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Bierculles t1_j9yq60v wrote

Reply to comment by imakenosensetopeople in A platform for products with no planned obsolescence by shanoshamanizum

Many coffee machines have a built in counter that shuts them down after a set numbers of coffees. Officially it is for quality reasons but you can easily get twice as many coffees out of a machine withoput a drop in quality. You can reset the counters if you know how, it's not that hard. Especially cheap full coffee machines do this so people have to constantly buy new ones every few years.

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imakenosensetopeople t1_j9yr473 wrote

Where can I read more about this? I’ve had exactly one coffee machine fail on me, due to a crack in the tubing causing a leak (and I was able to fix it). I drink at least a pot a day, so if I was going to hit one of those counters I definitely would have done so by now.

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Bierculles t1_j9ysop2 wrote

Maybe you got lucky, i think this was a discussion around a decade ago. I don't know how widespread it was and if it's even still legal but there were certainly coffee machines that had this or simmilar features.

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imakenosensetopeople t1_j9yt53h wrote

Is there any documentation anywhere? Can I read an article about it or something?

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Bierculles t1_j9yv6py wrote

For coffee specificly, i don't know, this specific case just stuck with me because i've seen it firsthand.

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femmestem t1_j9z24ex wrote

Without any kind of documentation, this sounds made up or not at all widespread.

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imakenosensetopeople t1_j9z6ccv wrote

Agreed. Last time I posed this question I got a hundred people telling me about light bulbs but not one single person could cite another example. A lot of folks misunderstand how products are engineered and how much the relentless pursuit of Shareholder Value forces design compromises, but the intent is never to make something fail; simply to last through the warranty period as cheaply as possible.

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PublicFurryAccount t1_ja00hgn wrote

There wasn't any such thing.

The issue was that, a decade ago, companies were adding smart features without really grokking the implications of a sensor which can halt operation. This led to lots of products becoming useless because the sensor had failed.

This can be counteracted in some systems with a hard reset. The machine will sometimes have code to mark a sensor as bad when it runs the first-run diagnostic and will ignore the sensor thereafter. Other times the issue was just a routine that wanted the user to perform some maintenance task years later, long after they'd lost the manual, and they would not know how to reset the flag. (E.g., by powering on the coffee maker while holding the brew button or whatever.)

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to be your source for the cause. I work in IOT and this sort of stuff was among the war stories told by coworkers from the early days of the market.

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imakenosensetopeople t1_ja0c3q7 wrote

Thank you - that was informative! Seems that no matter the actual explanation; whenever a product doesn’t work perfectly forever, people just jump right to “planned obsolescence.”

In your opinion, if you don’t mind me asking, is security getting any better in relation to IOT? My layman’s understanding was a lot of early IOT was just “set up and abandon” and stuff just went online without getting security patches, or only got patches for a short period of time.

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PublicFurryAccount t1_ja0d6oj wrote

Analytically, security is vastly improved. Higher standards all around.

Constructively? I don’t know. There are more devices and more users, which means a larger attack surface and more targets.

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Bierculles t1_j9zg18r wrote

Could be the case, my only source is a single anecdotal case

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mhornberger t1_ja3qjji wrote

What system is this? Some Keurig or Nespresso model? You already can buy drip coffeemakers, moka pots, espresso machines etc that don't have any of that technology. I don't know which system you're talking about, but the timer may have been to encourage de-scaling.

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