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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> none of that is the same as spending time to figure out how to ensure that something breaks at the right time
Yes 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.
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 malice
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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 future
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
This is really neat, if true, but I have to say I'm skeptical. This is just too good a story!
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.
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.
> 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
I am not an electrical engineer. Could the microcontroller use the battery as some kind of calibration? Or could it have another function?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> the screen is maliciously connected to the board with strong adhesive
That’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Like they say that anyone can overbuild a bridge but only an engineer can make it barely stand up
The majority of biggest suspension bridges if I remember correctly are barely standing up. They use above 80% of the cables carrying capacity for themselves.
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. /s
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!
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.
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.
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.
First, 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 bay
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.
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.
>Almost any car can go 200,000 miles these days and exceptions
Doubt 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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
They 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.
> I think what frustrates people more is that the more expensive options don’t usually last long
Yeah, 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.
A 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
A similar thing happened to my Brother laser printer. It has a tiny rubber piece inside that serves as a bumper to quiet down a component that clicks while the paper travels through the printer. Over time, it gets sticky and winds up holding the component too long, which confuses the printer into thinking it has a paper jam, causing it to suddenly abort the print job partway through. The fix was to simply remove the rubber pad and it was back to normal -- albeit a little "clickier" than when it started!
Same kind of problem with an old HP LaserJet 1300 we still use. It began by it occasionally picking up multiple sheets of paper and jamming. It gradually got worse until the printer wasn't usable anymore.
The issue turned out to be the solenoid for the pick-up mechanism. When activated it should cause the pick-up mechanism to turn once. The solenoid once apparently had a small rubber pad to reduce noise. This had turned into goo and the solenoid would stick causing the mechanism to turn multiple times.
Fixed by removing the left-over goo and a piece of tape. Ten minute fix.
I had the same problem when my previous Brother printer was nearly ten years old, I did the same trick, and it worked. Most components might last almost forever, but things like rubber or glue, not so much.
That's why I've decided that my next mouse won't have any rubber in it, but it's difficult to find a good mouse without rubber. I'm still looking for one.
Generally, I try to avoid buying anything with rubber. It is usually the first part that goes bad. Either it gets sticky and starts melting or it gets hard and dry and breaks up. Also, I avoid using rubber bands. They usually end up damaging objects they hold together.
If you have don't care about the price, there's always FinalMouse. Their mice are carbon fiber, with PTFE feet. I forget if the wheel has any, I'd have to check once I'm home.
In some cases, plastic doesn't either. It will "dry" out and either crack or begin to flake off. I've had plastic gasoline containers where the plastic rings that you tighten down to prevent leakage, simply crack down the sides when trying to unscrew them to get to the fuel, especially in winter time.
This is not to say all plastic is this way, some plastics that are more flexible, like on the gas containers themselves, can last for years. But the cap rings are made of hard plastic.
This morning I replaced the rubber grip on my manual coffer grinder. By my math I'd ground about 40 kg of coffee by hand over 4 years, and the grip had gotten to the point where it just spun around the body of the grinder unless held very tightly.
I assume I could extend the lifespan by wearing gloves when I grind coffee to keep my hand oils off the rubber, but the replacement was only $5.
It takes a lot of alcohol. I learned to soak a paper towel and rub it on the sticky stuff with almost no pressure. If it sticks, there is not enough alcohol.
And change the paper towel frequently. It works by dissolving the sticky stuff, not mechanically wiping it off. So the paper towel picks up the dissolved crud after only a few wipes, then switch to a clean one.
I’ve cleaned cameras, mice, umbrella handles, and the back of a Samsung tablet this way.
I had some success in soaking gooey rubber parts in a vinegar and water bath overnight. It seemed to cause the gooey stuff to slough off enough that I was able to removed by scrubbing lightly with a dish rag.
"Rubber" means lots of different plastics, some of which are very stable and some of which are very unstable. Some are natural; others are synthetic. All they have in common is that they are soft and very elastic—if even that, since sometimes ebonite is called a rubber as well, comprised as it is in large part of natural latex rubber.
Silicone rubbers in particular are extremely stable.
I've 'fixed' a number of items like that with isopropyl alcohol. Googling brought me that solution, and although it discolors, it's functional. You have to use a lot though.
I had forgotten about Quantum hard drives.. I bought a Quantum harddrive in the 1990s for my mac like "Tower Power Pro".. It stopped working about a week after I got it with clicks. The first clue something was amiss was the person on the phone stating "thats a little early for it to fail". Got a replacement drive... 2 weeks later same issue. I think they were bought out by someone.
As I get older I wonder how may of my burned DVDs will still work.. My MiniDiscs still do as of this fall when I dusted them off (different technology). I had heard of tv networks "baking " magnetic tapes to get the information off.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome
I bought a 50MB (yes, megs) Quantum HD from an acquaintance. It was freaking slow connected to my Amiga, like 20-30KB per second. It also made a horrible high-pitched whine.
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I turned it over and squirted some 3-in-1 oil on the motor spindle. The whine started increasing in pitch as it quietened, and slowly the HD benchmark program started creeping up toward a more reasonable 1MB/s or so. I didn't use that drive afterward, and just copied the, ahem, public domain apps and games off it and then threw it away.
I have not before or since sped up a computer by oiling it.
Wow, that was my first PC HDD. (I had a 10MB HDD in my Sirius 1 before that)
Bought at an Egghead somewhere the Computer Museum in Boston while on vacation from the UK -- about half the price of something similar in England at the time due to exchange rate.
but older hard drives like the ones I’ve shown above are remarkably tolerant of being opened. That’s not to say I would leave it operating without the cover for an extended period of time, but for quick data recovery purposes in a decently clean environment, it’s fine.
The airflow while the platters are spinning keeps dust off them, and as long as particles don't stick and cause excessive "thermal asperity", the heads will still work. The latter is what makes transient bad sectors appear.
I too have fixed (temporarily) a hard drive by opening it open and moving the arm back and forth a few times. I got about 20 minutes out of it. Was able to save some photos… that are stored on another hard drive.
The most common issue with Pentax ME Super, one of the most popular consumer-grade manual focus SLRs, was caused by a degraded rubber ring near the mirror assembly.
The ones without such an issue is still often recommended for hobbyists who want to get into analog photography today, because they are generally inexpensive, compatible with very nice lenses, and there are so many of them circulating still for parts and repair.
Given that they were made in the late 70s to early 80s, and the shutter mechanism is fully controlled by electronics (instead of mechanical), it's quite amazing that the rest of the camera mostly held up over nearly 5 decades.
Ahhh, Conner. My second computer (a 386sx-33) had a whopping two Conner IDE 120MB drives... until it didn't. I can remember the clicking as those drives would spin up... until one fine day the clicks died and POST threw an error wondering why my hard drive wasn't ready.... and then the drive began clicking again. One soft reset later and I was back in business, but even as a teen back then I knew that was a sign from PC-Hulud to immediately start pulling everything off. I had always assumed the problem was stiction of the read/write head w/r/t the platters. Neat.
I’ve recently got into old typewriters and have had the same problem with the rubbery belt that goes from the motor spindle to the larger wheel that spins the inner roller that drives the keys and returns the carriage. They turn into a very sticky goo, and those exact size belts are not available.
This reminds me of what happens to that rubberized coating that was so popular on plastic peripherals a long time ago. I have a relatively recent Ubiquiti AmpliFi device and it's just...sticky. I can't get rid of the stickiness no matter what I try.
By coincidence I found an old Toshiba external USB drive in a drawer last week when I was rummaging for a cable, a black STORE.E one with the (now sticky and nasty) rubberised coating. I just powered it up: happily it still works so I guess no internal rubber bumper.
Worst application of rubber so far was on some old Stanley screwdrivers, now unusable unless you want to apply solvent to your hands after use. I got those maybe 15+ years ago, put me off Stanley branded tools. Now I have a perfectly good beech handled Wera set which (sigh) Wera appear to have stopped making.
I'm a bit surprised there was no mention of semiconductors (mostly capacitors?) going bad on 1990's hard drives. I want to rescue the Fast SCSI2 drive on my old Amiga at some point and never thought the problem might be inside. If the electronics on server-quality drives (it sounds like a jet engine) are this reliable, then I'll be thankful for having just one problem and not two.
Dons glasses well etymologically... the "semi-" in semiconductor means "partial", something between an insulator and a conductor. A capacitor is an insulator between two conductors.
(But this approach fails on the temperature coefficient of resistance test: capacitor ESR increases with temperature while semiconductors have a negative coefficient.)
Do HDDs have many electrolytics? Those are the main culprits for going bad, and are usually used for power electronics, not controllers/processing circuitry (they don't need the bulk capacitance that you'd usually use an electrolytic for)
There are indeed some aluminum electrolytics hiding on Quantum drives. They look sneakily like tantalum caps, but they're just cans hiding inside a plastic cover. Here's one where I accidentally broke the cover, revealing what's underneath:
No reasonable EE would mistake this for anything but an electrolytic cap.
This is a very old package design from the transition between through hole and SMD. The process for making the vertical axial style common now hadn't been perfected and it was briefly cheaper to cast regular axial caps into an epoxy block.
No other component looks like this, it's a very distinct package and footprint from any other type of cap. No one tried to disguise anything, they really just thought this was the cheapest way to make a surface mount electrolytic cap.
It's more likely so these could be used with a pick and place machine. They're obviously lytics if you look at the ends. I don't know why everything has to be a conspiracy these days.
I'd have to pull the drive to have a good look, but my memory is that the circuit board resembles the inside of a 1960's era transistor radio. Will hope you're right.
Hm, I have some classic scsi drives still kicking in some old Macintoshes, maybe I aught to back them up. They're funny, sometimes they get stuck and I have to whack them with the rubber side of a screwdriver to start them up.
Many years ago, I have lost valuable data stored on Sony QIC magnetic tapes (QIC = quarter-inch cartridge), because those magnetic tape cartridges contained a rubber belt that was used to move the magnetic tape inside the cartridges, when they were inserted in a tape drive.
After many years of storage, the rubber belts had become fragile and any attempt to move the magnetic tape turned the belts into dust, making the cartridge unreadable.
The LTO magnetic tape cartridges used today are much more robust, because the cartridge is simpler and it hopefully no longer includes any parts that are susceptible to rapid aging.
At that time, i.e. 30-40 years ago, rubber belts were used because they ensured in a simple mechanical way a constant moving speed for the magnetic tape. Later, the electronic alternatives for ensuring a constant tape speed by varying the speed of an electric motor have become cheap enough to eliminate the need for such belts.
I just found my old Flip Camera in bin of old electronics today and its rubber case was a sticky mess. In the bin is a bunch of old hard drives that haven't been touched in a decade as well. I imagine there is nothing on there I need that hasn't been transferred elsewhere, but also just curious if any of them work.
Man this guy's posts are always awesome. The other place I've seen gooey rubber/plastic like this is on certain models of cars after many years of service. Sometimes even the steering wheel can have this effect which is gross
It seems that just about everything I have owned in the past 20 years that has had some sort of rubberized thing has turned into this goo. From knobs on digital music equipment, toys, coffee grinders... all of it. So very irritating.
I've thrown out an expensive chefs knife this week with a sticky rubber handle.
Also two pairs of boots where the rubber bases have just crumbled. I contacted the manufacturer of one of them because they were a very expensive 'best pair' and had hardly ever been worn. The reply was that boots have to be worn every few months to prevent this, and not covered by warranty. I wonder if all polymers/plastics are like this, use it or lose it. Entropy rebooted.
Unfortunately rubber deteriorates as it absorbs moisture. I forgot the name of the reaction, but keeping these things in a well ventilated, cool and dry place extends their life a lot.
I've had good luck using bicarbonate of soda as a mild abrasive on knives and saucepan handles with that horrible rubberised soft-touch coating. On good quality items it removes the stickiness. On poor quality items it removes the soft-touch coating, which is still a good result in my book!
I wonder if this is also the reason freezing a broken harddrive makes it temporary work again. I have used this trick a few times with success. Either keeping the disk in the freezer with the cable to the outside or putting a bottle or frozen liquid on top of it after it has been in the freezer (but beware of condensation).
I had two hard drives sitting on the shelves just suddenly refuse to work after not touching them for years... Xbox360 hdd went south, a seagate st4000dm000 too. interesting... what is aging in these modernish drives that makes them go south?
Hmmm, I wonder if there are similar tricks for newer hard drives. I have a 2010 iMac that has a seized or "otherwise non-booting" hard drive, just randomly wouldn't boot one day. I can only guess there is a mechanical problem like this, because those aluminum iMacs were notorious for running too hot internally and basically overheating the HDD. Same problem on my wife's 2008 iMac, that machine burned through 3+ HDDs due to the heat issue.
Another option, if you can’t find a card, is a ZuluSCSI or BlueSCSI V2 in initiator mode to image the drive to an SD card. It’s pretty nifty! I’ve recently even been using ZuluSCSI as a USB-SCSI bridge with USB MSC initiator mode.
