... It is simply complete BS that they try to design in a one year life span. It is true they will not spend one penny more than it takes to make SURE it lives long enough to get through warranty, but that is a different issue.
...

Not really. It's "six of one, half a dozen of the other".

Of course they are designing to use the cheapest possible construction and that also shortens the product life. The two go hand in hand. They are well aware that if the use cheap parts X and Y that the product will last roughly 1 year, which is "acceptable". We can't argue that decisions are made that reduce cost AND reduce life, and they know it...

But what about deliberate designed-in failure? The cases where last year's model has the cap 30 mm from the heatsink, and this year's model has it right next to the heatsink so it fails much more quickly. And in both cases there is no cost saving and no need to place the cap there. So the change was deliberately to reduce product life.

Or do you believe this is just an "accident"?

How can it be an accident when their repair staff give them feedback about the problem from previous years, and their design staff know full well about it?

"Designed-in failure" is a modern sales tool. I'm surprised you're not aware of that, or maybe your product design involvement was in the good old days when they made stuff to last? I remeber those days too, prior to "lead free" and all the other B.S. designed to shorten product life.

 

How about when, right after the iphone5 was released, apple pushed out an OS update that made all the iphone4 users' phones slow to a crawl and deplete their batteries dramatically faster, with no way to uninstall the update?

 

oops, my LCD monitor just died on me. Don't you just love waking up to wonderful aroma of toasted chips first thing in the morning?

 

oops, my LCD monitor just died on me. Don't you just love waking up to wonderful aroma of toasted chips first thing in the morning?

That's a joke right. Or did it really die?

 

Yep, it really died. I had to move to my iPad.
How old is the monitor? I would have to look it up. Maybe 10 years.

 

oops, my LCD monitor just died on me. Don't you just love waking up to wonderful aroma of toasted chips first thing in the morning?

That sounds like one I came up with in 1974 and it goes like this:

"I love the crackle of exploding thermoplastic in the morning".

How does it relate to this thread?
My employer was negotiating to sell the corporation. The buyers sent in a design by a, "real" engineer to find out what the turn around time was on a new design. When it got to Quality Control, I ran it through the excess load test and the rectifiers exploded.

Typical, "cheaper is better" stuff. The LM317 design (with extra output transistors) was cheaper than an LM723 design so they proved that, "a power supply without current limiting is really a fuse". (That's a quote from another of our local denizens.) Anything to save a penny!

For their next act, they designed a toroid transformer that couldn't be built because the core was too small to fit all the wires in.
Not my first experience in correcting the design of a B.S.E.E.

 

Not really. It's "six of one, half a dozen of the other".

Of course they are designing to use the cheapest possible construction and that also shortens the product life. The two go hand in hand. They are well aware that if the use cheap parts X and Y that the product will last roughly 1 year, which is "acceptable".

You really don't get what is going on, I have seen it. The people who design products have ABSOLUTELY no control over the components. In most cases, the company who "owns" the design doesn't either. They shop the design out to subcontractors in the Pacific Rim and the cheapest bid gets the job to build it. The subcontractors cheap out the components to lower the bid.

In some cases, if quality drops badly, customers will push back and force the original company to crack down on suppliers but that's rare.

There is simply zero truth in the notion they design products to fail. They do try to design them to be cheap to build, but the quality failures generally enter in the production side. Even Apple and Intel have gotten bitten by that.

In the consumer environ, design has no contact at all with the component procuring people. If they are done at subcontractors, they usually don't even know what brands of components are used. If the quality really gets bad, they will step in and force them to use specified brands but that is very rare.

But what about deliberate designed-in failure?

I worked in consumer electronics for 30 years and never saw a single instance of it. Period.

The cases where last year's model has the cap 30 mm from the heatsink, and this year's model has it right next to the heatsink so it fails much more quickly. And in both cases there is no cost saving and no need to place the cap there. So the change was deliberately to reduce product life.

Or do you believe this is just an "accident"?

No, it reflects that digi heads should not lay out power analog circuit boards. Unless I see the circuit, I don't believe that is the cause. It may be just to get the cap closer to the power device it feeds.

How can it be an accident when their repair staff give them feedback about the problem from previous years, and their design staff know full well about it?

Like I said, 30 years and I never saw it.

"Designed-in failure" is a modern sales tool.

NO, it isn't. Anybody who sells consumer products does not want to sell junk. They still rely on reputation. And the net spreads the word quickly if one maker's stuff is junk. As I said, quality tends to be low because price pressure has forced profit margins near zero. It has done that to PCs, cel phones, and TVs and monitors and the low quality is the result. But it is simply ridiculous to think designers are "building in" failures intentionally.

I'm surprised you're not aware of that, or maybe your product design involvement was in the good old days when they made stuff to last? I remeber those days too, prior to "lead free" and all the other B.S. designed to shorten product life.

You really have it all wrong. lead-free is driven by environmental laws so the companies have nothing to do with it at all. You can keep saying that there is some conspiracy to design failure modes but I guarantee that is not true.

 

The people who design products have ABSOLUTELY no control over the components. .

Very true. And apparently even the components supplier has no control over it. We build everything here, on our own production floor. We bought once electrolytic capacitors through, I think it was AVNET, and they were a whole lot of fakes. 1500uF in a 3900uF package, same size, wrong label (saying 3900uF). Who knows where these came from.....

 

We bought once electrolytic capacitors through, I think it was AVNET, and they were a whole lot of fakes. 1500uF in a 3900uF package, same size, wrong label (saying 3900uF).

That probably sounded like a good deal at the time.

It is a fine example that illustrates the need to test what you get from a source, so you can take effective action quickly. What did you do with those incorrectly identified capacitors? I hope you returned them for a refund or exchange.

 

How about when, right after the iphone5 was released, apple pushed out an OS update that made all the iphone4 users' phones slow to a crawl and deplete their batteries dramatically faster, with no way to uninstall the update?

Since I'm not a smart-phone user or Apple fanatic, this is the first I've heard of this. I would think that this would have invited a big class-action lawsuit. What eventually happened.

 

You really don't get what is going on...
...
There is simply zero truth in the notion they design products to fail.
...

It looks like we will just have to agree to disagree.

I've got decades of real world observation giving ample proof that they design things to fail.

You've got decades of experience working in design where you didn't see them design things to fail.

Maybe the difference is that my experience comes from hundreds of manufacturers, and yours comes from just a couple?

 

It looks like we will just have to agree to disagree.

I've got decades of real world observation giving ample proof that they design things to fail.

You've got decades of experience working in design where you didn't see them design things to fail.

Maybe the difference is that my experience comes from hundreds of manufacturers, and yours comes from just a couple?

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.

They cleverly were able to keep hidden from me this world wide conspiracy to build in design bombs able to make products detonate just after warranty.

The most clever part of their plan to keep me in the dark was their ability to predict what electronics items I would buy in the future (and I own a ton of electronics) and disable their "built in bombs" so that my Trinitron would last 18 years...... and none of the other things I bought exhibited the self destruct mode.

amazing

 

Here's another important aspect for the life expectance of electronic devices: Ambient temperature.

We all know that temperature ratings for commercial products are more or less the same, but am I to believe that a product that was developed and tested in Scandinavia has the rated life expectancy spending its lifetime in the Greek summers? Or even worse in Africa?

I highly doubt it.

 

As to heat affecting a product designed in a cooler country, reminds me of selling AWA 4KA 26inch CTVs back in the mid 70s. These sets were designed in England & imported to Australia & then had a Isolating transformer fited as they were a live chassis in England. I unfortunately sold quite a few of these sets, they started to fail during the summer months in large quatitys. Eventualy found if you fitted a computer fan to them, they rarely failed. The most reliable sets I sold back then were Japanese manufactured Toshiba & Mitsubishi CTVs.

 

That probably sounded like a good deal at the time.

It is a fine example that illustrates the need to test what you get from a source, so you can take effective action quickly. What did you do with those incorrectly identified capacitors? I hope you returned them for a refund or exchange.

I don't know, that's not my department. I guess they had to throw away everything that was produced with these caps. Having somebody disassemble hundreds of units would have been too expensive.

 

Bountyhunter and RB. I didn't mean to start a religious war here. Religion is not allowed on AAC.

We all have our beliefs, but my and Bhunters experience is that no designer we ever worked with designed to fail. RB observed things that, according to him, could not have been designed the way they were by mistake or negligence.

Maybe we leave it at that. Neither side has the absolute proof for anything. (just like religion)

 

We all have our beliefs, but my and Bhunters experience is that no designer we ever worked with designed to fail.

I live by Judge Judy's wisdom:

If something doesn't make any sense, it isn't true.


A designer is rated by his work... so, he is NEVER going to design something to blow up. He is going to do the best he can. Second, the company selling product is rated by consumers on their quality.... and with internet, the word goes out INSTANTLY. They will NEVER intentionally build things to blow up.

That said: there is plenty of cheap consumer junk on the market due to the fact that all companies are under time and cost pressure. There is never enough time to do it right the first time, always enough time to do it over when it turns out to have major defects. And price pressure means that production is cheaped out and that introduces defects.

It is simply not true that consumer electronics are designed to fail. The companies do not spend much time verifying the design, they spend ZERO time verifying component quality or monitoring the quality in production and that results in junk quality.

 

Here's another important aspect for the life expectance of electronic devices: Ambient temperature.

We all know that temperature ratings for commercial products are more or less the same, but am I to believe that a product that was developed and tested in Scandinavia has the rated life expectancy spending its lifetime in the Greek summers? Or even worse in Africa?

I highly doubt it.

TA does affect life. Especially electrolytic caps. The cel phone makers forced us to guarantee -20C operation on our ICs in cases where somebody left their cel phone in their car overnight in Scandinavian country. The electrolyte of the caps would be frozen at that temp and the phone would stick to your face.... but they still forced us to change our data sheets to accomodate a -20C spec.

 

Here's another important aspect for the life expectance of electronic devices: Ambient temperature.

What we found for ICs is that there is a threshold. As long as junction temp does not exceed about 110C, the life of any WELL MADE semi is so long it greatly exceeds the lifetime of the other components so no worries. But sometimes when a design is CHEAPED OUT, they reduce the heatsink or change to a cheaper FET with higher on Resistance and junction temp goes up. In those cases, using the device in a hotter ambient can affect life because it pushes junction temp up into the zone where it dies early.

 

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.