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toTheNewLife t1_jdrtez3 wrote

Reply to comment by BoilerButtSlut in My Aunt’s GE Spacemaker Coffeemaker from 1988, used nearly everyday since by ME5SENGER_24

>Planned obsolescence isn't a thing

Narrator: It is.

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BoilerButtSlut t1_jdrus4l wrote

It isn't. I'm an engineer that works on consumer electronics. I'm frequently in meetings that decide the cost of these things.

Most consumers want cheap junk more than they want durability.

I've never been in any meeting where anyone was told to make things fail faster in some misguided attempt to sell more. We are given a cost target because we know many units will sell at each price cutoff and the overwhelming scale is at the lower end.

I also know dozens of engineers across multiple market segments. None has ever been told to make things fail faster.

The whole idea of planned obsolescence doesn't even make sense: when I buy something that breaks immediately or is shoddily made, I don't go out and buy the same thing again.

The whole idea only works if you have a monopoly on the market and literally can't buy anything else. But obviously that's not true since you can find quality versions of whatever you want. It just costs more. Most consumers don't want to spend more. They want to spend less.

You can literally have the long lasting version right next to cheap junk and even tell them that the longer lasting one will last decades, and consumers will still buy the junk one. I know because I've literally done this at the store. Still haven't had a single person I've talked to go for the long lasting one.

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Doughymidget t1_jdrxeo4 wrote

Just to defend the idea that it is a real thing, it has been a tactic used purposefully by cartels. Now, do most companies do this to this day? Maybe not. I think you are not wrong. But I do think that Apple soldering the ram memory in their computers so that you are unable to upgrade it and extend the life of your MacBook is planned obsolescence. Also, companies that restrict your ability to repair a product is planned obsolescence. So, it is a thing and is alive. It just may not always be the reason that a product is made cheaper or for some reason fails sooner than you’d like.

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BoilerButtSlut t1_jds1xle wrote

A few things:

  • The "lightbulb" cartel was to ensure uniformity over consumer bulbs. 1000 hours was chosen as the best compromise between lifetime and brightness. There were still 10k bulbs made and sold by members of the "cartel". You could still buy long-lasting stuff. Also and as an aside, it's always funny to me that the only proof anyone can offer of planned obsolescence is an industry cartel that hasn't existed since before WW2. Literally nothing else.

  • Apple solders the ram directly to the board because it's cheaper. Connectors are expensive. We do the same at my company. It probably saves several dollars per connector. And well, Apple customers just don't enough about it to buy something else that's upgradeable. I know that's not the satisfying answer but that's certainly it: consumers don't care enough to buy upgradeable models from elsewhere.

  • As also mentioned elsewhere, I doubt they can get the same thinness with the RAM slots put in. Thinness seems to be what their consumers want, so they are naturally going to focus on that.

>Also, companies that restrict your ability to repair a product is planned obsolescence.

The idea behind that isn't to make it fail faster or sell more. The purpose behind it is because counterfeiting is a huge problem, especially for Apple. There's literally an entire shadow industry that buys broken iphones, puts generic parts in them to make them work again, then resell them, and then when those break because they aren't repaired properly, the people who bought them take them to Apple for repair, which costs them money.

This isn't just for computers: tractors, industrial equipment, aircraft parts, etc are very easy to forge and have some factory somewhere in China make a substandard version for it for less than half the cost. Fake aircraft parts were implicated in some plane crashes in the 90s until regulators clamped down on it.

I'm sure there's a revenue component to the service subscription aspect as well, but again, people aren't willing to buy other stuff over it, so clearly it's not important enough to buyers to go elsewhere.

Again, not a satisfying answer, but that's a large component of it.

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kapponen t1_jdv3ky0 wrote

Just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to offer an engineer's perspective on this discussion

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Patient_Fox_6594 t1_jds0wfr wrote

Cheaper to solder them in, also helps with thinness. Buy a Framework laptop, possibly. But people that buy Mac seem to want brand cachet mostly. Longevity is just one product factor, and it's pretty low on many people's checklists, and they won't pay for it on purpose.

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BoilerButtSlut t1_jds3m37 wrote

Listen to this person, because this is exactly right.

Consumers *say* they want long-lasting and durable, but as soon as it's time to open their wallet, they want more features/gimmicks for the price or better aesthetics, or lower price, etc.

There's decades of sales/marketing data that shows this.

This is all consumer-driven. There are high quality versions of everything, and they are consistently low sales, because that market is only like 1% of the population.

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Doughymidget t1_jds1deo wrote

Cheaper than pushing it in?

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Patient_Fox_6594 t1_jds1nt1 wrote

Cheaper than soldering in SO-DIMM or whatever slots and placing the memory in, and designing the board to take the stress of pushing it in. Soldering them in is easier to automate, I'd think, just slap slap slap slap slap plop.

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intermediatetransit t1_jds2zj6 wrote

I would say so, yes. I mean I hate MacBooks personally and the way they no longer support most pc standards, but I have no problems coming up with justifications for their choices beyond ”planned obsolence”.

For instance if the memory is all soldered on there is a lot less to test for, i.e. the device only has a small set of memory sizes and maintaining quality and consistency with those is easier. You also no longer have to provide support for your customers shoving shoddy memory into the device and contacting support when it doesn’t work properly.

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Doughymidget t1_jds86bt wrote

Sure. And every decision is made with multiple factors for and against it. Just having one reason to do something doesn’t mean that another reason couldn’t still be seen as a positive by a company. Again, there is hard proof that it’s been done before, and I don’t think that companies focus on this as a business strategy. But, I think it does exist.

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toTheNewLife t1_jdt717w wrote

>You can literally have the long lasting version right next to cheap junk and even tell them that the longer lasting one will last decades, and consumers will still buy the junk one.

People don't really trust corporations. I sure don't. Even though I get it from an engineering perspective. Yet I'm still dubious when I see a $150 version of a product sitting next to a $35 one. Instinct tells me the more expensive one is a cash grab - because that's what companies do today. They pad their margins.

I have no trust that the more expensive one will really last a decade. And it it doesn't how do I know that I won't be put into phone menu hell when I try to exercise my warranty? "HUMAN!" "HUMAN!".

It's been made easier to throw stuff away, IMO.

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BoilerButtSlut t1_jdtafg9 wrote

And this is how people get the attitude of "it's all the same so I'll spend the bare minimum to replace it" and then are never able to escape the garbage cycle and then insist that there is no other way.

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