" a newer vehicle and they "want" to have an asset (trade in) worth money to offset the price.

Is there really a need for everything to be "backwards compatible" ... I don't think so.

I wondered if anyone would misread what I wrote and answer a statement I didn't make.

I didn't say that my examples were planned obsolescence.

I said they were obsolescent.

Yes they were obsolescent because they were superceeded by progress.

That is an entirely different thing, which is just the point I was making.

Sony seems to have achieved a good press in this thread so far so here is my story of the Sony EV-C3E

When video cameras first came out I bought a video 8 camera.

Its output was sVHS and stereo audio.

I also wanted a pair of decks for editing and to save the camera mechanism for camera work.

I bought 2 Sony EV-C3E decks.

Stereo ? No sir not available for 2 years.

sVHS ? No sir not available for several years.

So Sony sold me equipment that contained a significant missing element, which appeared in the update model.

I have seen this again and again when evaluating subsequent Sony equiment, before making alternative purchaisng choices.

 

related Links
http://www.weibull.com/hotwire/issue22/hottopics22.htm

http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=35831

https://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pop/lm_failureRates.html

I bought 2 Sony EV-C3E decks.

Stereo ? No sir not available for 2 years.

sVHS ? No sir not available for several years.

So Sony sold me equipment that contained a significant missing element, which appeared in the update model.

I have seen this again and again when evaluating subsequent Sony equiment, before making alternative purchaisng choices.

The consumer makes their choices at the time they purchase. Every consumer who bought a computer purchased "extras" that will never be used by them. I don't know anyone who uses 100 percent of the software on their computer. The same is said for "smart phones".

 

The consumer makes their choices at the time they purchase. Every consumer who bought a computer purchased "extras" that will never be used by them. I don't know anyone who uses 100 percent of the software on their computer. The same is said for "smart phones".

If this is in answer to the quote posted immediately before it I can't see the relevance.

 

You nailed the whole issue dead on the bullseye. In electronics, it would be infinitely more difficult as well as EXPENSIVE to try to design in a failure mode at the very precise window you would have to hit to make sure it got out of warranty but died soon after.

The whole thing is ridiculous.

I did not read an article from a GM designer lamenting how hard it was for him to design parts that fail at a predetermined mileage, but I would take any such comments with a gigantic grain of salt because I don't believe it.

I think the GM engineer mis-understood his instructions. gM's design spec for most new technologies is 10 years and 100k miles - GM does not ask for exactly 100k miles.

Specs like this are easy to estimate with accelerated aging tests on gears, bearings, lubricants, valve and cylinder wear, gasket and o-ring swelling or drying, fade of coatings and pigmented plastics, environmental testing takes care of plastic UV damage and thermal damage (cracking, fade, sag, yellowing, fatigue, friability (for foams).

Electronics is more-or-less a non-issue except in under-hood applications where long-term thermal damage becomes an issue - last time I was involved in automotive projects, the target was 200 C components. I think the component manufactures told the automotive industry to pound salt on that proposal - I never heard the end of the story since I moved on to other, easier-to-work-with industries.

 

"I don't know anyone who uses 100 percent of the software on their computer. The same is said for "smart phones".


I hear that, Joe.

How does a guy start deleting useless apps from an Android?

 

CEO's are extremely aware of the importance of repeat sales. Short product life gives increased repeat sales. This is a hard business fact.

Designed-in failure causes repeat sales, which is very important. Do you really think they are totally blind to something that can bump sales figures by 20 to 30% easily? A CEO that stupid would need to be sacked.

Almost every piece of electronics today has an embedded microcontroller. It is conceivable that a programmer can easily make the system fail at any time or under any conditions, precisely or randomly as the designer may choose.

I find it totally reprehensible that any CEO would knowingly instruct the company's designers and engineers to implement such policy for the sake of increased revenue.

 

You nailed the whole issue dead on the bullseye. In electronics, it would be infinitely more difficult as well as EXPENSIVE to try to design in a failure mode at the very precise window you would have to hit to make sure it got out of warranty but died soon after.

The whole thing is ridiculous.

I did not read an article from a GM designer lamenting how hard it was for him to design parts that fail at a predetermined mileage, but I would take any such comments with a gigantic grain of salt because I don't believe it.

As for the first paragraph, it sure seems odd the number of times I have mumbled under my breath, "warranty timer" while fixing something that was 14 months old. That's probably where the myth comes from.

As for the last paragraph, it was I that the General Motors engineer told and I believed him because, A) he employed me to build oscilloscope kits for him and, B) he was sleeping with my mother. I don't think you will ever read about that because, A) both of them have been dead for at least 15 years and, B) I don't think he ever slept with a technical writer.