3/3/2025 at 12:22:19 AM
I used to cynically think that things breaking down over time was mostly a choice for built-in obsolescence. After doing some real physical product design though, I can say that it's really difficult to build things to last.by klysm
3/3/2025 at 8:12:55 AM
It’s also really hard to make things that last at least X long but hardly event more than Y. I know an engineer who spent two years of his life making sure the new water pump designs would fail at warranty + 50 percent, but only in an annoying, non catastrophic way.Also, plastics that last very specific amounts of time are common in specific pieces of assemblies in mechanical timers for refrigerator defrosters and the little crossbars that tie the vanes in air vent directors together. Replacement timers use all nylon gears and last “forever”.
The one I personally uncovered is a Honeywell thermostat. It is a direct replacement for a mechanical thermostat that would frequently fail about 10-15 years out due to corroded/pitted contacts. The all electronic replacement does not have this problem, but they still failed around 10 years out, but with remarkable predictability in my friends apartment complex.
I reverse engineered one. It is powered by the 16-24v signal line. It uses a simple potentiometer to set the temperature, no clock, memory or other features. It has a battery soldered on the circuit board. The battery slowly discharges while the unit is on. In about 10 years of operation, the battery voltage drops below 1v or so. The battery powers nothing, but the microcontroller senses it’s voltage and when it is too low, it changes the behaviour of the thermostat to randomise the temperature cut in/out points by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit , making the thermostat annoyingly unpredictable in a way that is very similar to the typical failure mode of the old thermostat it replaced.
One notable difference is that the electronic one will never fail (unless it is in the off position) to come on at 45F or lower, preventing the programmed random behaviour from provoking a freeze-up and damage to structures, so I guess that’s nice?
by K0balt
3/3/2025 at 1:41:31 PM
> I know an engineer who spent two years of his life making sure the new water pump designs would fail at warranty + 50 percent, but only in an annoying, non catastrophic way.Wow what an abhorrent waste of talent and life.
by mort96
3/3/2025 at 6:31:30 PM
This can be a pretty blurry line.If the engineer took some existing product and did nothing for 2 years other than design in additional failures that show up after the warranty has expired, I agree that's awful. However, I'm very skeptical of that. I've worked in some manufacturing orgs who try to pinch every possible penny they can, and I've never seen anything resembling that level of mustache-twirling villainy in engineering. Also, 2 years seems like an incredibly long time for someone to spend doing this and nothing else.
It's much more likely that the company asked the engineer to reduce the cost of the pump while still hitting the product's requirements (e.g. no failures during warranty period plus some margin), and while doing that, the engineer found the design was overspeced for those requirements and made some changes which reduced the pump's expected lifespan while still meeting that requirement.
Unlike what the OP is suggesting, this happens constantly...it's what engineering is.
Obviously I'm not OP and I'm reading between the lines here, but it's very easy to imagine someone hearing this story second-hand and completely misrepresenting it.
by mkipper
3/4/2025 at 11:57:45 AM
I think it’s something in between. The new pump actually cost more to make than the old one it replaced. The old pump would 90 percent make it through warranty, but sometimes failed early.If the old pump failed, it often did so in a way that caused additional warranty expenses and reduced reliability perception. The problem was that a seal failure could cause catastrophic bearing failure.
So, the new pump was designed so that a seal failure would not cause bearing damage. Good sealed Bearings properly specced are very reliable these days, and seals on a true shaft wear very little. The problem was that the new pump would invariably make it to EOL.
So after spending a few weeks designing a no-fail pump, they had him redesign it so there was criticality in one of the bearings, so that one was effectively overloaded and would develop enough play to cause seal wear, (and dripping) while the other bearings would prevent the shaft from actually failing. The thing is, it’s hard to spec a bearing for “will wear a little out of tolerance but won’t fail” so it took two years and a lot of testing to get it right.
In all, there was a considerable amount of moustache twirling going on. But not as much as in those damnable disintegrating plastics or the unneeded battery in the thermostat.
by K0balt
3/3/2025 at 4:28:47 PM
In mechanical design, you typically target an order of magnitude of stress cycling for product design. In a pump, everything stress cycles, so it all needs to be simulated. If this was a pump you were going to make ten million of, then suddenly every fractional 10th of a cent you save becomes the difference between, e.g., having another coworker or not. So to balance that with offering a reasonable warranty such that there's actually demand for this product makes sense.Before anyone brings it up: sure, a lot of companies just pocket this savings or whatever, but a lot don't; you just don't hear about them because they're typically midsize companies that nobody complains about.
by albrewer
3/3/2025 at 5:39:30 PM
I'm sorry, but I feel like you're reading my message extremely uncharitably. I'm obviously onboard with the idea that nothing lasts forever, and time spent figuring out how to increase something's lifespan to "at least X years" is obviously valuable, as is time spent figuring out how to cut costs without making a product break "before X years". But none of that is the same as spending time to figure out how to ensure that something breaks at the right time.It matters whether the focus is on reducing costs while keeping track of the impact on the product's lifetime, or the focus is on reducing the product's lifetime. What I'm calling a waste of talent and human life is spending time on the latter, and that's what it sounds like my parent comment describes their engineer friend doing.
by mort96
3/5/2025 at 3:41:39 PM
> none of that is the same as spending time to figure out how to ensure that something breaks at the right timeYes it is. At the absolute limit, balancing cost and reliability is this exact optimization exercise; we are talking about the exact same thing taken to different extremes. The difference between your ideal scenario and the practice outlined in the OP is the difference between 97% BOM efficiency and 99.99% BOM efficiency. At extreme scales, that gap can mean the difference between a company laying people off vs. surviving.
Side note - this same discipline is what ensures your widgets fail in a safe, controlled manner and not in a catastrophic way.
> I feel like you're reading my message extremely uncharitably
I saw an naive take on how mechanical design for failure works in practice and wanted to educate. I mean no disrespect, it's just seemed like it might be an unknown unknown for you. Your comment had at least a few upvotes, so there are others out there who may also lack the same information.
To your charitability point, though, my first take on the OP above is probably the most charitable take. The least charitable scenario for the OP is that the company wants to make sure they have higher annually recurring revenue from replacing their widgets breaking down but need to _barely_ beat or match the other guys in a warranty. Reality is probably somewhere in between.
by albrewer
3/3/2025 at 8:15:18 PM
Amen, intent matters. And it sounds like in both of the cases the OP cited, the intent was to force otherwise-unnecessary replacement, which is bad.by eschaton
3/3/2025 at 7:07:12 PM
Oh i think I saw an AvE video where they explained a cheap part being omitted resulted in this exact sort of problem.by whaleofatw2022
3/3/2025 at 2:01:25 PM
While I don’t doubt the behavior, I have a hard time believing that a product manager would let an expensive part like a battery get added to the BOM if it’s only purpose was to fail after ten years. Which suggests it performs some sort of function, which means this could be a bug rather than a malicious act. We will likely never know but I’m always willing to assign stupidity rather than maliceby matthewfcarlson
3/3/2025 at 7:14:12 PM
> While I don’t doubt the behavior, I have a hard time believing that a product manager would let an expensive part like a battery get added to the BOM if it’s only purpose was to fail after ten years.It depends how much of the BOM price was the battery.
by hulitu
3/8/2025 at 1:29:16 AM
When the battery is removed and the pin pulled up to the 3v bus, the thermostat works flawlessly.I traced the circuit, it goes between ground and the uC pin, through a 1 Mohm resistor, no other connection. It’s about right for killing a 300mah battery over 10 years. The pin is held low when the unit is energized by the thermostat signal lines.
by K0balt
3/3/2025 at 10:59:00 AM
> The battery powers nothing, but the microcontroller senses it’s voltage and when it is too low, it changes the behaviour of the thermostat to randomise the temperature cut in/out points by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit , making the thermostat annoyingly unpredictable in a way that is very similar to the typical failure mode of the old thermostat it replaced.This should be criminally investigated and the person who ordered it be put in prison for at least a decade.
by mschuster91
3/3/2025 at 11:35:08 AM
Why not at least 9? Or 5?I think it would be best to focus on the deterrent effect for the future: we need a law that makes this business strategy not viable. Not on punishing bad behavior that already happened. Maybe such law already exists, but we need more enforcement. Or a better thought out law.
I don't think it's important if _that_ person gets jail time. I would not particularly rejoice at the news. But if somehow this practice was made impossible or impractical, I'd
by salviati
3/3/2025 at 11:50:14 AM
One of the reasons for punishment is deterrence. It it becomes clear people consistently go to prison for doing something like this that will reduce the likelihood of people doing this in the futureby wongarsu
3/3/2025 at 1:00:45 PM
Or at least make it mandatory to disclose such behaviours before purchase. Failure to disclose should result in the vendor and the manufacturer becoming liable for the repair/replacement costs (with the vendor similarly able to push the costs to the manufacturer if it was not disclosed to them either), as well as any actual damages resulting from the failure of the product.by joshuaissac
3/3/2025 at 4:29:30 PM
Need the jail time and a safe harbor if the behavior is fully disclosed in advance with all advertising (a simple phrase will do such as: "Useful life limited to ~10 years, details at xyz")Some people might be fine with a product with a known lifespan, or want to pay more for the unlimited life version
The penalty should be more like corporate death than individual prison, as that often gets fobbed off on some scapegoat rather than on the actual manager responsible
by toss1
3/3/2025 at 1:56:08 PM
As much as I agree with the sentiment and desired outcome (better/longer lasting products), detecting and enforcing that seems horrendously difficult. A great example is the VW (and others) emissions scandal. They evaded detection for years despite bringing the product for inspection. In the case of this thermostat, you would have to prove it wasn’t a bug and instead malicious intent to send someone to jail. You’d need records of who said it needs to be this way.We can’t send arbitrary people to jail for bad designs. I don’t think many people would be an engineer if you knew there was possible jail time if you shipped something with a bug.
by matthewfcarlson
3/3/2025 at 1:59:24 PM
You can fix some of this by having competent and independent inspection, which this seems to be. The rest - perhaps you can't litigate, but you can publicise, with details, and perhaps something a consumer rights watchdog or public body would pick up.by robertlagrant
3/3/2025 at 4:17:16 PM
You can already go to jail for engineering something with a bug, if it has bad enough effects and the prosecution can prove that a reasonable engineer should have fixed the bug or not written it.by immibis
3/3/2025 at 8:18:41 AM
This is an incredibly useful investigation! Did you publish it somewhere?by salviati
3/3/2025 at 11:39:04 AM
+1 on this. I don't think I've read a story about how planned obsolescence is achieved in such a novel and non-plausibly deniable way. By that, I mean they haven't just cheaped out on materials, they've spent extra to make it fail predictably.by h0l0cube
3/4/2025 at 12:14:54 PM
I should have written it up. I could still, but I’d need to order one of those thermostats and do the teardown again.At the time I was just focused on why my buddy was having to replace 200 thermostats in ten years. It turned out you could just cut out the battery with a pair of dikes and jumper the leftover positive post to 3v to get basically unlimited lifespan, so he did that instead of replacing the thermostats with new ones. Afaik most are still working fine.
Helping him out is also how I figured out the defrost timer disintegrating gears thing. When you do things at scale, things that seem random in onesies practically scream at you. It made me appreciate the value gathering data…you can find the patterns at lower scales.
The car air vent thing I figured out on my 94 Toyota 4runner. The air vent crossbars that keep the vanes in alignment with each other all failed over a two year period. A minor annoyance, but it makes you feel like you need a new car lol. I popped them out and found that of all of the plastic parts, only the crossbars were exceptionally brittle. Suspiciously, the bars also had what looked like date codes molded into them. None of the other pieces had numbers at all. I just printed new crossbars.
by K0balt
3/4/2025 at 11:19:13 PM
Oh well. These comments alone are at least a microblog entry. But if you cross something like that again, and have the time and the inclination, I think a HN submission would be super appreciated.by h0l0cube
3/12/2025 at 4:35:43 PM
I noticed the promise of LED bulbs lasting forever were engineered to fail. I replaced all the bulbs in my house with and about 1-2 years in, many have failed.Though interestingly LEDs in various components or even LED strip lighting seem to last for many many years.
Le sigh.
by itchyouch
3/3/2025 at 2:13:10 PM
> The battery powers nothing, but the microcontroller senses it’s voltage and when it is too low, it changes the behaviour of the thermostat to randomise the temperature cut in/out points by about 10 degrees FahrenheitThis is really neat, if true, but I have to say I'm skeptical. This is just too good a story!
by jefftk
3/4/2025 at 12:24:28 PM
Pick one up and see for yourself. I think they still make them. It’s the basic round dial type thermostat from Honeywell. It uses an at328p MCU and it even has a programming header. The debug was open on the ones I played with, so I downloaded the code, but I never got around to (or had the tools to) disassemble it. I was going to just write an arduino sketch to replace the factory code, but we figured out the “cut out the battery and jumper to 3v “ solution so I never did. Saved about $4000 in thermostats replacements though.by K0balt
3/3/2025 at 8:12:17 PM
So you know of two cases of companies putting in work to defraud people by selling products that aren’t fit for purpose outside their warranty window. Name & shame.by eschaton
3/3/2025 at 4:56:19 PM
> It has a battery soldered on the circuit board. The battery slowly discharges while the unit is on. In about 10 years of operation, the battery voltage drops below 1v or so. The battery powers nothingI am not an electrical engineer. Could the microcontroller use the battery as some kind of calibration? Or could it have another function?
by andruby
3/3/2025 at 5:43:20 AM
I was in film school in the mid 00s, when RED was just starting to sell digital cameras to Hollywood studios. I remember a lot of my professors being concerned that we'd lose the archival properties of cinema - you can play back a 100 year old movie with a bright light and a ratchet - the same stuff you need to play back a movie from the 90s. They were concerned there'd be too much churn in digital formats.Just this weekend, I saw a headline that the Looney Tunes box set I bought then probably doesn't work anymore, because Warner Bros used crappy materials to mint the DVDs and people have had them degrade beyond playability.
by bsimpson
3/3/2025 at 8:34:38 AM
Film wasn't always perfect either. A lot of early, pre-1950s cinema has been lost because the old nitrate film stock degrades over time. And can catch fire.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Nitrate_film_fi...
by Reason077
3/3/2025 at 2:48:20 PM
Even modern film is often not great, particularly theatre prints that aren't explicitly made for archival purposes. There was a fascinating YouTube video recently where the author pushes back on the purported superiority of fan-scanned 4Ks now competing with official, studio-supervised restorations:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQwQRFLFDd8
Obviously DNR and bad HDR jobs are kind of their own issue, but he focuses specifically on coloring and the notion that theatre prints are themselves often wildly inconsistent and change over time, so it can be extremely difficult to even establish a baseline for what a film was meant to look like or even what it actually looked like upon release.
As a modest 4K collector myself, it frustrates me when certain films seem to sit in indefinite limbo, but Amadeus (released this week) looks fabulous and was absolutely worth the wait, so I have hopes that the people taking their time to do right by films like Ben Hur and The Sound of Music are doing so for the right reasons.
by mikepurvis
3/3/2025 at 5:29:10 PM
Thanks for posting that, it was an interesting watch!by Aloha
3/3/2025 at 6:11:19 PM
There's a lot of really great film meta-commentary like that on YouTube. Nerrel's video about about dynamic range and colour gamut in the context of Aliens was a game changer for me in appreciating the true potential of the UltraHD format:by mikepurvis
3/3/2025 at 10:30:18 AM
Thing is, those old films will eventually degrade too unless very carefully maintained. I don't think there's realistically any storage format that doesn't degrade over some period of time. Even things carved into stone will weather away over time unless somehow protected.In an interesting way it's almost that human memory is the most durable format -- as long as we remember to care for and preserve information, we can keep it around as long as people are around; But once people stop caring about it, eventually it will fade.
by genocidicbunny
3/3/2025 at 12:51:48 PM
The word unless is unfortunately superfluous in your statement. David Fincher just went through a grueling restoration process for Seven, and he talked about the process and basically said: Eastman Kodak has spent a lot of money to convince Hollywood that if your shoot on film and keep it in a vault that it will never degrade. It’s false.by philistine
3/3/2025 at 4:01:54 PM
I guess you could stave off the degradation by occasionally transferring the film to new media. But yeah, the unless is kind of superfluous there, even with frequent 'refreshing' film will eventually degrade.by genocidicbunny
3/3/2025 at 12:34:10 PM
We have ancient oral traditions that describe constellations that no longer exist (the Seven Sisters). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-64606-6_11by wizzwizz4
3/3/2025 at 8:39:42 PM
Do you mean the Pleiades?by HeyLaughingBoy
3/3/2025 at 9:18:37 PM
Yes, the Pleiades, which consists of 6 bright points of light in the sky, yet is still called the "Seven Sisters" (or "Seven Brothers", or similar). Some mythologies tell us what happened to the seventh, while others leave the discrepancy unresolved – or else, those stories do not survive.by wizzwizz4
3/7/2025 at 5:55:39 PM
This place is not a place of honor.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Also, ray cat memes: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
by yencabulator
3/3/2025 at 12:37:43 PM
That's it, data needs to be refreshed regularly, archival data needs to be kept 'alive' and transferred to newer media on a continuous basis.by Cthulhu_
3/3/2025 at 2:14:36 PM
I wonder if you could come up with a preservation metric tied to time investment or labor. The oral tradition is very labor intensive. How does it compare to the labor required to mine, refine, and build computers and hard drives for a storage service like S3 to preserve an equivalent amount of information? Or to chiseling everything into giant stone tablets? Printing and re-printing books?by foobarian
3/3/2025 at 5:48:23 AM
So kind of correct but not quite related?The old film stuff which survives is mainly due to material quality, storage and luck, in that sequence. Those DVD started already losing the battle.
by xandrius
3/3/2025 at 8:52:52 AM
DVDs use organic layer for data storage (that rainbowy part IIRC). There is no way in chemical reality that that layer can last more than 2-3 decades, apart from very few outliers. I'd say half-life is somewhere around 15-20 years from what I've witnessed.If you have anything worthy still on DVDs that still works, make a backup to keep it.
by jajko
3/3/2025 at 10:38:49 AM
I recently found an old spindle of DVDs that I burned a while ago, mostly with booty gathered from sailing the seas, if you will. I had a 100% success rate with guessing which discs would be unreadable just by looking at them -- the recording layer had degraded so much over time that it was apparent to the naked eye.Luckily this was all stuff I had no issue with discarding, but if those discs had contained anything of sentimental value, I'd have been quite upset to find that they were basically useless now.
> If you have anything worthy still on DVDs that still works, make a backup to keep it.
And make sure to make it to multiple other formats, preferably including some sort of cloud storage. Solid state storage, especially modern small portable drives, are great if you use them often, but if you're planning to just copy stuff to them and leave them sitting unpowered for a long time, you should be aware that over time they too will suffer from data corruption. The charges in the storage cells don't leak fast, but they do leak.
You gotta actively maintain your backups, even if that just means plugging the backup drive in every other month to check its' health.
by genocidicbunny
3/3/2025 at 12:23:02 PM
If done correctly a ~35 year old Laserdisc's glue layers are still fine. This depends on the plant and when the disk was produced, but Pioneers plants were quite good by the late 80's.Most 1980's CD's are still fine, except for ones made by PDO UK.
I'm not sure if the glue layers in DVD are organic or not, but I think the rainbow part itself is aluminum.
by happycube
3/3/2025 at 9:14:05 AM
For archival purposes M-DISC can then be used, whith a purported lifetime of 1000 years.by MaKey
3/3/2025 at 3:55:08 AM
> it's really difficult to build things to last.Having a non-user replaceable battery is a really easy way to ensure a product stops working after 3-4 years though.
And the criticism is typically directed at companies like Apple, who does make things that last physically, but then force you to upgrade by way of battery.
by kajecounterhack
3/3/2025 at 4:08:43 AM
Both can be true: planned obsolescence is real, but building things to last is difficult too.IMO the durability problems in early generations of products tend to be "real", because there are still real engineering problems that aren't understood, and there isn't (generally) a super limited market. Once the engineering problems are solved and the market is fully saturated, there is suddenly an incentive to add planned obsolescence. I don't have any data to back up this claim though.
by pinkmuffinere
3/3/2025 at 4:39:16 AM
A more accurate term is "value engineering."If you have a product that's been in the market for a while and it looks like it's meeting service life expectations you start looking at it trying to find ways to save money by substituting cheaper parts. You swap out metal gears for plastic gears, for instance.
If these parts have a shorter service life, but the service life is still longer than the warranty, then maybe that's a win in two ways for the manufacturer.
by jordanb
3/3/2025 at 10:45:22 AM
> You swap out metal gears for plastic gears, for instance.Great, till the motor that drives the gears jams. When the gears are metal,the expensive part (the motor) is more likely to lose. When the gears are plastic, the motor survives and you need to replace the gears with nylon ones or 3D print your own.
The plastic gears may not always be designed as a sacrificial part, but most consumers unfairly dismiss the possibility immediately
This comes down to warranty too. If it fails during the warranty period, which one does the OEM want to pay to replace: the expensive motor, or the cheap gearing?
by xethos
3/3/2025 at 5:57:44 AM
I think of it as a continuous feedback loop between engineering, finance, and QA that ultimately ends in a product being manufactured as inexpensively as possible without dying in the warranty period.by folsom
3/3/2025 at 5:11:03 AM
Wow that's super interesting! I've never heard of this, but the appeal is immediately obvious. Thanks for commenting, gonna have to do a Wikipedia binge.by pinkmuffinere
3/4/2025 at 6:05:44 PM
Honestly, though, nothing has come along or happened to create the need for more power than what was found in the iphone 6 or 7.Modern phones are examples of too much power for too little reason as far as I am concerned.
by BizarroLand
3/3/2025 at 5:57:50 AM
You're never really forced to upgrade because of battery. If you don't want to get Apple to replace it (which though expensive is still much cheaper than a new phone), then you can take it to your local phone repair shop which will do it for not much more than the cost of a replacement battery.by nicoburns
3/3/2025 at 7:55:31 AM
In some versions of the iPhone the screen is maliciously connected to the board with strong adhesive making these replacements not easy at all.by yard2010
3/3/2025 at 9:05:12 AM
> the screen is maliciously connected to the board with strong adhesiveThat’s not necessarily malice. Using lots of glue makes the device stronger, and making glue that a) glues really well (if there’s as good as no bezel, how is the screen staying attached to the phone otherwise?), b) lasts for years in any climate and c) can be easily removed isn’t an easy problem.
by Someone
3/3/2025 at 9:54:43 AM
Using glue is an anti-repair malice by itself. On my planet screws and gaskets were invented long ago.by KETHERCORTEX
3/3/2025 at 1:22:31 PM
Engineering is a matter of trade-offs.So, how do you screw a thin piece of glass onto a phone that doesn’t have bevels to speak of in such a way that you can put it into your pocket for years, and push a finger on the center of the screen tens of thousands of times without breaking?
Also, if there’s room below the screen, the screen will bend more than when there isn’t, and that will affect longevity.
I’m not claiming using glue wasn’t done out of malice, just that we can’t say it is.
by Someone
3/3/2025 at 11:01:46 AM
Screws are visible from the outside though.In any case, all it takes to repair a phone with a glued screen is a two face suction grip for about 20 dollars and an ordinary hair dryer.
The nasty part of a phone repair, I will admit that, is scraping off the glue gunk - I had to repair a Google Pixel once where the battery was dead, and during removing the glue on the display unit border I apparently managed to damage the seal between the OLED display and the glass, exposing the OLED to oxygen which led to eventual oxidization and a new display panel.
by mschuster91
3/3/2025 at 12:49:22 PM
> Screws are visible from the outside though.Which is a positive in my book, it means I know where to start if I need to get into the thing.
by ryukafalz
3/3/2025 at 1:20:44 PM
It not that easy with their glued in batteries on some Macbook Pros. You have to essentially use alcohol to remove the glue to replace the battery. Absolute PITA. They could have used 4 screws and it would be easy to replace.Apple has a high profit margin on their products so I expect better. This isn’t a cheap laptop from a supermarket.
by EndShell
3/3/2025 at 2:11:06 PM
Agreed but on the other side it makes the manufacturing more complex - another plastic part and screws as well as the time needed compared to just gluing in the battery.I suspect this is a classic example of corporate beancounting at work, even if it just a dollar or two per machine, at Apple's volume of millions of machines that's nothing to sneeze at.
To fix it, we need laws that require a certain repairability score for all devices sold. Then doing the "right thing" would be a KPI that competes with pure financial incentives.
by mschuster91
3/3/2025 at 3:21:05 PM
> Agreed but on the other side it makes the manufacturing more complex - another plastic part and screws as well as the time needed compared to just gluing in the battery. > > I suspect this is a classic example of corporate beancounting at work, even if it just a dollar or two per machine, at Apple's volume of millions of machines that's nothing to sneeze at.They make a high margin on each device and other manufacturers can manage it fine at similar price points. I believe it was deliberate, they back tracked after being highly criticised for it.
> To fix it, we need laws that require a certain repairability score for all devices sold. Then doing the "right thing" would be a KPI that competes with pure financial incentives.
If people are concerned about repairability they should seek out manufacturers that offer products where they have a good track record.
Laptops, tablets and phones are seen as partly consumable by the majority of people and they replace them every few years. I am not saying that it is right, I am just saying that is the reality. Also not every problem can be legislated away and if you make something a KPI it will be gamed.
by EndShell
3/3/2025 at 8:46:22 AM
It’s fairly easy to open. They designed it so a cheap and inexperienced worker in the Apple Store can replace the battery quickly and without issues.They also made a massive improvement by designing an adhesive for the battery that detaches with electricity. So you no longer have to use pull tabs or heat.
by Gigachad
3/3/2025 at 5:42:49 PM
Are Mac laptops still glued together? My 2013 MBP needed a new battery, which required replacing the following as one unit: battery, keyboard, top case, trackpad. The reason is that it was all one blob. (And then the charging circuit on the motherboard died, and I moved on to ThinkPads I can upgrade and deal with myself.)by tlavoie
3/3/2025 at 10:48:04 PM
My last iPhone’s battery lasted about 5.5 years before it needed to be replaced. Replacing it cost about $90 + tax at the Apple store. The bottom line is Apple products do last and if you need a new battery, you can get one.by StressedDev
3/3/2025 at 2:24:52 AM
There is a choice to pay 4 cents or 6 cents for a capacitor in your electronic devices.by ThatMedicIsASpy
3/3/2025 at 4:52:20 AM
But unless you spend the effort to personally test those 2 cent more expensive parts, how do you know you are actually getting more for your money until after your or your customer's shit is broken? Even if you do test it, you might need to retest those same parts a year or two down the line as either your suppliers equipment wears down, or the skimp on QC more over time, or if they just outsource it to someone else as a middle man. There is a lot of room in there for people to get fleeced because everybody is playing the same game all the way down the line to the hole they dug the minerals out of.by AngryData
3/3/2025 at 4:58:58 AM
That's like the simplest possible case, and it's not even that clear cut. The truth is nobody has any idea which capacitor is going to last longer.Things like fatigue failure, surface wear, vibration, corrosion, etc. and super hard. Entropy is a real bitch and it comes for everything.
by klysm
3/3/2025 at 4:03:13 AM
There was a Leviton (well known brand) timer power switch that would prematurely fail.They spec’d out too low temperature rating of a capacitor that was right next to a heat source and cook itself to death:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=315&v=BQM4ERy-wpY
https://electronupdate.blogspot.com/2017/12/leviton-ltb30-bu...
So yeah, tried too hard to save 2 cents
by Scoundreller
3/3/2025 at 5:00:07 AM
That's not a 'saving 2 cents problem', that's a failure to recognize the thermal environment and requirements for a component, which is kind of my entire point: engineering isn't easy.by klysm
3/3/2025 at 6:00:59 AM
The 6 cent capacitor is more durable and can absorb an error like that without the product failing.Like they say that anyone can overbuild a bridge but only an engineer can make it barely stand up. A lot of that cost cutting is useful but it tends to go too far.
by Dylan16807
3/3/2025 at 7:50:31 AM
Same point: anyone can build a submarine that gets to the Titanic.by yard2010
3/3/2025 at 2:51:50 PM
Yeah. Anyone can get to the bottom of the ocean. Getting back up alive involves more skill.by eschneider
3/3/2025 at 7:13:56 AM
>Like they say that anyone can overbuild a bridge but only an engineer can make it barely stand upThe majority of biggest suspension bridges if I remember correctly are barely standing up. They use above 80% of the cables carrying capacity for themselves.
by ReptileMan
3/3/2025 at 2:39:30 AM
"There is no choice" - clueless MBAby waste_monk
3/3/2025 at 6:29:28 AM
Your CEO will be very upset when they find out that their probable bonus is used on "useless" capacitors, 2 cents at a time. Instead, you should use 2 cent capacitors and pay him the rest for the ingenuity. /sby bayindirh
3/3/2025 at 3:42:46 PM
In my years in PD, I never saw intentional product obsolescence. Instead, I saw a lot of targets based on use metrics, i.e. design for this many years, exposure, etc. The problem is testing - you can't actually test for time in real time. Instead, we try to develop elaborate accelerated testing schemes that try to closely capture consumer intent. The problems with accelerated testing schemes are four fold:1) They're a relative benchmark. They don't represent how the product will perform in absolute terms, only how it will do in this standardized bench test against other products.
2) They might miss some things that are coupled together that don't fully get felt out until you're over longer periods of time.
3) They're imperfect if the use cases for a consumer product will be complex. An easy example is a car. Auto OEMs will try their best with their standardized accelerated testing scheduled for durability, corrosion, etc -> but the consumer will always end up doing shit that is totally reasonable but not in the accelerated testing scheme )or under provisioned).
4) For complex products, a lot of accelerated testing might happen on only a subsystem level and may not fully map to the final product.
Although these downsides are real, accelerated testing is still great and, with good planning and experience, can catch a lot of problems.. but it tends to always miss something and the above 4 points can synergistically work together to make a "design big" more obvious when in the field/hands of the customers!
by SecretDreams
3/3/2025 at 4:35:03 AM
I'd be fine with planned obsolescence if the mfr had a duty to disclose the means of obsolescence and the Product lifespan.by anjel
3/3/2025 at 5:35:59 AM
While we are at it, I want companies to disclose that a brand is made with cheaper ingredients or meets a lower quality expectation. Can think of some loopholes myself though.by aitchnyu
3/3/2025 at 12:44:01 AM
Spending time in a company that designs and manufactures real products will cure anyone of this conspiracy theory. There’s probably an exception for companies that don’t have any warranty and don’t have to suffer returns (e.g. the stuff you buy from Temu). Any company that has to build a reputation and suffer the economic consequences of warranty claims will not be doing anything to intentionally make their products break down over time.Once you’re close to the engineering side of physical products you also realize how hard it would be to make products that break down precisely after the warranty period is up. Most failure modes get spread out over a very long time (years/decades). Attempts at intentional obsolescence would start cutting into your warranty period very easily.
by Aurornis
3/3/2025 at 2:18:44 AM
> Any company that has to build a reputation and suffer the economic consequences of warranty claimsWhat are the economic consequences of warranty claims if you products are cheapened to fail after the warranty expires?
Have you not heard of enough of penny-pinching electronics fails (a device worth hundreds $ failing due to low quality part worth cents)?
by eviks
3/3/2025 at 4:21:31 AM
The argument is, cheapening your products to break after the warranty expired is sufficiently hard that it would result in plenty of products breaking before the warranty expires.by margalabargala
3/3/2025 at 4:31:19 AM
It's not rocket scienceFirst, you're not blind - you can test your product to see what the "plenty" is.
Second, many components have rated use, so it's easy to estimate mean time to fail and pick the one beyond the warranty period with whatever buffer you like. It's not like you need seconds level of precision here!
by eviks
3/3/2025 at 4:44:02 AM
Might I suggest reading about the normal distribution?Or, I don’t know, perhaps giving slightly greater consideration to the people in this thread who’ve actually worked on physical device engineering?
by stouset
3/3/2025 at 4:55:05 AM
The level of consideration matches the level of argumentation, e.g., it's obvious you failed in your interpretative nitpicking on the word "mean" and think "reading about the normal distribution" means anything in this context.by eviks
3/3/2025 at 5:20:13 AM
Appropriately for the topic, I tailored the level of consideration to just barely exceed that of your original argument. So, next to none.by stouset
3/3/2025 at 5:48:28 AM
Are you replying to yourself? You were the one demanding consideration, not me!by eviks
3/3/2025 at 7:25:25 AM
Please design a physical product to reliably fail after a specific and precise amount of time (not usage, because that’s easier and not what you’re arguing), then come back and describe how easily you accomplished that feat. Everyone reading this thread who has worked in device design knows that your assertions are completely and utterly misguided.by nickff
3/3/2025 at 7:40:21 AM
Right after you explain how in this imaginary world of 0 knowledge where you're not even capable of translating usage into time companies set a warranty to 3 years (>legal min) instead of 13; and why there are warranty limitations for heavy use.(and no, you don't need "reliably ... specific and precise", those are just artifical constraints you've added)
And don't speak for everyone, not everyone is so clueless re. business decisions just because they've designed some hardware.
by eviks
3/3/2025 at 8:12:24 PM
“I know so much more about this topic from some casual Googling than people who actually do this for a living, so please listen to me.”by stouset
3/3/2025 at 4:15:45 AM
I think the point is that Hanlon’s Razor applies here. Though there are definitely cases like this, I’m not sure how one could prove that the penny-pincher was intentionally oblivious to the damage from failure.by shermantanktop
3/3/2025 at 2:26:43 AM
I agree with your overall sentiment, but I can't help but feel that when companies offer single-year warranties it's because they haven't put in the engineering to keep the failure rate down over what's actually a reasonable-for-the-consumer lifespan for the product.by Marsymars
3/3/2025 at 4:26:09 PM
Or perhaps a manufacturer has determined the customer isn’t willing to pay a premium for the engineering or material costs required to increase lifespan.by jwagenet
3/3/2025 at 1:05:51 AM
The cost of improved quality still need only offset the cost of returns within the warranty period and opinion on reasonable product lifetime though. At some point the cost of better quality will be greater than the profit margin a company is willing to accept and a consumer is willing to pay, but it’s in the companies best interest to get that as close to a number that passes the pub test (e.g., an ‘untentional’ bug bricking the firmware the day after warrantee expires)I’m not convinced some of my very expensive smart products aren’t intentionally degrading over time, given fw is introducing more functional bugs.
by hsbauauvhabzb
3/3/2025 at 4:50:40 AM
When peoplespeak of planned obsolescence, they're discussing how companies pay the bare minimum to make a part that functions within the warranty period. They aren't doing it to fail the part prematurely, they'd doing it to pinch pennies in the manufacturing costs.by Salgat
3/3/2025 at 12:56:26 AM
Do you think the fact that new cars have engines that are not rebuildable but only replaceable is just a coincidence? With every year car manufacturers get more insight in how and when things break, thus allowing the use of more plastic parts in the engine bayby NullPrefix
3/3/2025 at 1:16:57 AM
Almost any car can go 200,000 miles these days and exceptions (Hyundai/Kia engines, Nissan transmissions) are well known and excoriated.Pre OBD2 cars just didn’t do that. 100k was a significant milestone for the life of the car. Today, it’s a preventative maintenance milestone.
Shitty plastic parts aren’t a feature of modern cars, just lousy companies. I had a 1991 Dodge Spirit in college and high school that had a little plastic part in the distributor that broke when it got hot.
When it did, the car would just stop if you hit a puddle or turned right quickly. It did so enough that I kept two spares in the trunk. One time the car died on the ramp from the GW Bridge to the West Side Drive. I just stopped on the ramp and fixed it, pissing off hundreds of people in the process.
by Spooky23
3/3/2025 at 4:19:53 AM
Great story. The GW bridge is one of the most stressful driving-in-city-you-don’t-know-well experiences I’ve ever had. We were literally shouting at google maps as it blithely delivered nonsense while we were surrounded by cars who wanted very much not to let us change lanes.by shermantanktop
3/3/2025 at 1:39:31 AM
>Almost any car can go 200,000 miles these days and exceptionsDoubt that
>Pre OBD2 cars just didn’t do that
In Eastern Europe, if the car has 200k-300k km on the odomoter, it only means one thing - the odometer is turned back. Pre OBD2 doing 500k and up is pretty normal here.
>little plastic part in the distributor
Distributor was always plastic, afaik. I'm talking about plastic water pumps on the new BMWs
by NullPrefix
3/3/2025 at 3:10:20 AM
"How Many Miles Does a Car Last?The Bureau of Transportation indicates that the average age across the board for vehicles still on the road is just over 11 years according to Autotrader, and the average may be approaching 12 years. Standard cars in this day and age are expected to keep running up to 200,000 miles, while cars with electric engines are expected to last for up to 300,000 miles."
https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a32758625/how-many-mil...
by WrongAssumption
3/3/2025 at 1:26:30 PM
Old BMWs have plastic water pumps. That’s hardly something new.by kube-system
3/3/2025 at 1:02:57 AM
It's not a coincidence - new cars have turbochargers and electronic engine control that provide huge performance/efficiency gains and necessarily are harder to repair.Your average shitty 4-banger from the 80s or 90s is not remotely comparable to a new engine - in almost every respect (including reliability!) the new one is better.
by SR2Z
3/3/2025 at 2:52:35 AM
Turbochargers date back to the 1920s, and I'd rather troubleshoot a modern EFI/GDI system than a carburetor any day of the week.by marcus0x62
3/3/2025 at 5:40:35 PM
Sure they're old, but my understanding is that outside of diesels and aircraft they were too fiddly and unreliable to put in common use.by SR2Z
3/3/2025 at 1:40:26 AM
New engines also have thin blocks, which cannot be honedby NullPrefix
3/3/2025 at 10:44:32 AM
New engines don't ever need to be honed. You can change the performance parameters in software easily enough.by Peanuts99
3/3/2025 at 8:25:02 PM
honing is part of rebuildby NullPrefix
3/4/2025 at 8:44:10 AM
Yes, and who exactly is going to rebuild a $2000 engine instead of buying a new one?The labor costs ALONE make that a horrible idea for anyone who isn't a mechanic already - and if an engine lasts ten years the depreciation on the car is intense enough that it doesn't matter.
by SR2Z
3/5/2025 at 1:44:01 AM
I doubt you could buy a new engine for $2k. And this whole thing that you are arguing for, it's called throwaway productsby NullPrefix
3/3/2025 at 1:15:55 AM
Obsolescence doesn't exist because a comically evil mastermind designs things to break. It exists because capitalism favors profits over anything else.A lower quality component is cheaper than a higher quality one that would last longer, so that's what ends up being mass produced, and that's what you, as a product designer with no power over the entirety of the production pipeline, has to work with.
by desdenova
3/3/2025 at 3:38:31 AM
Well, also it turns out that most people won't pay that much extra for something to last longer.by tbrownaw
3/3/2025 at 4:47:53 AM
It might if there was an actual reliable correlation between the price of a product and its longevity. But many times the shittiest products will slap on some marketing materials about it being extra heavy duty or something, or design it to appear like a more reliable competing product, but charge more for it. I buy the cheapest parts not because I want the cheapest parts, but because spending an extra 20% on the price often results in the exact same part with zero extra value.by AngryData
3/3/2025 at 5:49:09 AM
People have typical shelled out significant more money for Miele washing machines because they were known to last typically up to somewhere between 1 and 2 decades and be repairable.People pay a lot extra for Toyota.
I don't want to pay extra for my pants to last at least a full year (think 100 days use, 30 wash cycles), or for my electronics to last at least five years since I am old enough to remember that this used to be absolutely normal and the way things used to be.
by skinkestek
3/3/2025 at 4:22:06 AM
Also paying extra does not in any way mean you will get any better quality these days. It is indeed a market for lemons.by entropi
3/3/2025 at 4:54:58 AM
And part of this is because it's very difficult for consumers to measure this, especially as even the best brands experience enshitification. Sears' Craftsman tools famously had a lifetime warranty, but capitalism eventually did its thing and outsourced their manufacture and removed the lifetime warranty, hoping to leverage years of good will for a short term gain.by Salgat
3/3/2025 at 7:55:01 AM
They also started putting plastic gears in their gas powered stuff. No bearings, just bushings in the shaft. Crap like that.All these companies some of us remember are all now owned by the same company. This is how capitalism goes. Eventually, a company makes a mistake, and a competitor will absorb them.
This is dramatically simplified, but the big joke is that capitalism breeds competition and that is good for the consumer.
The illusion of choice via mergers and acquisitions.
by genewitch
3/3/2025 at 1:45:06 PM
That reminds me of what happened with Kitchenaid, where now only the pro line and better has metal gears, which is why folks seek out the old models at garage sales.by Salgat
3/3/2025 at 1:39:38 AM
You are assuming that a product designer needs the product to last as long as possible given our current knowledge of physics, chemistry, engineering, and manufacturing at the moment. Most of the time, that's just not necessary. Things break, and if you can make some money off of them before they break then we can keep the cycle going. Customers would happily spend the same amount of money again after some time if they expect an improved product (for proof, see every subscription service).by guhidalg
3/3/2025 at 6:03:12 AM
> capitalism favors profits over anything else.At what rate of return does "profits" turn into unbridled greed and capitalism turns into parasitic exploitation?
by yMEyUyNE1
3/3/2025 at 8:09:15 AM
> It exists because capitalism favors profits over anything else.…and that’s where the regulator needs to step in and establish a set of requirements which must be met to allow profiting.
by baq
3/3/2025 at 1:59:06 PM
Agreed. A great example would be the testing of old tvs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxQS58t39_UThey were often tested to ridiculously high standards with huge voltages applied across strenuous tests. And they cost accordingly.
It’s amazing how cheap things are these days. I think what frustrates people more is that the more expensive options don’t usually last long. Finding the more reliable option is fiendishly difficult and it may not exist.
by matthewfcarlson
3/3/2025 at 2:11:57 PM
> I think what frustrates people more is that the more expensive options don’t usually last longYeah, well put. Just had to replace a dishwasher, and among the models of one brand it seems the more expensive models just add more moving parts and complexity that, ironically, may lead to more issues.
Don't get me started about clothes. The quality and weight of the fabric is almost completely disconnected from the price.
by foobarian
3/3/2025 at 12:54:27 AM
>it's really difficult to build things to lastA lot of depends on where your price point is. Do you compete with Temu or do you sell expensive things. People rarely expect cheap things to last, but if you don't compete on being the cheapest, than the product is expected to be made to last
by NullPrefix
3/3/2025 at 5:00:40 AM
I'm saying even when cost isn't the motivating factor, it's _still_ difficult to build things to really last, especially when there are moving parts.by klysm
