I would say the (Premature),failures; are due to using cheaper materials.

Switches from the 1930-1960s, were so much bulkier, stronger, and more reliable; as compared to today's parts. Just one example.
Hard to beat Bakelite.

Cheaper materials......larger profit margins.

 

I know you are all experienced guys, in many areas probably more than me. But did any of you participated actively in the design process of a new product?

I just don't know where exactly the decision would be taken to design something for failure. I imagine it would be difficult to design for a failure to happen after X years, except for obvious cases like attaching a capacitor to a heatsink. Maybe they wanted to cool the cap...

Don't know about consumer electronics, but in the industrial realm you have a reputation to lose. You just don't do that with your customers.

 

This reminds me, it was in the 1960's when an engineer from General Motors told me, "It's easy to design a car that will last forever. The difficulty is in trying to design them to fail at a certain mileage."

I don't know. Maybe that was before they knew that force times rotations is how you calculate the lifespan of a ball bearing.

 

...which keeps the revenue flowing.

Very true. Without cash flowing, who would have a job? No one.

 

Very true. Without cash flowing, who would have a job? No one.

The repair guys. And everybody could have more leisure time. I have a job but don't see any use to the stuff we produce.

Electronic power steering, self-driving lawn mower, tons of sensors for vehicles.... All pretty useless. I would prefer we all work only 4h a day at most and produce less crap.

 

http://theriac.org/riacapps/search/?mode=displayresult&id=86

There you can find the reliability data on electronic parts ... for a fee.

The repair guys.

I can agree if the repair guys have enough population with enough failures to keep them gamefully employed throughout the year. If your in a sparsely populated area, your "area of operation" increases, adding to your overhead, causing your prices to go up. If the MTBF increases, you have less opportunity to repair, and your prices go up. The reality is, most repairers know what they need to have to support their family.

 

I know you are all experienced guys, in many areas probably more than me. But did any of you participated actively in the design process of a new product?

I just don't know where exactly the decision would be taken to design something for failure. I imagine it would be difficult to design for a failure to happen after X years, except for obvious cases like attaching a capacitor to a heatsink. Maybe they wanted to cool the cap...

Don't know about consumer electronics, but in the industrial realm you have a reputation to lose. You just don't do that with your customers.

I'm with you on this one. Look at what makes a company successful and it's not product failure. Sure, you get for what you pay for in regards to quality, which typically drives the longevity of life cycle. It typically takes a good team to build good quality, leaving everyone else to build everything else.

 

Repairing current, castoff = [ pack-ratted ] and obsolete technology, is my bread and butter... [[ Milk, eggs, and beer too ]]

I have seen many instances that I could swear were built-in obso... tho' inept consumer abuse plays a large part...

Some stuff [ aka crap ] is obviously not worth messing with, and then there are things one can re-engineer. The HVAC shop I spent time with, had a " make it work " attitude.

It doesn't help, when a line of replacement motors [ formerly A.O. Smith ] -American parts... assembled in Mexico -- had a 50 % failure rate out of the box.. This did not impress contractors that got saddled with having to do jobs over afted a new installation puked the next day...

 

[SIZE=+2][SIZE=+2]People have pondered since 1858 at least................

HAVE you heard of the wonderful one-hoss-shay
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it--ah, but stay
I 'll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits,--
Have you ever heard of that, I say?[/SIZE]

http://www.eldritchpress.org/owh/shay.html#ohs


[/SIZE]

 

Just remembered. General Motors adds talc to their plastic when they make fan blades. After a certain amount of time, they crumble. It doesn't matter if you're trying to pry them off a fan motor or just wondering why the car heater doesn't seem as good as it used to be. Now...why would somebody add talc to the pure plastic beads that they buy for the injection molding machines?

Intentional sabotage, or as we are calling it today, planned obsolescence.

 

Don't know about consumer electronics, but in the industrial realm you have a reputation to lose. You just don't do that with your customers.

I think it really is two different realms with two totally different rule sets and circumstances. Supply and demand. The demand in these two realms is totally different, therefore the supply is totally different.

If I'm in charge of procurement in the order of millions of dollars for a soda bottle blow forming/filling/capping/casing/palletizing/wrapping line, I'm going to demand that line to return as much on my/my company's investment as possible. I'm going to demand as much uptime as I can possibly squeeze out of it. I'm going to demand electronics that last 20 years at minimum, and that those electronics will have replacement parts and excellent tech support available for the foreseeable future (or at least until I get promoted or retire). Look at the history/manufacturers of industrial electronics; that's exactly what they deliver. The Allen Bradley PLC-5 system was rolled out before I was born (1985), and you can still buy processors, I/O, everything for it brand new from Allen Bradley and get expert tech support over the phone (all for an extremely exorbitant price, of course).

Consumer electronics is a totally different ball game. What do you demand from your smart phone? Most people demand that their smart phone last 2 years and that there will be a fancier version available at the end of that two years, and that's exactly what smart phone manufacturers deliver. People demand planned obsolescence from their smart phones, and that's what they get. That is, planned obsolescence in it's literal sense; that the device will be obsolete, and replaced by something more cutting edge very soon. It would be absurd for you to expect your smart phone to last 30 years and still have parts availability for it during that time.

Now, regarding planned obsolescence in regards to consumer electronics, and in regards to the way the term is generally used (to mean planned failure), is it really that hard to conceive that it could/would happen? People in general already crave to replace their devices regularly, why not give them that little nudge to do it sooner rather than later? After all, in this game, your name doesn't rest on reliability/longevity, it rests on putting the most feature-rich devices out the fastest. Who cares if it only lasts 3 years, whether planned or not?

I've yet to see a single person espouse the virtues of their 1991 bag phone because it's delivered them 22 years of faithful service with minimal downtime. It would be unreasonable to design a phone to last for 22 years.

 

I hear from many people that they believe in this myth:

Manufacturers build ON PURPOSE parts in their products that fail with very high probability after a certain amount of time, e.g. 5 years.

Well I worked now for more than 20 years in the manufacturing electronics industry and I think that the idea failures are "planned" is BS. I've never seen anything that would confirm that idea.

They build junk because of price pressure on pacific rim vendors. A company like Apple or Acer or whoever has a "reference design" they go out for bids on and the cheapest bid gets the job. The components that carry a lot of cost are the electrolytic caps and they are usually downgraded to save money. They may not "design in" the failure rate, but they do use parts which are known to have an MTBF in the few thousand hour range.

So, if you ever wonder why your new PC fails after a couple of years....

 

Then you should have worked for 20 years in repair, where you get to see exactly what fails, and WHY.

Over the years I have seen more and more devices where the SMPS has small electro caps placed directly next to a heatsink. On examining the PCB you can see there is a lot of room where they could have placed that cap 25mm away from the heatsink instaed of 3 mm away. And i check the PCB layout to see if they put the cap there because the track layout was tight. But it's not.

They deliberately place the cap right next to a hot heatsink, knowing the cap life reduces exponentially with heat, AND knowing that when that cap fails in 6 to 12 months its failure mode will take out the whole PSU and turn the product into garbage.

In a switcher, those caps SELF HEAT because high freq ripple current flows through them. They must be placed within a cm of the switch device to have any effect or else trace inductance will effectively remove them from the circuit. They are not intentionally killing the caps, they have to be placed near the power devices: however, when they use cheaper grade caps (with higher ESR) that raises their operating temps and shortens their lives drastically. It is possible many layouts could be improved, I spent about 20 years fixing those. But I always found the problem to be analog ignorance, not a conspiracy to kill the product.

 

Mmh. I have only 6 years in repair and spend the rest in development departments. Never anybody placed any component deliberately in a position where the component MUST fail. IMO it's all I said before, no time, low price, negligence, maybe even "I don't care and we can't do better with the time and budget available" - attitude.

Yeah, and fools with zero experience in power layout doing SMPS design.

 

I can agree if the repair guys have enough population with enough failures to keep them gamefully employed throughout the year. If your in a sparsely populated area, your "area of operation" increases, adding to your overhead, causing your prices to go up. If the MTBF increases, you have less opportunity to repair, and your prices go up. The reality is, most repairers know what they need to have to support their family.

But most consumer electronics devices are so cheap that repair is no longer feasible, it is automatically replaced with a new unit.

 

Just remembered. General Motors adds talc to their plastic when they make fan blades. After a certain amount of time, they crumble. It doesn't matter if you're trying to pry them off a fan motor or just wondering why the car heater doesn't seem as good as it used to be. Now...why would somebody add talc to the pure plastic beads that they buy for the injection molding machines?

Intentional sabotage, or as we are calling it today, planned obsolescence.

Very little plastic is used as pure polymer for structural parts. Adding Inorganics like mica and talc strengthens plastic while lowering the thermal expansion. Fillers also add randomness to the plastic to prevent crack propagation. Soft fillers like talc and mica don't cause wear and abrasion issues with the screw/barrel in the injection molding machine nor the hardened steel mould - even at multiple tons of molding pressure.

The mica or talc (or any number of other fillers) is not just added when molding. It is a value-added process and completely separate step - called "compounding". The virgin beads are run through a twin screw extruder with the filler. Getting the exact ratio and exact even distribution of filler is critical, otherwise the molded plastic part will shrink inconsistently after the hot part is removed from the mold (anisotropy) and cause warping.

Short glass fibers, milled carbon fibers and graphene and carbon nanotubes are also used as fillers in injection molded parts.

An interesting story at the dawn of composite materials (filled polymers) likely started with sawdust added to water to form incredibly strong and long lasting (slow melting) ice blocks.

See Pykrete

And a little known WWII project based on Pykrete:
Project Habakkuk

 

Electronics is becoming far more reliable over the years IMHO. If you get past the first 30 days the device will work for years.

I disagree very much with this observation.

I have numerous consumer items purchased in the 1970s and 1980s that are still working today, including computers and VCRs. My families first microwave oven finally gave out (and was quite possibly repairable) after 30 years of service. I have a TV that I bought from a second hand store that I then used for another 25 years. The TV I replaced it with -- the audio failed in less than a year. My first DVD player lasted about ten years. When it failed I bought a cheap one to just get me through for a few months until I was out of debt -- it didn't even make it through the first movie! After I got out of debt I bought a nice one and it failed after less than three years. The one I bought after that made it a little over a year. I then bought a nice DVD/Blue Ray unit and it started having issues in less than two years and now, at less than four years old, it won't play a Blue Ray at all (even brand-new out-of-the-box) and sometimes balks at a DVD. I bought a RAID system with four drives and one of them was bad out of the box.

And, other than the one cheap DVD player, I'm not talking about cheap Chinese never-heard-of-brands. I'm talking Sony Bravia and the like.

Every single computer that I have that is more than 15 years old is still working with the original hard drives and such. Out of all of them, I am aware of three individual components that have failed: a floppy drive in one, a sound card in another, the DVD drive in a third. Even most of the original CRT monitors are still up and running, though my computer that I bought in 1996 with a 21" monitor has gone through three of them. Every single computer that we have bought in the last five years has had to have warranty work done or has something that has failed (or is no longer operable at all). My current computer had the audio outputs fail the second day and the sound card in general in less than a month.

My wife does buy a lot of off-brand electronics from Ebay and the like and I just shake my head. More than half don't work out of the box and nearly all the rest fail within a week to a month. I don't think she has bought one single thing that was still fully functional after three months.

 

I disagree very much with this observation.

I have numerous consumer items purchased in the 1970s and 1980s that are still working today, including computers and VCRs. My families first microwave oven finally gave out (and was quite possibly repairable) after 30 years of service. I have a TV that I bought from a second hand store that I then used for another 25 years. The TV I replaced it with -- the audio failed in less than a year. My first DVD player lasted about ten years. When it failed I bought a cheap one to just get me through for a few months until I was out of debt -- it didn't even make it through the first movie! After I got out of debt I bought a nice one and it failed after less than three years. The one I bought after that made it a little over a year. I then bought a nice DVD/Blue Ray unit and it started having issues in less than two years and now, at less than four years old, it won't play a Blue Ray at all (even brand-new out-of-the-box) and sometimes balks at a DVD. I bought a RAID system with four drives and one of them was bad out of the box.

And, other than the one cheap DVD player, I'm not talking about cheap Chinese never-heard-of-brands. I'm talking Sony Bravia and the like.

Every single computer that I have that is more than 15 years old is still working with the original hard drives and such. Out of all of them, I am aware of three individual components that have failed: a floppy drive in one, a sound card in another, the DVD drive in a third. Even most of the original CRT monitors are still up and running, though my computer that I bought in 1996 with a 21" monitor has gone through three of them. Every single computer that we have bought in the last five years has had to have warranty work done or has something that has failed (or is no longer operable at all). My current computer had the audio outputs fail the second day and the sound card in general in less than a month.

My wife does buy a lot of off-brand electronics from Ebay and the like and I just shake my head. More than half don't work out of the box and nearly all the rest fail within a week to a month. I don't think she has bought one single thing that was still fully functional after three months.

WBAHN,

What do you attribute the long lasting devices from the 1970s and 1980s? Were parts over-specified (correctly specified) for the application? Were engineers better trained? Are there too many off-brand / counterfeit parts on the market?

I agree that a time - somewhere in the late 1970s to 1980s - the most reliable consumer electronics were made. We had the bottom-end GoldStar TV from K-Mart last from 1985 until 2005 when we just threw it away because we wanted a cooler running flat screen.

NOTE: that flat screen TV has already failed and been replaced.

 

WBAHN,

What do you attribute the long lasting devices from the 1970s and 1980s? Were parts over-specified (correctly specified) for the application? Were engineers better trained? Are there too many off-brand / counterfeit parts on the market?

I agree that a time - somewhere in the late 1970s to 1980s - the most reliable consumer electronics were made. We had the bottom-end GoldStar TV from K-Mart last from 1985 until 2005 when we just threw it away because we wanted a cooler running flat screen.

NOTE: that flat screen TV has already failed and been replaced.

I think there are multiple factors at play, and I don't think anything sinister is at play in the overwhelming majority of them.

I think the biggest factors are more or less directly related to economies of scale and advancing technology. We live in a global market place where the physical and information lines of communication make it practical to at least attempt to find the "optimal" solutions for each part of a product, from concept and engineering, to manufacturing, to distribution, service, and marketing, from literally anywhere in the world. This forces/enables different places to specialize in different areas and, as they do, their share of the market increases and their unit costs decrease and it, to a point, becomes a positive-feedback loop.

Combine that with the much higher disposable income that many (most?) people have today compared to decades ago and you get consumers that are not as sensitive to quality/price tradeoffs as they were. Forty years ago buying a VCR was a major investment that few people were ever in a position to even consider, so when they did they treated it as a major investment and expected it to last essentially indefinitely. The first VCR that I bought (actually as a gift for my parents) a bit over 30 years ago (and that is still working just fine) cost me $650. I was making minimum wage ($3.35/hr) at the time and so it represented every penny of income for well over a month's work -- in practice it took me nearly half a year to save up the money for it. You can bet I didn't buy the first unit I saw! I spent hours going to different stores and learning what things I should be looking for and what brands were most reputable and looking up articles in Consumer Reports (or something similar) at the library. But today, when I get around to replacing this DVD/BluRay player I will almost certainly go to one store and spend perhaps twenty minutes deciding between the units they have on hand that I can walk out with. My guess is that I will pay something around $300 for it. Even at my present significantly reduced income that represents a day and a half's wages and a few years ago it would have been four hour's revenue. At that point my time is more valuable than making a good decision.

Complicating all of this is the rushing pace of technology. Forty years ago you made a major investment in an appliance (TV, fridge, VCR, pretty much whatever) and you expected that you would still WANT to be using it ten or twenty years down the road. Today, you buy most things and you know that you will probably NOT want to be using that same thing even two years down the road because of all the new bells and whistles that are coming out every day. With that background, how much are most people willing to pay more for something that will last significantly more than that time horizon?

 

I think there are multiple factors at play, and I don't think anything sinister is at play in the overwhelming majority of them.

I think the biggest factors are more or less directly related to economies of scale and advancing technology. We live in a global market place where the physical and information lines of communication make it practical to at least attempt to find the "optimal" solutions for each part of a product, from concept and engineering, to manufacturing, to distribution, service, and marketing, from literally anywhere in the world. This forces/enables different places to specialize in different areas and, as they do, their share of the market increases and their unit costs decrease and it, to a point, becomes a positive-feedback loop.

Combine that with the much higher disposable income that many (most?) people have today compared to decades ago and you get consumers that are not as sensitive to quality/price tradeoffs as they were. Forty years ago buying a VCR was a major investment that few people were ever in a position to even consider, so when they did they treated it as a major investment and expected it to last essentially indefinitely. The first VCR that I bought (actually as a gift for my parents) a bit over 30 years ago (and that is still working just fine) cost me $650. I was making minimum wage ($3.35/hr) at the time and so it represented every penny of income for well over a month's work -- in practice it took me nearly half a year to save up the money for it. You can bet I didn't buy the first unit I saw! I spent hours going to different stores and learning what things I should be looking for and what brands were most reputable and looking up articles in Consumer Reports (or something similar) at the library. But today, when I get around to replacing this DVD/BluRay player I will almost certainly go to one store and spend perhaps twenty minutes deciding between the units they have on hand that I can walk out with. My guess is that I will pay something around $300 for it. Even at my present significantly reduced income that represents a day and a half's wages and a few years ago it would have been four hour's revenue. At that point my time is more valuable than making a good decision.

Complicating all of this is the rushing pace of technology. Forty years ago you made a major investment in an appliance (TV, fridge, VCR, pretty much whatever) and you expected that you would still WANT to be using it ten or twenty years down the road. Today, you buy most things and you know that you will probably NOT want to be using that same thing even two years down the road because of all the new bells and whistles that are coming out every day. With that background, how much are most people willing to pay more for something that will last significantly more than that time horizon?

I agree with most everything except that you will spend $300 on a bluRay Player. I don't think BestBuy even carries one over $120 (unless you add 3D AND video recording). Talk about technology passing quickly