Decimator714 t1_isevrm4 wrote on October 15, 2022 at 1:19 PM

Reply to comment by BoilerButtSlut in Dishwasher keeps going by Atlantic76

Deliberately making a business decision not to sell parts needed to repair something you own is basically the definition of planned obselecense. Of course engineers aren't going to design something with the plan for it to fail.

BoilerButtSlut t1_isfhep4 wrote on October 15, 2022 at 4:06 PM

Then literally everything everywhere is planned obsolescence. There is no business that promises parts availability forever, and there never has been. And if your definition is that broad, then it is effectively meaningless.

Making parts for years after a product has ended costs money. Keeping a working supply chain costs money. Keeping those parts on shelves somewhere, ready for replacement, costs money. Keeping inventory and track of all of this costs money. And you normally have to overproduce them because trying to go back 10 years later to put an old part back into production is enormously expensive.

Most consumers are simply not willing to pay for that. This is one of those things that consumers say they care about, but when it comes to pony up money for it, they suddenly don't care about it. What consumers say and what their behavior actually is are two different things.

That's why you have to go to companies where you're paying for that part support and quality up-front: Miele guarantees parts availability for 10 years after discontinuing of a model appliance (though 15 years is standard). Commercial manufacturers can guarantee even longer availability most of the time (mostly because their designs change to little over time).

But you simply won't find that for cheap shit appliances. The whole point of cheap shit appliances is to have razor thin margins, and keeping an active supply chain open goes against that.

Decimator714 t1_ish6z3c wrote on October 15, 2022 at 11:27 PM

Eeeh okay yes but I have a counter.

Apple recently has ensured their products can remain obselete when they fail, by ensuring chip manufacturers do not sell their chips to consumers for hardware level motherboard repair.

Now you might be thinking, "well apple made the chip they can do what they want with it". That's not the case. They literally take a consumer purchasable chip, tell the manufacturer to change the pinout, to make it proprietary so you can't replace the voltage regulator or whatever that is a known failure point of the computer.

If that is not planned obselecense, then we clearly are taking the definition of the words in a completely different way. No, they didn't plan on changing the pinout to directly cause their laptops to fail, but they clearly made an anti consumer decision to incentivise throwing your old computer away and getting a new one. Thus, planned obselecense. The executives know exactly what they're doing when they make this decision. They know it will result in more profit for the company.

In my opinion the trend of anti repair is equivalent to planned obselecense. The end goal is the same. Get the consumer to "just buy a new one".

BoilerButtSlut t1_ity878l wrote on October 27, 2022 at 4:25 AM

Apple does this because they want total control over their ecosystem and that includes control over the hardware. There's a variety of business reasons for this (some reasonable, some asinine), but that's what it is. One reason for this policy is because they are so highly desirable around the world and they are expensive. People will literally buy broken phones, shoddily repair them, and then sell them as new in some bumfuck country somewhere else, and when it stops working they want apple to fix it.

Apple is far from the only company doing this with their products, though most other companies are doing it for other reasons.

And no that is not planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence (at least in the textbook definition) is designing something to fail sooner or to not function after some period of time. Unless I'm missing something, Apple isn't doing that. They just aren't supporting repair outside of their ecosystem.

The whole concept of causing something to fail quicker in some vain hope that consumers will go back to you to get their next version never made sense to me: if I have an appliance or phone that breaks within a few months, the very last thing I'm going to do is go back to the same manufacturer for a new one. It's just a guaranteed way to drive people to your competitors. The only time it could even work is if you have a total monopoly on that product.

>but they clearly made an anti consumer decision to incentivise throwing your old computer away and getting a new one. Thus, planned obselecense.

Anti-consumer is not the same thing. Those are two totally different concepts. I completely agree that Apple is awful to its customers, but their customers keep coming back so they get away with it. Walmart isn't much different in that regard. But they aren't designing their stuff to fail quickly.

I mean, if they wanted to do planned obsolescence, why even bother with all of this? They could literally just make the phone self destruct at two years on the dot and people would still come around to buy more.