10 ms·

Phoebus Cartel

126 points by mbroncano 5y ago

lizknope 5y ago
The Omnibus Podcast with Ken Jennings did an episode on this last year. https://www.omnibusproject.com/276 https://www.omnibusproject.com/276
mdu96 5y ago
There's a fantastic Throughline podcast episode on the Phoebus Cartel: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707188193/the-phoebus-cartel https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707188193/the-phoebus-cartel.
smiley1437 5y ago
Standardizing a 1000 hr bulb life vs standardizing a 30% commission to host an app, is it really a coincidence or are cartels just better at hiding it now?
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Have Microsoft and Google standardized on the 30% commission? Or is it more that "Apple stuff" is not directly substitutable with "Google stuff", and that Apple has a monopoly on "Apple stuff"?
  - smiley1437 5y ago
    Yes, they have, please see this chart https://www.statista.com/statistics/975776/revenue-split-leading-digital-content-store-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/975776/revenue-split-lea... Pretty much everyone has, with the occasional exception.
    - mpartel 5y ago
      Steam and GOG too
      - NAG3LT 5y ago
        Wasn't Steam one of the first to implement such pricing? Or have they followed the lead of somebody else before them?
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Steam has a much better case to argue, given that they're a fiscally independent company with no board of directors or shareholders to satisfy. Since they don't get monthly cash infusions, they need to do two things: shoot for an aggressive growth model, and shower the end user in features. In my opinion, they've succeeded in both regards: their 30% cut is pretty large, but it's justified given the scale of the operation they run. Plus, their generosity with things like cloud save, video streaming, and their assortment of community offerings, it's hard to really claim that Steam doesn't deserve their cut. If anything, I consider them the premier example of what a "premium" CDN pipeline looks like.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      That is remarkable, and I wonder if there are explanations other than a cartel.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      Interesting, thanks. I wonder how much of this is deliberate collusion, as opposed to an equilibrium where companies all realize that it's more profitable to match each others' fees than to try to compete on price. If other app stores charge 30%, you know that developers are willing to pay 30%, and there's not much to be gained by reducing your own rate below that.
      - WalterGR 5y ago
        I wonder how much of this is deliberate collusion, as opposed to an equilibrium I saw a theory in the comments on HN once that companies can 'collude' without communicating with each other. If memory serves, it was different than just achieving an equilibrium. Maybe it's enough of a theory to have a name? Hopefully someone who knows what I'm thinking of can chime in. Edit: I may be thinking of "tacit collusion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion - "Tacit collusion is a collusion between competitors, which do not explicitly exchange information and achieving an agreement about coordination of conduct."
        ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        They read each-other's press releases, they reasearch competitors, employees and mamagers move between companies. There is no way for them to not communicate. Just because bosses didnt sit down a and sign a deal in a smokey room doesnt mean no decision was made
        nerdponx 5y ago
        Yes, although typically tacit collusion is introduced with the example of price matching at big box retailers. The setup in this case is somewhat different, although the outcome is still an equilibrium in which all sellers "agree" to keep prices high (and above marginal cost) without directly communicating.
- nrp 5y ago
  It’s unlikely there was collusion around app store commissions. It’s more likely a case of “how much can we get away with charging?” and existing competitors in market providing a proof point of what is palatable to developers. That is a somewhat stable state until someone like Epic comes in with a lot of money and a desire to quickly capture market share with a lower commission.
  - syshum 5y ago
    I am pretty sure it is established that there was, Amazon and Apple were the first 2 members
    - selectodude 5y ago
      Apple and Amazon are far from the first storefronts.
    - simonh 5y ago
      Steam was charging 30% as far back as 2003.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I'd be willing to defend Apple's 30% cut if any of it was justified. Instead, my experience working in the walled garden has been gruelling. Xcode is a pathetic disaster at this point, but Apple seems to be unwilling to extend any functionality to the editors I actually use. Getting an app through the guidelines is an exercise in arbitrary debasement. Their phone support is useless too, with most of them directing me to forum posts that basically say "don't do whatever you're doing". I think Epic has every right to offer their lower commission, because their service downright sucks. I still plan to buy games from Steam for the foreseeable future, because their work on Proton is worth it to me.
- simonh 5y ago
  Market forces often push participants towards an equilibrium value, so it’s hard to say. I don’t know enough about economic theory to know if there’s a way to tell. The 30% commission has a long history. There are precedents going back to the early days of games consoles. Both the iTunes music store and Steam opened in 2003 charging 30% or very close to it (iTunes tracks were 99c so it doesn’t work out exactly). It’s hard to argue the 30% in either of those cases were a matter of abuse of market power. Steam was struggling to establish itself against the incumbent distribution channels. The iTunes rates were negotiated with the major labels who were notoriously hard deal makers and very wary of online sales channels. They held all the cards is their negotiations with Apple and yet they seemed to think 30% was fair. So at that point I don’t think it’s possible to make a credible case that the 30% rate was extortionate. If 30% was abusive, we’d expect to see it act as a brake on adoption of the App Store by developers, but is there really any evidence for that? On Android have any of the smaller stores tried to differentiate on price at lower than 30% to attract developers, or has Google tried to woo iOS developers with lower rates? If 30% was abusively high we’d expect to see something like that happening.
  - amelius 5y ago
    A percentage doesn't make sense, because cheap apps and expensive apps require exactly the same effort for hosting them, and there is no risk involved. So the fact that these competitors use the same pricing model and the same price has a bad smell.
    - simonh 5y ago
      If the actual cost of service was pro rated across apps this would basically eliminate free and low cost apps. In fact how would you price this in the first few years of the App Store when it lost money? Furthermore it would make it incredibly expensive and therefore risky to develop launch an app. They would likely have had to charge hundreds of dollars, perhaps thousands per app in the early years, stifling innovation and strangling freemium or free offerings. The App Store would be a very, very different place today. This would be like supermarkets charging product manufacturers a uniform fixed rental for shelf space. No supermarket would stock toilet paper, it’s too bulky and low revenue, or if they did they have to charge a lot more for it.
syncsynchalt 5y ago
In a bit of synchronicity, Dubai has sponsored development of more efficient and longer lived (via underdriving) LED lamps, and exclusivity enforcement means that you are prevented from being able to buy these longer-lived lamps: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-lights-you-cant-buy/ https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
- tialaramex 5y ago
  This is a very different trade though, the Dubai lamp trades a higher upfront price (these lamps are more sophisticated and cost more to make, so unsurprisingly they also cost more to buy) for a longer lifespan and improved efficiency. Whereas incandescents were trading lifespan versus efficiency. You can make 5000 hour incandescents, but your "60 watt" 5000 hour lamp will put out far less light, so it costs the same to run but it's not bright enough, then you buy the 100 watt version, now it's bright enough but you're paying two thirds more money to run it! A hypothetical 5000 hour incandescent only makes economic sense if your electricity is basically free (greedily maybe it makes sense if you don't pay for it, e.g. rental inclusive of electricity bills) whereas a Dubai lamp makes sense regardless of electricity price, because over long enough periods the increased lifespan saves you money anyway.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    these lamps are more sophisticated and cost more to make Actually, they're simpler than a lot of other LED lamps, because they're not dimmable and use only a capacitor to limit current followed by a small post-regulator. The driving electronics often fails before the LEDs, but they've minimised that with these.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      Because they're under-driven, they actually need considerably more (typically four times as many) light emitters than a cheaper alternative, and those cost money. It's true that a capacitive dropper is a cheap way to make LED lamps work, but that's how the LED lamps you're offered in a typical store today already work, so doing that isn't saving them money over competitors, and since it's a long-life product they didn't skimp on the power supply design, check this Big Clive video for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM2DMuryw_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM2DMuryw_A
fsflover 5y ago
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606748
infogulch 5y ago
Veritasium made a video that reviews the history and presents the topic in an engaging way. "This is why we can't have nice things" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
FridayoLeary 5y ago
not sure how much things have changed. A couple years back i had a few brand new, expensive led bulbs. I expect my light bulbs to last at least a couple of years. There supposedly long life light bulbs began flickering after just a few months.
- rta10 5y ago
  Nothing has changed. In the EU the expensive "eco friendly" LED bulbs had a stated lifetime of 2 years. None has lasted even half a year here, which is shorter than incandescent bulbs. It is all a big fraud.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    I have philips bulbs going strong for like 7 years
- bserge 5y ago
  LG's rather misleading "10 year warranty (small print: on the inverter drive)" on some of their washing machines comes to mind. Your LEDs are fine, it's just that everything else fails heh.
syshum 5y ago
I often wonder is their is a Phoebus equivalent in the SmartPhone market. I am unsure how we got to a point where the life span of a $900-$1,200 device is measured in months not years is acceptable but is seems to me it would have to involve some conspiracy especially when the technology they replaced or augmented (traditional phones and laptops) where all measured in years, multiple years.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  My mother-in-law is still using my hand-me-down iPhone 6s, a 6 year old phone that still runs the latest iOS.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It is entirely possible, but in the case of smartphones the hardware processes and systems are so new that we're also seeing the effects of "crapshoot integration..." The market is moving so fast that there isn't time to run enough tests to have strong expectations on the ten-year lifespan of the product. Batteries, in particular, are such bleeding-edge technology (and in a space of chemistry so poorly theoretically understood) that every new design is more or less a dice-roll on the long-term performance. The hallmark of a Phoebus-cartel-style situation would be if smartphones from N years ago from multiple manufacturers were still going strong but newer phones were slower, or had crappier battery life, or broke down more often (consistently year-over-year). I'm not sure that's an easy comparison to make; go too far back in the space and you pass into the pre-iPhone, pre-Android era "smartphones" that were robust as hell but remarkably featureless relative to what came after. That having been said, Apple has been sued over the planned obsolescence of its smartphones (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/08/apple-chile-planned-obsolescence-lawsuit https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/08/apple-chile-planned-obs...)
  - interestica 5y ago
    > that every new design is more or less a dice-roll on the long-term performance. Sometimes things happen to make companies uh take note: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/why-the-samsung-galaxy-note-7-kept-exploding/ https://www.wired.com/2017/01/why-the-samsung-galaxy-note-7-...
valyagolev 5y ago
Pynchon's "Byron the Bulb", the great example of American Sublime according to Harold Bloom, is a paranoid story about this very affair https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html
diplodocusaur 5y ago
Hm. Wondering how planned obsolescence (PO) can be fought. The first step of solving a problem is defining it. Maybe if there was a website where enough people self-reported device failures out of spite, wonder if that would help pinpoint PO cases. Incidentally it may solve the fake review issue. An open source bug reporting tool but for IRL failures. BBB comes to mind. Just a random and free idea.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  If your friendly neighborhood government has a fully empowered consumer protection agency, said agency can enforce reasonable warranties on products. If companies have to replace any appliance (or whatever) that fails within 10 (or whatever) years, you can bet they'll make them more reliable.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
    > you can bet they'll make them more reliable. Or a lot more expensive. And if you don’t care about the 10 year reliability, you are being hurt by having to pay more.
- fmajid 5y ago
  France has outlawed the practice as part of an environmental law.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Easy to outlaw, difficult to prove unless the law also mandated minimum usable lifetimes & warranties for products. A company doesn't have to build in some sort of off switch to force obsolescence, all they have to do is use cheap parts to cut costs and put the burden of paying for maintenance on the buyer. Basically, planned obsolescence can be indistinguishable from a product that is cheaply made.
  - simonh 5y ago
    They also outlawed managing cpu utilisation in order to prolong device lifetimes, so apparently it’s illegal to try to extend device lifetime and also illegal not to. Robespierre and Cardinal Richelieu would be so proud.
klondike_ 5y ago
The planned obsolescence of incandescent light bulbs is largely a myth. While there are plenty of real examples of planned obsolescence, with incandescent light bulbs there are engineering tradeoffs between longevity and efficiency. Basically, the longer lasting a bulb is, the dimmer and less efficient it is. If you've ever seen any of the supposed 100 year old bulbs, you'll notice that they're extremely dim. Before, during, and after the Phoebus cartel incandescent light bulbs were (and still are!) standardized to 1000 hours. Why? Because that happens to be a good trade off between longevity and efficiency. It just doesn't make sense to waste an extra $5 on electricity to make a $1 light bulb last longer. You have always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs, and still can to this day. They're called rough service bulbs, made for ovens and closets and areas used infrequently. People just never used them for general purpose lighting because they're dim and power hungry. If you read the report by the British monopolies commission quoted in this article, you'll notice that they came to the same conclusion [1]. Pop science articles and Reddit love to bring out the Phoebus cartel over and over as an example of planned obsolescence, but always completely ignore the factors that go into making a good incandescent light bulb. [1]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/235313/0287.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- hilbert42 5y ago
  Your arguments notwithstanding, the fact that the Phoebus Cartel essentially operated in secrecy implies that there was more to this than just optimizing (standardizing) incandescent light bulbs to 1000 hours. True, one has always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs and I've done so myself to use in certain industrial situations. However, I'd contend that that has little or nothing to do with planned obsolescence. Moreover, there's more than a whiff of the Phoebus Cartel still about today with light bulb manufacture. Let me give you an example: when compact fluorescent bulbs first came out some four decades ago, I installed many of them. The principal brands I bought were Philips and Wotan and the majority of them lasted well in excess of 10,000 hours. I recall losing track of the life of one low power bulb of ≈8 watts after it had passed 50,000 hours operation (that is, after having being in service for over 25 years and used between 4 and 5 hours per day over this time, eventually it was replaced not because it had failed but rather to replace it with a bulb of higher wattage). Take the current situation: almost every compact fluorescent that I've bought in the last 10 or so years has only lasted about 1000 hours despite the fact that the packets they came in usually advertised their life to be a nominal 8,000 hours or so. The fact is that none of them ever reached anywhere near these published figures. To make matters worse, often these bulbs would break (usually around the base) and sometimes the coiled glass would fall to the floor (no doubt dispensing its small amount of Hg everywhere in the process). Moreover, a while back, so called 'green' environmentally friendly compact fluorescent bulbs were all the rage. They were advertised as having less mercury and thus more environmentally sound. What a joke that turned out to be. All the Greenies loved them because they contained less mercury. Unfortunately, most never knew how the bulbs worked anyway and thus they never realized that reducing their mercury levels below a certain concentration would dramatically reduce the bulb's life to such an extent that the overall result was a net loss for the environment. Right, environmentally friendly bulbs actually had an even shorter service life (hence, Watt for Watt, they produced much more environmental e-waste over the long run)! Clearly, all manufacturers were disingenuous by not stating the consequences of lowering the mercury levels in compact fluorescent bulbs. They deliberately played on the fact that consumers weren't cognizant of the facts, thus the lowering of manufacturing standards was a win for them as there were few complaints. Manufacturers not only made savings by including less mercury but also other manufacturing standards were lowered such as using lower grade capacitors and the maximum working voltages on capacitors and semiconductors were reduced to much closer (lower) tolerances which made these bulbs much more prone to failure from over-voltage spikes, etc. In the end, many more bulbs were consumed than there should have been. Concomitantly, we've ended up with even bigger piles of electronics waste—and the net amount of mercury used was actually higher than it would have been if the bulbs had been designed to have a service life of >10,000 hours (as had been the case some 20 years earlier). Incidentally, the same unacceptable logic is now being applied in the manufacture of normal fluorescent lights† in that current tubes have a much, much shorter lifespan than those made 50 or so years ago). Yep, it wasn't kosher to go around advertising the fact that 'our bulbs have a little more mercury but they will last you many times longer'. Right, manufacturers must have been laughing themselves sick over the fact that they could double-dip their profits by playing on the fact of the public's current, almost irrational, phobia over Element 80 and that reducing the amount of it in bulbs automatically led to vastly increased bulb sales. Moreover, they gloated even more when some governments made compact florescent bulbs mandatory but did not also introduce mandatory manufacturing standards to ensure their long operational life. The overall net effect being bulb manufacturers scoring two wins whilst consumers and the environment both scored nil. Right, the incarnation of the Phoebus Cartel is alive and well. ___ † Several years ago, I was involved in relocating a factory and the old site used T12-type fluorescent tubes the majority of which were made by Crompton Parkinson and were over 50 years old and still in good working condition! We decided not to relocate those old lights and we replace them with new T8-type fluorescents of Eastern manufacture at the new site. These new tubes are now already starting to fail. The lifespan difference between the old and new types is so startling that I reckon it ought to be part of a study into changes into manufacturing techniques. These new tubes have to represent one of the most quintessential examples of planned obsolescence ever. Frankly, it's absolutely outrageous that this can happen.
tag2103 5y ago
Strangely Youtube suggested exactly this topic on my feed last week and weird enough it isn't the first time I've seen stuff on HN after it popping on there. Just an observation.
- dEnigma 5y ago
  Possibly a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion But then it's also not unlikely that other people got the same YouTube recommendations, after which they did some online research and posted interesting links to HN. Or maybe the causation was the other way around. Who knows?
branon 5y ago
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MarkusWandel 5y ago
The magical longer life and more efficient incandescent bulb was invented of course: The halogen bulb. It got around the previous physics barrier: That the hotter the filament (and therefore whiter and brighter the light), the more quickly it deteriorated to the point of failure. To me, hot as they ran (fire hazard if used improperly) halogens were the pinnacle of artificial light quality. Of course I've changed all mine to LEDs now. The LEDs give adequate light and are better in every other way. But the light from halogen bulbs was beautiful.
Trias11 5y ago
Back in a day I kept receipts for all bulbs and pestered Home Depot with refunds for failed bulbs. Can't affect fraudulent cartels but can apply pressure on merchants not to carry flawed merchandise

126 points by mbroncano 5y ago

The Omnibus Podcast with Ken Jennings did an episode on this last year. https://www.omnibusproject.com/276 https://www.omnibusproject.com/276

mdu96 5y ago

There's a fantastic Throughline podcast episode on the Phoebus Cartel: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707188193/the-phoebus-cartel https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707188193/the-phoebus-cartel.

smiley1437 5y ago

Standardizing a 1000 hr bulb life vs standardizing a 30% commission to host an app, is it really a coincidence or are cartels just better at hiding it now?

nerdponx 5y ago
Have Microsoft and Google standardized on the 30% commission? Or is it more that "Apple stuff" is not directly substitutable with "Google stuff", and that Apple has a monopoly on "Apple stuff"?
- smiley1437 5y ago
  Yes, they have, please see this chart https://www.statista.com/statistics/975776/revenue-split-leading-digital-content-store-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/975776/revenue-split-lea... Pretty much everyone has, with the occasional exception.
  - mpartel 5y ago
    Steam and GOG too
    - NAG3LT 5y ago
      Wasn't Steam one of the first to implement such pricing? Or have they followed the lead of somebody else before them?
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Steam has a much better case to argue, given that they're a fiscally independent company with no board of directors or shareholders to satisfy. Since they don't get monthly cash infusions, they need to do two things: shoot for an aggressive growth model, and shower the end user in features. In my opinion, they've succeeded in both regards: their 30% cut is pretty large, but it's justified given the scale of the operation they run. Plus, their generosity with things like cloud save, video streaming, and their assortment of community offerings, it's hard to really claim that Steam doesn't deserve their cut. If anything, I consider them the premier example of what a "premium" CDN pipeline looks like.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    That is remarkable, and I wonder if there are explanations other than a cartel.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I wonder how much of this is deliberate collusion, as opposed to an equilibrium where companies all realize that it's more profitable to match each others' fees than to try to compete on price. If other app stores charge 30%, you know that developers are willing to pay 30%, and there's not much to be gained by reducing your own rate below that.
    - WalterGR 5y ago
      I wonder how much of this is deliberate collusion, as opposed to an equilibrium I saw a theory in the comments on HN once that companies can 'collude' without communicating with each other. If memory serves, it was different than just achieving an equilibrium. Maybe it's enough of a theory to have a name? Hopefully someone who knows what I'm thinking of can chime in. Edit: I may be thinking of "tacit collusion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion - "Tacit collusion is a collusion between competitors, which do not explicitly exchange information and achieving an agreement about coordination of conduct."
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        They read each-other's press releases, they reasearch competitors, employees and mamagers move between companies. There is no way for them to not communicate. Just because bosses didnt sit down a and sign a deal in a smokey room doesnt mean no decision was made
      - nerdponx 5y ago
        Yes, although typically tacit collusion is introduced with the example of price matching at big box retailers. The setup in this case is somewhat different, although the outcome is still an equilibrium in which all sellers "agree" to keep prices high (and above marginal cost) without directly communicating.
nrp 5y ago
It’s unlikely there was collusion around app store commissions. It’s more likely a case of “how much can we get away with charging?” and existing competitors in market providing a proof point of what is palatable to developers. That is a somewhat stable state until someone like Epic comes in with a lot of money and a desire to quickly capture market share with a lower commission.
- syshum 5y ago
  I am pretty sure it is established that there was, Amazon and Apple were the first 2 members
  - selectodude 5y ago
    Apple and Amazon are far from the first storefronts.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Steam was charging 30% as far back as 2003.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I'd be willing to defend Apple's 30% cut if any of it was justified. Instead, my experience working in the walled garden has been gruelling. Xcode is a pathetic disaster at this point, but Apple seems to be unwilling to extend any functionality to the editors I actually use. Getting an app through the guidelines is an exercise in arbitrary debasement. Their phone support is useless too, with most of them directing me to forum posts that basically say "don't do whatever you're doing". I think Epic has every right to offer their lower commission, because their service downright sucks. I still plan to buy games from Steam for the foreseeable future, because their work on Proton is worth it to me.
simonh 5y ago
Market forces often push participants towards an equilibrium value, so it’s hard to say. I don’t know enough about economic theory to know if there’s a way to tell. The 30% commission has a long history. There are precedents going back to the early days of games consoles. Both the iTunes music store and Steam opened in 2003 charging 30% or very close to it (iTunes tracks were 99c so it doesn’t work out exactly). It’s hard to argue the 30% in either of those cases were a matter of abuse of market power. Steam was struggling to establish itself against the incumbent distribution channels. The iTunes rates were negotiated with the major labels who were notoriously hard deal makers and very wary of online sales channels. They held all the cards is their negotiations with Apple and yet they seemed to think 30% was fair. So at that point I don’t think it’s possible to make a credible case that the 30% rate was extortionate. If 30% was abusive, we’d expect to see it act as a brake on adoption of the App Store by developers, but is there really any evidence for that? On Android have any of the smaller stores tried to differentiate on price at lower than 30% to attract developers, or has Google tried to woo iOS developers with lower rates? If 30% was abusively high we’d expect to see something like that happening.
- amelius 5y ago
  A percentage doesn't make sense, because cheap apps and expensive apps require exactly the same effort for hosting them, and there is no risk involved. So the fact that these competitors use the same pricing model and the same price has a bad smell.
  - simonh 5y ago
    If the actual cost of service was pro rated across apps this would basically eliminate free and low cost apps. In fact how would you price this in the first few years of the App Store when it lost money? Furthermore it would make it incredibly expensive and therefore risky to develop launch an app. They would likely have had to charge hundreds of dollars, perhaps thousands per app in the early years, stifling innovation and strangling freemium or free offerings. The App Store would be a very, very different place today. This would be like supermarkets charging product manufacturers a uniform fixed rental for shelf space. No supermarket would stock toilet paper, it’s too bulky and low revenue, or if they did they have to charge a lot more for it.

syncsynchalt 5y ago

In a bit of synchronicity, Dubai has sponsored development of more efficient and longer lived (via underdriving) LED lamps, and exclusivity enforcement means that you are prevented from being able to buy these longer-lived lamps: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-lights-you-cant-buy/ https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

tialaramex 5y ago
This is a very different trade though, the Dubai lamp trades a higher upfront price (these lamps are more sophisticated and cost more to make, so unsurprisingly they also cost more to buy) for a longer lifespan and improved efficiency. Whereas incandescents were trading lifespan versus efficiency. You can make 5000 hour incandescents, but your "60 watt" 5000 hour lamp will put out far less light, so it costs the same to run but it's not bright enough, then you buy the 100 watt version, now it's bright enough but you're paying two thirds more money to run it! A hypothetical 5000 hour incandescent only makes economic sense if your electricity is basically free (greedily maybe it makes sense if you don't pay for it, e.g. rental inclusive of electricity bills) whereas a Dubai lamp makes sense regardless of electricity price, because over long enough periods the increased lifespan saves you money anyway.
- userbinator 5y ago
  these lamps are more sophisticated and cost more to make Actually, they're simpler than a lot of other LED lamps, because they're not dimmable and use only a capacitor to limit current followed by a small post-regulator. The driving electronics often fails before the LEDs, but they've minimised that with these.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Because they're under-driven, they actually need considerably more (typically four times as many) light emitters than a cheaper alternative, and those cost money. It's true that a capacitive dropper is a cheap way to make LED lamps work, but that's how the LED lamps you're offered in a typical store today already work, so doing that isn't saving them money over competitors, and since it's a long-life product they didn't skimp on the power supply design, check this Big Clive video for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM2DMuryw_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM2DMuryw_A

fsflover 5y ago

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606748

infogulch 5y ago

Veritasium made a video that reviews the history and presents the topic in an engaging way. "This is why we can't have nice things" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

FridayoLeary 5y ago

not sure how much things have changed. A couple years back i had a few brand new, expensive led bulbs. I expect my light bulbs to last at least a couple of years. There supposedly long life light bulbs began flickering after just a few months.

rta10 5y ago
Nothing has changed. In the EU the expensive "eco friendly" LED bulbs had a stated lifetime of 2 years. None has lasted even half a year here, which is shorter than incandescent bulbs. It is all a big fraud.
- deleted 5y ago
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- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  I have philips bulbs going strong for like 7 years
bserge 5y ago
LG's rather misleading "10 year warranty (small print: on the inverter drive)" on some of their washing machines comes to mind. Your LEDs are fine, it's just that everything else fails heh.

syshum 5y ago

I often wonder is their is a Phoebus equivalent in the SmartPhone market. I am unsure how we got to a point where the life span of a $900-$1,200 device is measured in months not years is acceptable but is seems to me it would have to involve some conspiracy especially when the technology they replaced or augmented (traditional phones and laptops) where all measured in years, multiple years.

kalleboo 5y ago
My mother-in-law is still using my hand-me-down iPhone 6s, a 6 year old phone that still runs the latest iOS.
shadowgovt 5y ago
It is entirely possible, but in the case of smartphones the hardware processes and systems are so new that we're also seeing the effects of "crapshoot integration..." The market is moving so fast that there isn't time to run enough tests to have strong expectations on the ten-year lifespan of the product. Batteries, in particular, are such bleeding-edge technology (and in a space of chemistry so poorly theoretically understood) that every new design is more or less a dice-roll on the long-term performance. The hallmark of a Phoebus-cartel-style situation would be if smartphones from N years ago from multiple manufacturers were still going strong but newer phones were slower, or had crappier battery life, or broke down more often (consistently year-over-year). I'm not sure that's an easy comparison to make; go too far back in the space and you pass into the pre-iPhone, pre-Android era "smartphones" that were robust as hell but remarkably featureless relative to what came after. That having been said, Apple has been sued over the planned obsolescence of its smartphones (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/08/apple-chile-planned-obsolescence-lawsuit https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/08/apple-chile-planned-obs...)
- interestica 5y ago
  > that every new design is more or less a dice-roll on the long-term performance. Sometimes things happen to make companies uh take note: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/why-the-samsung-galaxy-note-7-kept-exploding/ https://www.wired.com/2017/01/why-the-samsung-galaxy-note-7-...

valyagolev 5y ago

Pynchon's "Byron the Bulb", the great example of American Sublime according to Harold Bloom, is a paranoid story about this very affair https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html

diplodocusaur 5y ago

Hm. Wondering how planned obsolescence (PO) can be fought. The first step of solving a problem is defining it. Maybe if there was a website where enough people self-reported device failures out of spite, wonder if that would help pinpoint PO cases. Incidentally it may solve the fake review issue. An open source bug reporting tool but for IRL failures. BBB comes to mind. Just a random and free idea.

InitialLastName 5y ago
If your friendly neighborhood government has a fully empowered consumer protection agency, said agency can enforce reasonable warranties on products. If companies have to replace any appliance (or whatever) that fails within 10 (or whatever) years, you can bet they'll make them more reliable.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  > you can bet they'll make them more reliable. Or a lot more expensive. And if you don’t care about the 10 year reliability, you are being hurt by having to pay more.
fmajid 5y ago
France has outlawed the practice as part of an environmental law.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Easy to outlaw, difficult to prove unless the law also mandated minimum usable lifetimes & warranties for products. A company doesn't have to build in some sort of off switch to force obsolescence, all they have to do is use cheap parts to cut costs and put the burden of paying for maintenance on the buyer. Basically, planned obsolescence can be indistinguishable from a product that is cheaply made.
- simonh 5y ago
  They also outlawed managing cpu utilisation in order to prolong device lifetimes, so apparently it’s illegal to try to extend device lifetime and also illegal not to. Robespierre and Cardinal Richelieu would be so proud.

klondike_ 5y ago

The planned obsolescence of incandescent light bulbs is largely a myth. While there are plenty of real examples of planned obsolescence, with incandescent light bulbs there are engineering tradeoffs between longevity and efficiency. Basically, the longer lasting a bulb is, the dimmer and less efficient it is. If you've ever seen any of the supposed 100 year old bulbs, you'll notice that they're extremely dim. Before, during, and after the Phoebus cartel incandescent light bulbs were (and still are!) standardized to 1000 hours. Why? Because that happens to be a good trade off between longevity and efficiency. It just doesn't make sense to waste an extra $5 on electricity to make a $1 light bulb last longer. You have always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs, and still can to this day. They're called rough service bulbs, made for ovens and closets and areas used infrequently. People just never used them for general purpose lighting because they're dim and power hungry. If you read the report by the British monopolies commission quoted in this article, you'll notice that they came to the same conclusion [1]. Pop science articles and Reddit love to bring out the Phoebus cartel over and over as an example of planned obsolescence, but always completely ignore the factors that go into making a good incandescent light bulb. [1]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/235313/0287.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

hilbert42 5y ago
Your arguments notwithstanding, the fact that the Phoebus Cartel essentially operated in secrecy implies that there was more to this than just optimizing (standardizing) incandescent light bulbs to 1000 hours. True, one has always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs and I've done so myself to use in certain industrial situations. However, I'd contend that that has little or nothing to do with planned obsolescence. Moreover, there's more than a whiff of the Phoebus Cartel still about today with light bulb manufacture. Let me give you an example: when compact fluorescent bulbs first came out some four decades ago, I installed many of them. The principal brands I bought were Philips and Wotan and the majority of them lasted well in excess of 10,000 hours. I recall losing track of the life of one low power bulb of ≈8 watts after it had passed 50,000 hours operation (that is, after having being in service for over 25 years and used between 4 and 5 hours per day over this time, eventually it was replaced not because it had failed but rather to replace it with a bulb of higher wattage). Take the current situation: almost every compact fluorescent that I've bought in the last 10 or so years has only lasted about 1000 hours despite the fact that the packets they came in usually advertised their life to be a nominal 8,000 hours or so. The fact is that none of them ever reached anywhere near these published figures. To make matters worse, often these bulbs would break (usually around the base) and sometimes the coiled glass would fall to the floor (no doubt dispensing its small amount of Hg everywhere in the process). Moreover, a while back, so called 'green' environmentally friendly compact fluorescent bulbs were all the rage. They were advertised as having less mercury and thus more environmentally sound. What a joke that turned out to be. All the Greenies loved them because they contained less mercury. Unfortunately, most never knew how the bulbs worked anyway and thus they never realized that reducing their mercury levels below a certain concentration would dramatically reduce the bulb's life to such an extent that the overall result was a net loss for the environment. Right, environmentally friendly bulbs actually had an even shorter service life (hence, Watt for Watt, they produced much more environmental e-waste over the long run)! Clearly, all manufacturers were disingenuous by not stating the consequences of lowering the mercury levels in compact fluorescent bulbs. They deliberately played on the fact that consumers weren't cognizant of the facts, thus the lowering of manufacturing standards was a win for them as there were few complaints. Manufacturers not only made savings by including less mercury but also other manufacturing standards were lowered such as using lower grade capacitors and the maximum working voltages on capacitors and semiconductors were reduced to much closer (lower) tolerances which made these bulbs much more prone to failure from over-voltage spikes, etc. In the end, many more bulbs were consumed than there should have been. Concomitantly, we've ended up with even bigger piles of electronics waste—and the net amount of mercury used was actually higher than it would have been if the bulbs had been designed to have a service life of >10,000 hours (as had been the case some 20 years earlier). Incidentally, the same unacceptable logic is now being applied in the manufacture of normal fluorescent lights† in that current tubes have a much, much shorter lifespan than those made 50 or so years ago). Yep, it wasn't kosher to go around advertising the fact that 'our bulbs have a little more mercury but they will last you many times longer'. Right, manufacturers must have been laughing themselves sick over the fact that they could double-dip their profits by playing on the fact of the public's current, almost irrational, phobia over Element 80 and that reducing the amount of it in bulbs automatically led to vastly increased bulb sales. Moreover, they gloated even more when some governments made compact florescent bulbs mandatory but did not also introduce mandatory manufacturing standards to ensure their long operational life. The overall net effect being bulb manufacturers scoring two wins whilst consumers and the environment both scored nil. Right, the incarnation of the Phoebus Cartel is alive and well. ___ † Several years ago, I was involved in relocating a factory and the old site used T12-type fluorescent tubes the majority of which were made by Crompton Parkinson and were over 50 years old and still in good working condition! We decided not to relocate those old lights and we replace them with new T8-type fluorescents of Eastern manufacture at the new site. These new tubes are now already starting to fail. The lifespan difference between the old and new types is so startling that I reckon it ought to be part of a study into changes into manufacturing techniques. These new tubes have to represent one of the most quintessential examples of planned obsolescence ever. Frankly, it's absolutely outrageous that this can happen.

tag2103 5y ago

Strangely Youtube suggested exactly this topic on my feed last week and weird enough it isn't the first time I've seen stuff on HN after it popping on there. Just an observation.

dEnigma 5y ago
Possibly a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion But then it's also not unlikely that other people got the same YouTube recommendations, after which they did some online research and posted interesting links to HN. Or maybe the causation was the other way around. Who knows?

branon 5y ago

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

deleted 5y ago

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MarkusWandel 5y ago

The magical longer life and more efficient incandescent bulb was invented of course: The halogen bulb. It got around the previous physics barrier: That the hotter the filament (and therefore whiter and brighter the light), the more quickly it deteriorated to the point of failure. To me, hot as they ran (fire hazard if used improperly) halogens were the pinnacle of artificial light quality. Of course I've changed all mine to LEDs now. The LEDs give adequate light and are better in every other way. But the light from halogen bulbs was beautiful.

Trias11 5y ago

Back in a day I kept receipts for all bulbs and pestered Home Depot with refunds for failed bulbs. Can't affect fraudulent cartels but can apply pressure on merchants not to carry flawed merchandise