19 ms·

Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

301 points by memorable 4y ago

jedberg 4y ago
I thought the EU was trying to (or has?) passed a law that requires electronics to have replaceable batteries.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  I would mostly consider that law to be a good idea. But suppose I want to leave a temperature sensor on a mountainside somewhere, or attach a depth sensor to a walrus. Those are cases where I tend to suspect that it might be better for the manufacturer to have a lot of freedom as to the form of the object, and an expected lifetime after which the nonreplaceable battery dies may be the best of all possible worlds.
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    > But suppose I want... Like with GDPR where people imagined all sorts of situations ad absurdum (the grocer on the corner not being allowed to ask for your birthday anymore to give you a yearly free product or some such), these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Yes because a 99 section 11 chapter law whose only affect is to make the web worse with cookie banners everywhere is a model of government effectiveness.
      - lucb1e 4y ago
        This is what I mean: apparently even tech people still don't know the basics of GDPR. If it were common knowledge that cookie walls are not required for any normal website operation or statistics keeping, but only a thing required for invasive tracking, then any website introducing one would face questions and media attention rather than it being the norm. The law requires cookie walls exactly nowhere, it requires to ask for consent before doing something you have no valid reason for doing. There are 5 defined valid reasons, including "it's in the subject's interest" and "it's in our legitimate interest" and stuff like that. O-n-l-y if you can't shove it under any of those, then you need to fall back to politely asking the subject you want to track. Every cookie wall is in this category. We really shouldn't be accepting this, but try educating half a billion people speaking thirty languages who have better things to do. It's not even well-known among the tech community, which continuously surprises me. Maybe we need to outlaw consent that is not part of a bigger contract (so a random website visit, not like research or so), maybe we need to have big website owners set better examples... I don't know. But anyway I guess I was more interested in the new battery law rather than hosting my fourtieth hacker news gdpr misconceptions session, as I've not yet read the actual legal text of the former.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Maybe it’s the fault of the EU for making the GDPR so complicated? All a private company - Apple - had to do was create a 5 line rule change and add a setting to iOS and it the entire ad tracking industry including Facebook announced billions in losses.
        makapuf 4y ago
        Well Apple could enforce a single settings to drive all apps. The equivalent would be EU mandating by law a centralised privacy setting on browsers to state we only allow necessary cookies. That might come but some companies would have been kicking and screaming even more.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong. As is usually the case with legislation, the text of the law will support whatever reading you'd like to assign to it. If you're a booster for the legislation, you are free to claim that it doesn't have any problems. If you're not, there are some readily observable problems. The text is here ( https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52020PC0798&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... ), and here are the relevant parts: > [definition] (23) ‘appliance’ means any electrical or electronic equipment, as defined by Directive 2012/19/EU, which is fully or partly powered by a battery or is capable of being so > Article 11 > 1. Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at the end of the lifetime of the appliance. > A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance of that appliance. > 2. The obligations set out in paragraph 1 shall not apply where > (a) continuity of power supply is necessary and a permanent connection between the appliance and the portable battery is required for safety, performance, medical or data integrity reasons; or > (b) the functioning of the battery is only possible when the battery is integrated into the structure of the appliance. > 3. The Commission shall adopt guidance to facilitate harmonised application of the derogations set out in paragraph 2. So the law literally says "(1) all appliances must use removable, replaceable batteries, UNLESS (2) that would be bad, AND (3) we promise we will eventually set a standard for when it would or wouldn't be bad". But that hypothetical future standard is not part of the law. And we can't honestly say that "don't do something, unless you have a good reason" is a law that can actually be implemented. It will misidentify bad reasons as good reasons while punishing good reasons.
beecafe 4y ago
It would be great if consumer electronics products had expected lifetime ratings on the front. People would naturally take issue with products with significantly below median lifetime, and also if their own products didn't live up to the lifetime. It would also make sense to phrase other quantities on product packaging in the way they're experienced by the consumer: instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if you showed the lumens/$, more efficient bulbs would naturally win out. Instead, LED bulbs have fake wattage numbers to show the equivalent wattage incandescent lighting that would be needed to match the LED.
- fzzt 4y ago
  Many LED lightbulbs make claims about their expected lifetime. Except these numbers are often a fantasy. The LED itself may last almost forever, but the capacitors commonly go bad in a year or so. I suspect that would be the reality with a lot of the proposed mandatory labeling for electronics, too.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    They also severely overdrive the LEDs to get more brightness, at the cost of both reduced efficiency and lifetime. At least the Phoebus Cartel had an ostensible explanation (efficiency) for what they did. Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed. Some of the indicator LEDs on some of my electronics are many decades old, yet they are still functioning like when they were new. Clearly LEDs can last a long time, but there wouldn't be any profit in that. Here's some interesting discussion about the "Dubai Lamp", an attempt at going the opposite direction and actually making LEDs last significantly longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
    - eru 4y ago
      > Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed. How does it help the corporation make more money?
      - 4y ago
bityard 4y ago
My favorite mouse is the logitech anywhere mx original. It runs for months in two AA batteries. They don't make these anymore and the newer ones all have built in lipo death clocks. I try to buy all of my new electronics with this lesson in mind.
- smiley1437 4y ago
  I loved the original MX Anywhere too, but I found that iFixit offers a replacement Lipo for the MX Anywhere 3 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Logitech+MX+Anywhere+3+Battery+Replacement/145719 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Logitech+MX+Anywhere+3+Battery+... It looks approximately as difficult as changing the battery on a smartphone. Knowing that the battery could be changed gave me the piece of mind to switch. The battery management on the MXA 3 is really good - lasts a very long time and is quick to charge on USB-C. The Logi Bolt has been trouble-free. Changing to other devices via bluetooth is handy if you have multiple computers. The magnetic hyperscroll takes a little getting used to but uses a lot less force to switch modes.
  - bityard 4y ago
    I'll consider it, but I _really_ don't want to plug in a mouse to charge it, especially when I have to also use it. Wired mice drive me crazy (and did even before wireless was a thing). So I'd have to buy 2. And $80 a pop is hard to swallow, I bought all of mine for under $35 each. And there's _still_ no USB-C unify receiver? Ugh. There needs to be a DIY mouse-hacking community on par with the customized mechanical keyboard community.
- Gracana 4y ago
  I quite liked those as well, but I had to switch to something else after three failed due to the same problem. The thin plastic protrusions that press the microswitch plungers wear out, causing awful switch bounce and eventually an inability to hold the button down at all.
  - bityard 4y ago
    I've seen this one a couple of them, it's a known weakness. Some were made with poor quality microswitches. Interestingly, the very first one I bought is still my daily driver.
clumsysmurf 4y ago
I have been a long time enthusiast of high power flashlights. We typically use 18350, 18650, 21700, or 26650. But I have been in dismay as even in this community, companies are starting to move away from these standards and provide proprietary batteries (Olight) or sealed (some newer Fenix models). It would be good if * We could safely obtain reputable Li-ion batteries from reputable sources. I trust a handful of companies to vet their supply chain so I'm confident of authentic cells like Murata VT6, etc .. but its less than ideal. I don't think my mom would be able to just find a authentic 18650, and this has to pass the mom test * Easy way to recycle these cells. This needs to expand past home improvement stores, which often seem clueless as to the specifics of what they can accept
- lucb1e 4y ago
  Was wondering what these random numbers were, I expected a product number from a manufacturer. Instead: > An 18650 Battery is a lithium-ion rechargeable battery. The first 4 digits of the designation “18650” indicate the physical dimensions while the 5 <sup>th</sup> digit indicates it is a cylinder cell. The standard 18650 battery is 18mm around by 65mm long. (copied from curl because that page crashed the firefox tab, though I guess the superscript wouldn't have been preserved otherwise anyhow so might as well leave that bit of HTML in)
  - killingtime74 4y ago
    It’s great, it’s almost a standard. Many different manufactures and the only commonality is usually the voltage. 18650 is so popular it’s used in some teslas, while newer ones use 21700
    - fragmede 4y ago
      I’ve also heard they’re going to use 4680 cells for their newer batteries.
    - picture 4y ago
      The voltage is determined by the chemistry, which unless you seriously deviate from the standard lithium stuff, it's going to be able 4.2 V max. Aside: When people try to increase it to like 4.3 V with "strengthened electrode material," the lifetime still seriously suffers. I'm typing this comment on a Razer Blade 15 with a currently swollen battery pack, which has been replaced only 10 months ago due to the same swelling issue
samatman 4y ago
I've made AirPods last longer than any other pair of earbuds I've ever had. It's the cord. For me, a max of six months of fiddling with the damn thing and it breaks. I've had real headphones last quite a bit longer— but I buy the ones with replaceable cords. The pair I still have is on its fourth cord and second pair of muffs. I don't view it as any sort of economic, human, or environmental catastrophe, that they stop holding a charge after... how long again? I've had a pair of Pros since before the pandemic which seem to hold up fine. So I'm around what, twenty cents a day? It's a rare day I don't wear them for a solid hour. It undermines the argument to pick the easy, lazy, and really rather bad example that everyone else flocks to for some bizarre reason. It's genuinely hard to come up with a better product category for glued-in batteries than in-ear wireless headphones.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ramraj07 4y ago
  Yeah I don’t get the environmental angle as well. It’s 10g, I’m sure there’s more lithium in a single AAA cell than 50 AirPods. Imagine how much more polluting a single dude in Texas rolling coal would do compared to everyone in Texas using AirPods.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Why the specific Texas dude? Like rednecks in other areas don't roll coal in their neck of the woods too?
- gibolt 4y ago
  I use similar measurements to value/compare purchases and their impact. - Value per use - Weight (analog for materials used) - Likely lifetime Bonus for wireless headphones specifically is you can buy replacement cases, or single buds if any go bad.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  That's a pretty funny statement considering detachable cords exist. A cord is basically some copper and plastic sheet. Easily recyclable.
_adamb 4y ago
Pretty much anything engineered (buildings, bridges, electronics, houses, ...) have a death date. Any civil engineering projects I've been a part of have always had a quantified project lifetime. We _could_ build things that lasted hundreds of years, but the cost would be astronomically high and demand would change in that timeline. Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. This confuses me greatly.
- christophilus 4y ago
  I played my SNES for maybe 25 years or whatever. I see no reason why such longevity should be an exception. Anyway, I also complain about planned obsolescence in other areas: TVs, fridges, washers, etc. A friend of mine uses 50+ year old fridges and cars. They still run fine, though the cars are a death trap. I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a gradient or pendulum, and we’ve swung too far towards the wasteful side of things in my opinion.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  I've always wondered about skyscrapers; How long will they last, and what will happen with them?
  - greenyoda 4y ago
    Informative video - "How To Dispose of a Skyscraper": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-H7E-KQgHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-H7E-KQgHQ (6.5 min.) According to the video, they're built to last for 50 - 100 years.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  I'd be pretty unhappy if an engineer built a bridge that could have lasted 100 years if they hadn't cheaped out and saved $10 by using plastic instead of metal for some component, halving its life expectancy. Or if they put components next to each other which really shouldn't be, unnecessarily increasing failure rates. Or if they built a bridge where you couldn't replace any component without blowing part of it up.
psi75 4y ago
At this point, I only buy Apple products because of inertia. Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago. This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed, whether as a company or individual, you have to convince people to part with something called money they have been programmed to avoid parting with as much as humanly possible... in other words, you succeed not based on the value of what you produce (because wage work's actual cost is literally a rounding error) if you are better at transactions in a zero-sum game than others are. We probably need for money to exist, because trade wouldn't work without it, and because we're still a hundred years or more from true post-scarcity communism, but having a whole society run on an operating system of zero-sum transactions has some pretty clear negatives--neither the smallest nor the worst of which is tech waste--even if it's not always evident how best to fix this. Companies are going to keep producing short-lived crap because it's good for sales, because ultimately anything other than "good for sales" cannot be afforded under this particular economic system where something is either sold or it dies.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  >Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago Buy a Dell XPS.
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    It seems to be a lottery with the earlier XPS laptops (hardware-wise), but I have a 2020 model and it's been very good. I'm definitely interested in my next laptop being an XPS. I bought one that came with Windows and installed Ubuntu on it and it's great. The only thing I haven't tried is the fingerprint reader.
- pca006132 4y ago
  I think quite a lot of Windows laptop works fine with Linux nowadays? Perhaps not out-of-the-box, but they works fine after installing the OS manually (which doesn't really take much time TBH). I'm not sure what software you need for work, but if they are open source they are usually fine with Linux (iirc Mac exclusive projects usually have alternatives) . For cloud stuff, I don't know what you are using so can't really comment about it.
brudgers 4y ago
So a couple of months ago I bought a Yamaha Rex 50 digital effects unit from the 1980’s. I opened it up for cleaning, to check the electrolytic capacitors (some need replacement) and to swap out lithium coin cell battery that backs up the user’s saved settings. Since the battery was working, I assumed it had been replaced. Nope, the working lithium coin battery has a date of November 1987 which is very early so far as I understand. So it’s still there because if it’s still working after thirty five years, it will probably be working for the two or three years I can expect from a new battery. It was refreshing to experience an engineering design driven by long reliability in a piece of digital electronics.
- tomn 4y ago
  It's not the batteries that have changed, it's the circuitry. In older devices, batteries were required to power SRAM, which uses very little power (just leakage currents). This has largely been replaced by flash memory, so if you see a battery in a modern device there's a good chance it's powering a real-time clock, which use a fair bit more power in comparison. I'm sure there's a big difference between different implementations of this -- low power design is an art that's quite easy to get wrong.
Gualdrapo 4y ago
My first smartphone was the Motorola Atrix 4G, which I bought around may 2012. Removable battery, first fingerprint scanner, great pixel density for that era. It was cool and I took care of it as much as I could. But the 365th day after I bought it, WiFi and Bluetooth stopped working. All of a sudden. WiFi chip was built with a death date. On the other hand, the next phone I bought lasted with me for more than 7 years - until I accidentally dropped it and crashed with an acute metal surface. Only the screen died but I used it as an excuse to got a new phone, but now I fear phones now aren't designed nor built to last that much.
Trouble_007 4y ago
Incandescent light bulb : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb
Trouble_007 4y ago
The (bad) Capacitor plague; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague A higher-than-expected failure-rate of non-solid aluminium Electrolytic Capacitors --- search: >'bad capacitors'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bad capacitors' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bad capacitors'>
userbinator 4y ago
Sadly, I found many other devices are also designed to become trash. The battery in my Philips Sonicare toothbrush not only can’t be replaced — it’s fixed so firmly inside that the manual says you have to take a hammer to it just to throw it away (because batteries can cause trash fires). “The battery is firmly placed, in a water-resistant handle, to ensure safety, durability, longevity and robust performance,” says Philips. It makes me sad to see them claiming waterproofing as the reason, when the art of sealing easily disassembled components has already been perfected over many centuries... the other comment here mentions flashlights, another object of a similar shape which does often come in a waterproof version with replaceable batteries. I have no doubt they could design an electric toothbrush which is both waterproof and has replaceable batteries; they just don't want to, because they'd rather you buy a whole new one. Adding to the irony, water ingress and resulting damage often occurs to them anyway, but not at the bottom where they seal in the batteries; instead, water gets in around the shaft seal and then corrodes the insides from the top. Once again, it would probably be an easy task to make a better seal design, but that would cost just a tiny bit more than they'd like.
- kibibyte 4y ago
  It's bizarre to me that P&G (Oral-B) seemed to have figured this out where Philips couldn't. Granted the batteries still aren't user-replaceable, but their manual at least doesn't tell you that you have to be a "qualified professional" to safely dispose of a toothbrush, and battery removal is a lot more straightforward than requiring a hammer. If you have to be a qualified professional to ensure that a brush is disposed of the right way, well, that's a good way to ensure that they won't be disposed of the right way.
  - nikau 4y ago
    Braun seem to have the charging circuitry and battery sizing perfected now, my toothbrush is approaching 10 years old now and still works like new.
    - codfrantic 4y ago
      I guess this is because they are making their money on the replacement brushes, not the toothbrush itself.
unityByFreedom 4y ago
Why is this a link to archive.org? If you like articles like this and want them to continue, link the source.
- cyberbanjo 4y ago
  Paywall
  - unityByFreedom 4y ago
    Easily opened incognito. How do you expect articles like this to be written without ads, which this community often derides, or subscriptions?
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    Using Internet Archive to bypass paywalls is also a pretty great way to make sites block the Internet Archive.
13of40 4y ago
My Samsung TV has built-in apps for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Currently both of them fail with generic "oops, try again later" error messages despite things like YouTube working fine. My conspiracy theory is that they've just end-of-lifed the apps on that TV model and don't have the balls to tell me.
- eru 4y ago
  No conspiracy required. YouTube is famous for supporting really old stuff, Netflix doesn't both quite as much. So, I have an original iPad Air from 2013. Apple is no longer providing updates, and Netflix has long stopped working. But Youtube keeps trucking on just fine. I assume thanks to heroic and soulsucking efforts by the developers. (I remember when I did something as trivial as working on a few web frontends once, and how I loathed supporting anything but the most recent browsers. So supporting age old devices with Youtube is probably much, much more annoying for the devs.)
  - Synaesthesia 4y ago
    BTW the websites for Netflix and YouTube should work on Safari.
    - eru 4y ago
      Netflix doesn't. At least you can't play anything.
Eleison23 4y ago
A slightly tangential question for those in the know: how do consumers destroy their data? If I've got a busted HDD or a dead tablet — anything which is holding data that I can't electronically destroy — who do I give it to? The office supply shops have paper shredding. The municipal recycling centers will take stuff, and so will the electronics stores, but they all carry disclaimers about data privacy. I've considered visiting my local police station where they store confiscated property and just tip it into a public trash can. I suppose that the City's service would be safe enough. Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data?
- rsyring 4y ago
  12 gauge...#4 buckshot. Seriously.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  You can always save this kind of stuff until the next time you go visit an active volcano.
- throwaway277432 4y ago
  > who do I give it to? No one, you do it yourself. Here's what works for personal devices. - Hard drives: Open them up with a screwdriver, then physically smash the platters with the pointy end of a hammer. The platters easily shatter into a thousand pieces, very little force required. Use a plastic bag to contain the pieces. For newer models, also smash the cache chips on the logic board. - SSDs / flash storage: disassemble the case, then smash the memory chips with a hammer. - CDs/DVDs: break them a few times, ideally use a shredder if you have one that's strong enough. Make sure the metal foil is sufficiently destroyed. - Tapes: take out the tape itself, then carefully shredder lengthwise or just burn it. - anything with batteries in it: remove the battery first. - anything with device specific cloud service accounts: delete the data and close the account if you won't be using it anymore, so it can't leak data if it gets hacked in the future. >Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data? Physically no. Especially don't trust anybody telling you you can trust them. You have to do it yourself or at the very least watch it with your own eyes. There are commercial services that physically shredder hard drives and documents, these should let you watch so you can verify the destruction yourself.
pessimizer 4y ago
"Dustbuster" type vacuums, internal unreplaceable batteries that will maybe last two years before they won't hold a charge. Just buy a mini shopvac with an extension cord.
- nikau 4y ago
  Dyson are the worst, their BMS is terrible and just disables the pack with minimal cell voltage variation.
  - jen20 4y ago
    As much as I dislike Dyson (the man), the batteries are nothing to complain about. I have two cordless vacuums from 6 and 10 years respectively, both working fine with their original batteries, and with replacements trivially available and replaceable.
    - nikau 4y ago
      respectfully disagree: https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS
dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://web.archive.org/web/20220803004243/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/02/why-gadgets-die/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220803004243/https://www.washi..., which points to this. Please post the original URL. You can add a link to an archiving site in the comments if you feel that would be helpful. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please submit the original source."
slategruen 4y ago
I think the smart thing to do now is to buy products with the fewest features as possible and has decoupled components like easily replaceable batteries. I've noticed that the dumber the device is, the longer it usually lasts. I'd rather buy an analog watch than a smartwatch. I'd rather have a dumb TV than a smart TV. I'd rather have a mouse with hot swappable batteries than one with a built-in charger.
- mjevans 4y ago
  My mice (and keyboards) need tails! Plug those in and keep them light, responsive, and secure.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Unfortunately, analog watches don’t allow me to leave my phone at home when I go for a run and let me listen to music, take phone calls, get directions, track my speed, etc.
  - exodust 4y ago
    Why not just go for a run? You don't need to "get directions" or "track speed"... you're running not driving. If someone calls you when you're out running, call them back when you get home!
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I had a Garmin GPS watch for running a decade ago. Of course because of the technology at the time, it was a lot larger. Even back then I used it to track my pace when I was running. Also heart rate based training isn’t a new concept. Neither is running to music. I’m running much shorter distances now - because age. But the only thing that made running half marathons tolerable was music.
      - exodust 4y ago
        Fair enough. So we have no choice but to buy all these products that deny right to repair, and/or make it difficult to keep for longer than the manufacturer's imposed artificial lifespan.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I wonder if there is a market for higher end products that are truly built to last. Not so much things like cell phones (although I believe it should be mandatory that the batteries be easily replacable)... more like large appliances: refrigerators, washing machines, etc. Like, how hard would it be to separate all the little stupid useless features from the hardcore functional ones and make it so that things like control panels on washers are easy to replace when they malfunction?
- nikau 4y ago
  Its an interesting idea as the biggest problem where I live is the cost of labour to repair. By the time you get a serviceman out to take a look, order the part, come back and fix it the cost is approaching half that of a new machine. I've fixed my espresso machine, washing machine and fridge with parts that are usually sub $50, but they wouldn't have been viable to fix if I had to get a serviceman in for it. I'm not sure any of the repairs could have been made much easier, for example the front panel/MCU for my washing machine can be replaced in minutes, just remove about 6 phillips head screws to get the top and panel off, swap the connectors over, done.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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deathanatos 4y ago
It's not even just batteries. Every laptop I've ever owned comes with a AC to DC converter. Every laptop I've ever owned has outlived that AC-to-DC converter. Every converter that has failed has failed in exactly the same way: the plug/cord connection at the laptop end becomes unreliable. And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could have been a simple $5 replacement cord is now "replace the entire converter" and is now $30 if you try to find a third-party and pray they're not a fraud, or $50 from the manufacturer. Meanwhile at perfectly good converter (sans cord) is landfill. But lo and behold: the brick-to-wall cord is detachable. And funny that, that one never breaks…
- rob_c 4y ago
  > But lo and behold: the brick-to-wall cord is detachable. And funny that, that one never breaks… Yup. But that shows they're willing to pretend to be recyclable...
  - fragmede 4y ago
    It’s easier and simpler to supply the country specific brick-to-wall cable (either IEC 60320 or IEC C13 to local) than it is to manufacture county specific power bricks.
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      Plus, as a user, it's great to be able to only change the cable when traveling to a different country, instead of having to haul around adapters and stack them.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    It's only two or three conductors, at a lower current, and they're significantly larger. It doesn't seem too crazy that the AC cables hold up better. I got a Razer once, and the power brick's integrated cable came with pre-frayed insulation, no extra charge. That laptop had tons of hardware bugs, too.
- 4y ago
rob_c 4y ago
Pft, and capacitors leaking, and the lack of security patches and defects from coil whine and thermal expansion... This is the tip of a very large iceberg. I'd love to see it fixed, but id rather we don't forget the other problems just because we're taking about the battery issue... (And while we're on that one this covers electronic cars as well. But I guess some people believe that replacing a car every 10 years is somehow green efficient and makes up for a whole new car being ripped out of the ground somewhere in the 3rd world)
lamontcg 4y ago
How about we mandate user replaceable batteries (with some kind of wording to make it easy enough for normal humans with no glue and connectors that don't snap easily). Once upon a time I had an HTC Evo 4G that I could do this with. Mandating that they admit the death date seems to be baking in some level of stockholm syndrome.
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  id prefer they didn’t for now society has voted with their dollars to support my preferences
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    we haven't 'voted' we aren't given any options and companies have figured out that not enough of us will rebel that they can maximize their profits by planned obsolescence and externalizing the problem of their electronic waste.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    Why would you prefer they didn’t? How is producing tons and tons of e waste each year and having you spend an extra few hundreds every single year unnecessarily is something you’d prefer to keep on doing? And it’s not like the alternative would prevent you from doing it. You could still throw your phone away every couple of year and buy the new incarnation of you really wanted to still set your money on fire. It would take nothing away from you but make everyone else’s life a little better. I don’t get it.
    - throwaway98797 4y ago
      it would cost more or make the phone less well designed i prefer aesthetic over upgradability. i’m sure it won’t surprise you but i buy a new iPhone nearly every year. this isn’t meant to troll but to show you that people can care this much about how something looks and feels in their hands over some {insert ideal}
      - 4y ago
what-imright 4y ago
Stop trying to make hardware last forever. Who here would like to use hardware from 2017? iPhone x anyone? The lifetime of these devices is defined by the reasonable update schedule of the consumer, which is based on moores law. 5 years is a reasonable update schedule. Then put one in a museum and live in the now. You get this much time forget the nostalgia https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/months.html https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/months.html
- rob_c 4y ago
  How about forcing companies to do being so wasteful with badly, badly oh so badly written software. Sure advances happen but nearly nobody _needs_ the equivalent of avx2048 on a phone. Windows XP lasted almost an entire generation in computing terms. Sure it probably wasn't the most fun thing to work on by the time it was retired but Microsoft kept that going as the 64bit era launched and pcie and x86 multicore became the norm. Saying it can't be done is just excusing not wanting to go back and fix things or maintain stuff.
- cmroanirgo 4y ago
  I'm using and developing on a 2013 MBA, thank you. Phones become obsolete because the underlying tech has been going through large changes, but I can certainly get more than 5 years out of them. To top it off, I live in an affluent country. Imagine those countries where a $500 phone is a gigantic deal.
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  I don't think you understand the extent of what's going on. It's not that people are trying to make hardware last forever. It's that these devices are being deliberately designed to break down in a couple years. There are actual design decisions to force consumer behavior into purchasing new things every couple of years. This doesn't just apply to things that follow moores law. Almost every product in existence nowadays is literally designed to break earlier then they usually do. Companies in certain cases actually spend more money creating a design that ensures that a product will break early so that consumers will buy a new thing within some years. This includes cars, computers, phones, microwaves, lightbulbs. Etc. Your personal need to buy a new car, new phone and new clothes is the result of market manipulation over the last 10 decades or so... morphing our culture from one where we kept tools around for years into one where we need to buy new things all the time. It was not like this at least 1 or 2 generations ago. The result of this endless buying behavior is good for business and the economy but it has devastating effects on the environment and our resources. Worth watching if you have 15 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE The actual story of how companies colluded to make lightbulbs not last as long.
deltasevennine 4y ago
Planned obsolescence for electronics is a recent development in terms of human history. My parents remember times where hardware was incredibly reliable and could've bought electronics and products that lasted for decades. Nowadays there are deliberate design decisions in every product that cause these things to break down before their time.
- yborg 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel There has been planned obsolescence in human economic activity whenever it could be made advantageous to do so. You also discount the increasing capability of electronics, which in many cases involve including more or more complex circuitry, which reduces the lifespan. You can certainly design for reliability, but this generally increases the cost, and consumers almost always opt for the cheaper product. The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel).
  - deltasevennine 4y ago
    >The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel). Not true. Entire industries can move in lock step without formation of a cartel. Phones, cars and fashion is one example. All of the aforementioned products are designed with planned obsolescence in mind. It's sort of a behavioral phenomenon, the same way a flock of birds stays synchronized in the sky. Additionally, competing Companies in industries can still deliberately design things that fail earlier without losing profit margins simply because humans are too myopic to judge the difference between a phone that fails in 8 years vs. one that fails in 3.
kazinator 4y ago
> But buying gear with batteries sealed inside is kind of like buying a car where you can’t change the tires. We just don’t realize we’re doing it, or how it’s contributing to our climate and sustainability crises. Changing tires is better than throwing away a car whose tires are worn out, but it's not without impact. Tires don't recycle into anything useful; there are only so many bouncy playgrounds you can build from shredded tire rubber.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  What's the reasonable alternative? For most people who currently need a vehicle, that vehicle will need tires. Perhaps there's breakthroughs that can be made, but you can't expect people to just start trying to drive without tires.
- exodust 4y ago
  > Tires don't recycle into anything useful; Would be good to get a source on that claim. Or if not a source, then a reason why tires can't be recycled into anything useful.
deltasevennine 4y ago
This is called planned obsolescence, and it's not just electronics. Practically every product nowadays are designed with a death date to perpetuate a repeating buying cycle from consumers. It's very real. To learn more here's an interesting short video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
- exodust 4y ago
  > This is called planned obsolescence No kidding. It's only mentioned several times in the article.
- ornornor 4y ago
  I enjoyed the video, thanks
Helmut10001 4y ago
Reverse anecdote: I still use my HTC HD2 from 2009 - works flawlessly, on its 7th battery now.
hubraumhugo 4y ago
I'm building a crowdsourced website that collects data about these "death dates" to fight planned obsolescence. http://ExitReviews.com http://ExitReviews.com is a database of broken or worn-out products to identify common stress points and how to fix them.
SergeAx 4y ago
I would happily buy a smartphone with replaceable battery, which will be surely available in 2-3 years, but those are just not made anymore. Europe mandated all the phones have USB-C charging capability in two years. Maybe it's time to standardize batteries too?
- fsflover 4y ago
  Consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 or Pinephone, which are designed to be repairable and have lifetime software updates. The batteries are replaceable and should be available for a long time, too.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    I got myself Pinephone (not Pro) in December 2021. It was mostly unusable but very basic functions (make calls, send/receive SMS) out of the box at the time. Telegram client was very slow, Firefox had screen size problems, notifications were a mess. I think I should've tried to install another OS/env image, but alas I had no time for it. It was a nice try though, and I was impressed how far things got in mobile Linux ecosystem. Maybe something changed from the time, maybe Pro version is somehow better, but for now I think I'll abstain from experimenting for another year. Also, Serbia, where I am in right now, is notoriously bad with the procedure of receiving goods from abroad.
    - fsflover 4y ago
      I'm using Pinephone with Mobian as a daily driver. Installing Mobian is as simple as writing iso to a microSD card and inserting it. Telegram and Firefox are somewhat slow but generally work reliably. Noscript helps a lot.
      - SergeAx 4y ago
        Maybe I have to give Mobian a try, thank you!
pressurefree 4y ago
eternityforest 4y ago
USB-C has solved about half the power adapter problem and could solve most of the rest with some more adoption. Why do we not have universal batteries? In fact, we could probably just use USB-C directly. We are good enough at making small things that we could just choose a standard size, lile a Gopro battery, power bank form factor, with a male C connector sticking out one side. Would it be slightly wasteful to throw out the whole pack with all the electronics? Yeah kinda, but better than throwing out a whole device. Plus, it would guarantee any battery powered device can be run without a battery at all plugged into the wall. Failing that, they can just design a new futureproof chemistry-independant smart battery from complete scratch.
Grustaf 4y ago
This is not simply an evil plot to squeeze money from consumers, there’s of course a tradeoff between price, product size and longevity. A Macbook will easily last you 8 years, unless it has a butterfly keyboard, how many would be willing to pay extra for one that lasts 15 years? Or a phone that lasts 10? When it comes to products with strong brands, people will quickly learn what the life expectancy is, so you can’t really fool them. If they break easily, people will atop buying them. With generic gadgets like an electronic thermometer or something the incentives are different, it does make sense to have them break early. Btw, I’ve used my AirPods pro for at least 2 hours every day since they were released and the battery is still pretty decent.
throwaway787544 4y ago
Car parts fail reliably enough that the manufacturer tells you when you should replace parts of the car at regular intervals. They don't tell you the car will last forever, it's clearly in a constant state of breaking down. Electronics manufacturers should be just as honest. I think it's pretty funny when people pay more for an electronics gadget than for a used Honda Civic, and the Civic outlasts the gadget by 10 years (with maintenance). And the Civic's electronics, ironically, usually don't need maintenance.
- Panzer04 4y ago
  Electronics don’t fail reliably though. The vast majority of electronic failures are due to excessive mechanical stress that varies from user to user. The failures we can predict (like batteries) have gotten more attention, admittedly, but by and large it’s my experience that the actual electronic components don’t fail. The only wear part in most modern devices is the battery.
peanut_worm 4y ago
I am probably in the minority but I usually run my electronics into the ground and I have never had a battery fail or die permanently. I have always thought that the argument about planned obsolescence as it pertains to hardware was a bit blown out of proportion.
- criddell 4y ago
  While not necessarily planned, electronics often fail too soon. Sometimes they just wear out. Just this weekend my five year old NAS died because of a CPU flaw. AV receivers seem to last about 6 years before something fails (usually the HDMI board seems to fail). Wireless access points get worse after 4 or 5 years of use (I’ve been told the amplifiers wear out). It’s frustrating.
Trouble_007 4y ago
Planned Obsolescence : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
joecool1029 4y ago
I just rebuilt a lithium ion pack on my parents dustbuster (handheld cordless vacuum), they loved that thing but it was down to only a few minutes of battery life. Black & Decker refuses to sell replacement packs, and once you open one of the packs up it's easy to see why. All the brains of the vac are on the controller board on the battery pack. The rest is really just plastic, a switch, and a motor. My guess is the replacement cost of a pack would be about the same as a whole new unit, so they just don't make them for it. I bought a cheap spot welder ago on Amazon some years ago for re-celling packs. I bought the highest rated high output Molicel 18650's and it took about 5 minutes to spot weld them in with some nickel. Vac is now better than new, runs for a half hour or more on a charge. Probably will be good for years unless something else breaks in it.

301 points by memorable 4y ago

jedberg 4y ago

I thought the EU was trying to (or has?) passed a law that requires electronics to have replaceable batteries.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
I would mostly consider that law to be a good idea. But suppose I want to leave a temperature sensor on a mountainside somewhere, or attach a depth sensor to a walrus. Those are cases where I tend to suspect that it might be better for the manufacturer to have a lot of freedom as to the form of the object, and an expected lifetime after which the nonreplaceable battery dies may be the best of all possible worlds.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > But suppose I want... Like with GDPR where people imagined all sorts of situations ad absurdum (the grocer on the corner not being allowed to ask for your birthday anymore to give you a yearly free product or some such), these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Yes because a 99 section 11 chapter law whose only affect is to make the web worse with cookie banners everywhere is a model of government effectiveness.
    - lucb1e 4y ago
      This is what I mean: apparently even tech people still don't know the basics of GDPR. If it were common knowledge that cookie walls are not required for any normal website operation or statistics keeping, but only a thing required for invasive tracking, then any website introducing one would face questions and media attention rather than it being the norm. The law requires cookie walls exactly nowhere, it requires to ask for consent before doing something you have no valid reason for doing. There are 5 defined valid reasons, including "it's in the subject's interest" and "it's in our legitimate interest" and stuff like that. O-n-l-y if you can't shove it under any of those, then you need to fall back to politely asking the subject you want to track. Every cookie wall is in this category. We really shouldn't be accepting this, but try educating half a billion people speaking thirty languages who have better things to do. It's not even well-known among the tech community, which continuously surprises me. Maybe we need to outlaw consent that is not part of a bigger contract (so a random website visit, not like research or so), maybe we need to have big website owners set better examples... I don't know. But anyway I guess I was more interested in the new battery law rather than hosting my fourtieth hacker news gdpr misconceptions session, as I've not yet read the actual legal text of the former.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Maybe it’s the fault of the EU for making the GDPR so complicated? All a private company - Apple - had to do was create a 5 line rule change and add a setting to iOS and it the entire ad tracking industry including Facebook announced billions in losses.
        makapuf 4y ago
        Well Apple could enforce a single settings to drive all apps. The equivalent would be EU mandating by law a centralised privacy setting on browsers to state we only allow necessary cookies. That might come but some companies would have been kicking and screaming even more.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong. As is usually the case with legislation, the text of the law will support whatever reading you'd like to assign to it. If you're a booster for the legislation, you are free to claim that it doesn't have any problems. If you're not, there are some readily observable problems. The text is here ( https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52020PC0798&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... ), and here are the relevant parts: > [definition] (23) ‘appliance’ means any electrical or electronic equipment, as defined by Directive 2012/19/EU, which is fully or partly powered by a battery or is capable of being so > Article 11 > 1. Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at the end of the lifetime of the appliance. > A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance of that appliance. > 2. The obligations set out in paragraph 1 shall not apply where > (a) continuity of power supply is necessary and a permanent connection between the appliance and the portable battery is required for safety, performance, medical or data integrity reasons; or > (b) the functioning of the battery is only possible when the battery is integrated into the structure of the appliance. > 3. The Commission shall adopt guidance to facilitate harmonised application of the derogations set out in paragraph 2. So the law literally says "(1) all appliances must use removable, replaceable batteries, UNLESS (2) that would be bad, AND (3) we promise we will eventually set a standard for when it would or wouldn't be bad". But that hypothetical future standard is not part of the law. And we can't honestly say that "don't do something, unless you have a good reason" is a law that can actually be implemented. It will misidentify bad reasons as good reasons while punishing good reasons.

beecafe 4y ago

It would be great if consumer electronics products had expected lifetime ratings on the front. People would naturally take issue with products with significantly below median lifetime, and also if their own products didn't live up to the lifetime. It would also make sense to phrase other quantities on product packaging in the way they're experienced by the consumer: instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if you showed the lumens/$, more efficient bulbs would naturally win out. Instead, LED bulbs have fake wattage numbers to show the equivalent wattage incandescent lighting that would be needed to match the LED.

fzzt 4y ago
Many LED lightbulbs make claims about their expected lifetime. Except these numbers are often a fantasy. The LED itself may last almost forever, but the capacitors commonly go bad in a year or so. I suspect that would be the reality with a lot of the proposed mandatory labeling for electronics, too.
- userbinator 4y ago
  They also severely overdrive the LEDs to get more brightness, at the cost of both reduced efficiency and lifetime. At least the Phoebus Cartel had an ostensible explanation (efficiency) for what they did. Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed. Some of the indicator LEDs on some of my electronics are many decades old, yet they are still functioning like when they were new. Clearly LEDs can last a long time, but there wouldn't be any profit in that. Here's some interesting discussion about the "Dubai Lamp", an attempt at going the opposite direction and actually making LEDs last significantly longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
  - eru 4y ago
    > Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed. How does it help the corporation make more money?
    - 4y ago

bityard 4y ago

My favorite mouse is the logitech anywhere mx original. It runs for months in two AA batteries. They don't make these anymore and the newer ones all have built in lipo death clocks. I try to buy all of my new electronics with this lesson in mind.

smiley1437 4y ago
I loved the original MX Anywhere too, but I found that iFixit offers a replacement Lipo for the MX Anywhere 3 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Logitech+MX+Anywhere+3+Battery+Replacement/145719 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Logitech+MX+Anywhere+3+Battery+... It looks approximately as difficult as changing the battery on a smartphone. Knowing that the battery could be changed gave me the piece of mind to switch. The battery management on the MXA 3 is really good - lasts a very long time and is quick to charge on USB-C. The Logi Bolt has been trouble-free. Changing to other devices via bluetooth is handy if you have multiple computers. The magnetic hyperscroll takes a little getting used to but uses a lot less force to switch modes.
- bityard 4y ago
  I'll consider it, but I _really_ don't want to plug in a mouse to charge it, especially when I have to also use it. Wired mice drive me crazy (and did even before wireless was a thing). So I'd have to buy 2. And $80 a pop is hard to swallow, I bought all of mine for under $35 each. And there's _still_ no USB-C unify receiver? Ugh. There needs to be a DIY mouse-hacking community on par with the customized mechanical keyboard community.
Gracana 4y ago
I quite liked those as well, but I had to switch to something else after three failed due to the same problem. The thin plastic protrusions that press the microswitch plungers wear out, causing awful switch bounce and eventually an inability to hold the button down at all.
- bityard 4y ago
  I've seen this one a couple of them, it's a known weakness. Some were made with poor quality microswitches. Interestingly, the very first one I bought is still my daily driver.

clumsysmurf 4y ago

I have been a long time enthusiast of high power flashlights. We typically use 18350, 18650, 21700, or 26650. But I have been in dismay as even in this community, companies are starting to move away from these standards and provide proprietary batteries (Olight) or sealed (some newer Fenix models). It would be good if * We could safely obtain reputable Li-ion batteries from reputable sources. I trust a handful of companies to vet their supply chain so I'm confident of authentic cells like Murata VT6, etc .. but its less than ideal. I don't think my mom would be able to just find a authentic 18650, and this has to pass the mom test * Easy way to recycle these cells. This needs to expand past home improvement stores, which often seem clueless as to the specifics of what they can accept

lucb1e 4y ago
Was wondering what these random numbers were, I expected a product number from a manufacturer. Instead: > An 18650 Battery is a lithium-ion rechargeable battery. The first 4 digits of the designation “18650” indicate the physical dimensions while the 5 <sup>th</sup> digit indicates it is a cylinder cell. The standard 18650 battery is 18mm around by 65mm long. (copied from curl because that page crashed the firefox tab, though I guess the superscript wouldn't have been preserved otherwise anyhow so might as well leave that bit of HTML in)
- killingtime74 4y ago
  It’s great, it’s almost a standard. Many different manufactures and the only commonality is usually the voltage. 18650 is so popular it’s used in some teslas, while newer ones use 21700
  - fragmede 4y ago
    I’ve also heard they’re going to use 4680 cells for their newer batteries.
  - picture 4y ago
    The voltage is determined by the chemistry, which unless you seriously deviate from the standard lithium stuff, it's going to be able 4.2 V max. Aside: When people try to increase it to like 4.3 V with "strengthened electrode material," the lifetime still seriously suffers. I'm typing this comment on a Razer Blade 15 with a currently swollen battery pack, which has been replaced only 10 months ago due to the same swelling issue

samatman 4y ago

I've made AirPods last longer than any other pair of earbuds I've ever had. It's the cord. For me, a max of six months of fiddling with the damn thing and it breaks. I've had real headphones last quite a bit longer— but I buy the ones with replaceable cords. The pair I still have is on its fourth cord and second pair of muffs. I don't view it as any sort of economic, human, or environmental catastrophe, that they stop holding a charge after... how long again? I've had a pair of Pros since before the pandemic which seem to hold up fine. So I'm around what, twenty cents a day? It's a rare day I don't wear them for a solid hour. It undermines the argument to pick the easy, lazy, and really rather bad example that everyone else flocks to for some bizarre reason. It's genuinely hard to come up with a better product category for glued-in batteries than in-ear wireless headphones.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ramraj07 4y ago
Yeah I don’t get the environmental angle as well. It’s 10g, I’m sure there’s more lithium in a single AAA cell than 50 AirPods. Imagine how much more polluting a single dude in Texas rolling coal would do compared to everyone in Texas using AirPods.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Why the specific Texas dude? Like rednecks in other areas don't roll coal in their neck of the woods too?
gibolt 4y ago
I use similar measurements to value/compare purchases and their impact. - Value per use - Weight (analog for materials used) - Likely lifetime Bonus for wireless headphones specifically is you can buy replacement cases, or single buds if any go bad.
rowanG077 4y ago
That's a pretty funny statement considering detachable cords exist. A cord is basically some copper and plastic sheet. Easily recyclable.

_adamb 4y ago

Pretty much anything engineered (buildings, bridges, electronics, houses, ...) have a death date. Any civil engineering projects I've been a part of have always had a quantified project lifetime. We _could_ build things that lasted hundreds of years, but the cost would be astronomically high and demand would change in that timeline. Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. This confuses me greatly.

christophilus 4y ago
I played my SNES for maybe 25 years or whatever. I see no reason why such longevity should be an exception. Anyway, I also complain about planned obsolescence in other areas: TVs, fridges, washers, etc. A friend of mine uses 50+ year old fridges and cars. They still run fine, though the cars are a death trap. I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a gradient or pendulum, and we’ve swung too far towards the wasteful side of things in my opinion.
MerelyMortal 4y ago
I've always wondered about skyscrapers; How long will they last, and what will happen with them?
- greenyoda 4y ago
  Informative video - "How To Dispose of a Skyscraper": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-H7E-KQgHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-H7E-KQgHQ (6.5 min.) According to the video, they're built to last for 50 - 100 years.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
I'd be pretty unhappy if an engineer built a bridge that could have lasted 100 years if they hadn't cheaped out and saved $10 by using plastic instead of metal for some component, halving its life expectancy. Or if they put components next to each other which really shouldn't be, unnecessarily increasing failure rates. Or if they built a bridge where you couldn't replace any component without blowing part of it up.

psi75 4y ago

At this point, I only buy Apple products because of inertia. Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago. This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed, whether as a company or individual, you have to convince people to part with something called money they have been programmed to avoid parting with as much as humanly possible... in other words, you succeed not based on the value of what you produce (because wage work's actual cost is literally a rounding error) if you are better at transactions in a zero-sum game than others are. We probably need for money to exist, because trade wouldn't work without it, and because we're still a hundred years or more from true post-scarcity communism, but having a whole society run on an operating system of zero-sum transactions has some pretty clear negatives--neither the smallest nor the worst of which is tech waste--even if it's not always evident how best to fix this. Companies are going to keep producing short-lived crap because it's good for sales, because ultimately anything other than "good for sales" cannot be afforded under this particular economic system where something is either sold or it dies.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
>Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago Buy a Dell XPS.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  It seems to be a lottery with the earlier XPS laptops (hardware-wise), but I have a 2020 model and it's been very good. I'm definitely interested in my next laptop being an XPS. I bought one that came with Windows and installed Ubuntu on it and it's great. The only thing I haven't tried is the fingerprint reader.
pca006132 4y ago
I think quite a lot of Windows laptop works fine with Linux nowadays? Perhaps not out-of-the-box, but they works fine after installing the OS manually (which doesn't really take much time TBH). I'm not sure what software you need for work, but if they are open source they are usually fine with Linux (iirc Mac exclusive projects usually have alternatives) . For cloud stuff, I don't know what you are using so can't really comment about it.

brudgers 4y ago

So a couple of months ago I bought a Yamaha Rex 50 digital effects unit from the 1980’s. I opened it up for cleaning, to check the electrolytic capacitors (some need replacement) and to swap out lithium coin cell battery that backs up the user’s saved settings. Since the battery was working, I assumed it had been replaced. Nope, the working lithium coin battery has a date of November 1987 which is very early so far as I understand. So it’s still there because if it’s still working after thirty five years, it will probably be working for the two or three years I can expect from a new battery. It was refreshing to experience an engineering design driven by long reliability in a piece of digital electronics.

tomn 4y ago
It's not the batteries that have changed, it's the circuitry. In older devices, batteries were required to power SRAM, which uses very little power (just leakage currents). This has largely been replaced by flash memory, so if you see a battery in a modern device there's a good chance it's powering a real-time clock, which use a fair bit more power in comparison. I'm sure there's a big difference between different implementations of this -- low power design is an art that's quite easy to get wrong.

Gualdrapo 4y ago

My first smartphone was the Motorola Atrix 4G, which I bought around may 2012. Removable battery, first fingerprint scanner, great pixel density for that era. It was cool and I took care of it as much as I could. But the 365th day after I bought it, WiFi and Bluetooth stopped working. All of a sudden. WiFi chip was built with a death date. On the other hand, the next phone I bought lasted with me for more than 7 years - until I accidentally dropped it and crashed with an acute metal surface. Only the screen died but I used it as an excuse to got a new phone, but now I fear phones now aren't designed nor built to last that much.

Trouble_007 4y ago

Incandescent light bulb : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

Trouble_007 4y ago

The (bad) Capacitor plague; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague A higher-than-expected failure-rate of non-solid aluminium Electrolytic Capacitors --- search: >'bad capacitors'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bad capacitors' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bad capacitors'>

userbinator 4y ago

Sadly, I found many other devices are also designed to become trash. The battery in my Philips Sonicare toothbrush not only can’t be replaced — it’s fixed so firmly inside that the manual says you have to take a hammer to it just to throw it away (because batteries can cause trash fires). “The battery is firmly placed, in a water-resistant handle, to ensure safety, durability, longevity and robust performance,” says Philips. It makes me sad to see them claiming waterproofing as the reason, when the art of sealing easily disassembled components has already been perfected over many centuries... the other comment here mentions flashlights, another object of a similar shape which does often come in a waterproof version with replaceable batteries. I have no doubt they could design an electric toothbrush which is both waterproof and has replaceable batteries; they just don't want to, because they'd rather you buy a whole new one. Adding to the irony, water ingress and resulting damage often occurs to them anyway, but not at the bottom where they seal in the batteries; instead, water gets in around the shaft seal and then corrodes the insides from the top. Once again, it would probably be an easy task to make a better seal design, but that would cost just a tiny bit more than they'd like.

kibibyte 4y ago
It's bizarre to me that P&G (Oral-B) seemed to have figured this out where Philips couldn't. Granted the batteries still aren't user-replaceable, but their manual at least doesn't tell you that you have to be a "qualified professional" to safely dispose of a toothbrush, and battery removal is a lot more straightforward than requiring a hammer. If you have to be a qualified professional to ensure that a brush is disposed of the right way, well, that's a good way to ensure that they won't be disposed of the right way.
- nikau 4y ago
  Braun seem to have the charging circuitry and battery sizing perfected now, my toothbrush is approaching 10 years old now and still works like new.
  - codfrantic 4y ago
    I guess this is because they are making their money on the replacement brushes, not the toothbrush itself.

unityByFreedom 4y ago

Why is this a link to archive.org? If you like articles like this and want them to continue, link the source.

cyberbanjo 4y ago
Paywall
- unityByFreedom 4y ago
  Easily opened incognito. How do you expect articles like this to be written without ads, which this community often derides, or subscriptions?
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Using Internet Archive to bypass paywalls is also a pretty great way to make sites block the Internet Archive.

13of40 4y ago

My Samsung TV has built-in apps for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Currently both of them fail with generic "oops, try again later" error messages despite things like YouTube working fine. My conspiracy theory is that they've just end-of-lifed the apps on that TV model and don't have the balls to tell me.

eru 4y ago
No conspiracy required. YouTube is famous for supporting really old stuff, Netflix doesn't both quite as much. So, I have an original iPad Air from 2013. Apple is no longer providing updates, and Netflix has long stopped working. But Youtube keeps trucking on just fine. I assume thanks to heroic and soulsucking efforts by the developers. (I remember when I did something as trivial as working on a few web frontends once, and how I loathed supporting anything but the most recent browsers. So supporting age old devices with Youtube is probably much, much more annoying for the devs.)
- Synaesthesia 4y ago
  BTW the websites for Netflix and YouTube should work on Safari.
  - eru 4y ago
    Netflix doesn't. At least you can't play anything.

Eleison23 4y ago

A slightly tangential question for those in the know: how do consumers destroy their data? If I've got a busted HDD or a dead tablet — anything which is holding data that I can't electronically destroy — who do I give it to? The office supply shops have paper shredding. The municipal recycling centers will take stuff, and so will the electronics stores, but they all carry disclaimers about data privacy. I've considered visiting my local police station where they store confiscated property and just tip it into a public trash can. I suppose that the City's service would be safe enough. Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data?

rsyring 4y ago
12 gauge...#4 buckshot. Seriously.
lostmsu 4y ago
You can always save this kind of stuff until the next time you go visit an active volcano.
throwaway277432 4y ago
> who do I give it to? No one, you do it yourself. Here's what works for personal devices. - Hard drives: Open them up with a screwdriver, then physically smash the platters with the pointy end of a hammer. The platters easily shatter into a thousand pieces, very little force required. Use a plastic bag to contain the pieces. For newer models, also smash the cache chips on the logic board. - SSDs / flash storage: disassemble the case, then smash the memory chips with a hammer. - CDs/DVDs: break them a few times, ideally use a shredder if you have one that's strong enough. Make sure the metal foil is sufficiently destroyed. - Tapes: take out the tape itself, then carefully shredder lengthwise or just burn it. - anything with batteries in it: remove the battery first. - anything with device specific cloud service accounts: delete the data and close the account if you won't be using it anymore, so it can't leak data if it gets hacked in the future. >Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data? Physically no. Especially don't trust anybody telling you you can trust them. You have to do it yourself or at the very least watch it with your own eyes. There are commercial services that physically shredder hard drives and documents, these should let you watch so you can verify the destruction yourself.

pessimizer 4y ago

"Dustbuster" type vacuums, internal unreplaceable batteries that will maybe last two years before they won't hold a charge. Just buy a mini shopvac with an extension cord.

nikau 4y ago
Dyson are the worst, their BMS is terrible and just disables the pack with minimal cell voltage variation.
- jen20 4y ago
  As much as I dislike Dyson (the man), the batteries are nothing to complain about. I have two cordless vacuums from 6 and 10 years respectively, both working fine with their original batteries, and with replacements trivially available and replaceable.
  - nikau 4y ago
    respectfully disagree: https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS

dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://web.archive.org/web/20220803004243/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/02/why-gadgets-die/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220803004243/https://www.washi..., which points to this. Please post the original URL. You can add a link to an archiving site in the comments if you feel that would be helpful. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please submit the original source."

slategruen 4y ago

I think the smart thing to do now is to buy products with the fewest features as possible and has decoupled components like easily replaceable batteries. I've noticed that the dumber the device is, the longer it usually lasts. I'd rather buy an analog watch than a smartwatch. I'd rather have a dumb TV than a smart TV. I'd rather have a mouse with hot swappable batteries than one with a built-in charger.

mjevans 4y ago
My mice (and keyboards) need tails! Plug those in and keep them light, responsive, and secure.
scarface74 4y ago
Unfortunately, analog watches don’t allow me to leave my phone at home when I go for a run and let me listen to music, take phone calls, get directions, track my speed, etc.
- exodust 4y ago
  Why not just go for a run? You don't need to "get directions" or "track speed"... you're running not driving. If someone calls you when you're out running, call them back when you get home!
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I had a Garmin GPS watch for running a decade ago. Of course because of the technology at the time, it was a lot larger. Even back then I used it to track my pace when I was running. Also heart rate based training isn’t a new concept. Neither is running to music. I’m running much shorter distances now - because age. But the only thing that made running half marathons tolerable was music.
    - exodust 4y ago
      Fair enough. So we have no choice but to buy all these products that deny right to repair, and/or make it difficult to keep for longer than the manufacturer's imposed artificial lifespan.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I wonder if there is a market for higher end products that are truly built to last. Not so much things like cell phones (although I believe it should be mandatory that the batteries be easily replacable)... more like large appliances: refrigerators, washing machines, etc. Like, how hard would it be to separate all the little stupid useless features from the hardcore functional ones and make it so that things like control panels on washers are easy to replace when they malfunction?

nikau 4y ago
Its an interesting idea as the biggest problem where I live is the cost of labour to repair. By the time you get a serviceman out to take a look, order the part, come back and fix it the cost is approaching half that of a new machine. I've fixed my espresso machine, washing machine and fridge with parts that are usually sub $50, but they wouldn't have been viable to fix if I had to get a serviceman in for it. I'm not sure any of the repairs could have been made much easier, for example the front panel/MCU for my washing machine can be replaced in minutes, just remove about 6 phillips head screws to get the top and panel off, swap the connectors over, done.
- deleted 4y ago
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deathanatos 4y ago

It's not even just batteries. Every laptop I've ever owned comes with a AC to DC converter. Every laptop I've ever owned has outlived that AC-to-DC converter. Every converter that has failed has failed in exactly the same way: the plug/cord connection at the laptop end becomes unreliable. And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could have been a simple $5 replacement cord is now "replace the entire converter" and is now $30 if you try to find a third-party and pray they're not a fraud, or $50 from the manufacturer. Meanwhile at perfectly good converter (sans cord) is landfill. But lo and behold: the brick-to-wall cord is detachable. And funny that, that one never breaks…

rob_c 4y ago
> But lo and behold: the brick-to-wall cord is detachable. And funny that, that one never breaks… Yup. But that shows they're willing to pretend to be recyclable...
- fragmede 4y ago
  It’s easier and simpler to supply the country specific brick-to-wall cable (either IEC 60320 or IEC C13 to local) than it is to manufacture county specific power bricks.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    Plus, as a user, it's great to be able to only change the cable when traveling to a different country, instead of having to haul around adapters and stack them.
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  It's only two or three conductors, at a lower current, and they're significantly larger. It doesn't seem too crazy that the AC cables hold up better. I got a Razer once, and the power brick's integrated cable came with pre-frayed insulation, no extra charge. That laptop had tons of hardware bugs, too.
4y ago

rob_c 4y ago

Pft, and capacitors leaking, and the lack of security patches and defects from coil whine and thermal expansion... This is the tip of a very large iceberg. I'd love to see it fixed, but id rather we don't forget the other problems just because we're taking about the battery issue... (And while we're on that one this covers electronic cars as well. But I guess some people believe that replacing a car every 10 years is somehow green efficient and makes up for a whole new car being ripped out of the ground somewhere in the 3rd world)

lamontcg 4y ago

How about we mandate user replaceable batteries (with some kind of wording to make it easy enough for normal humans with no glue and connectors that don't snap easily). Once upon a time I had an HTC Evo 4G that I could do this with. Mandating that they admit the death date seems to be baking in some level of stockholm syndrome.

throwaway98797 4y ago
id prefer they didn’t for now society has voted with their dollars to support my preferences
- lamontcg 4y ago
  we haven't 'voted' we aren't given any options and companies have figured out that not enough of us will rebel that they can maximize their profits by planned obsolescence and externalizing the problem of their electronic waste.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Why would you prefer they didn’t? How is producing tons and tons of e waste each year and having you spend an extra few hundreds every single year unnecessarily is something you’d prefer to keep on doing? And it’s not like the alternative would prevent you from doing it. You could still throw your phone away every couple of year and buy the new incarnation of you really wanted to still set your money on fire. It would take nothing away from you but make everyone else’s life a little better. I don’t get it.
  - throwaway98797 4y ago
    it would cost more or make the phone less well designed i prefer aesthetic over upgradability. i’m sure it won’t surprise you but i buy a new iPhone nearly every year. this isn’t meant to troll but to show you that people can care this much about how something looks and feels in their hands over some {insert ideal}
    - 4y ago

what-imright 4y ago

Stop trying to make hardware last forever. Who here would like to use hardware from 2017? iPhone x anyone? The lifetime of these devices is defined by the reasonable update schedule of the consumer, which is based on moores law. 5 years is a reasonable update schedule. Then put one in a museum and live in the now. You get this much time forget the nostalgia https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/months.html https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/months.html

rob_c 4y ago
How about forcing companies to do being so wasteful with badly, badly oh so badly written software. Sure advances happen but nearly nobody _needs_ the equivalent of avx2048 on a phone. Windows XP lasted almost an entire generation in computing terms. Sure it probably wasn't the most fun thing to work on by the time it was retired but Microsoft kept that going as the 64bit era launched and pcie and x86 multicore became the norm. Saying it can't be done is just excusing not wanting to go back and fix things or maintain stuff.
cmroanirgo 4y ago
I'm using and developing on a 2013 MBA, thank you. Phones become obsolete because the underlying tech has been going through large changes, but I can certainly get more than 5 years out of them. To top it off, I live in an affluent country. Imagine those countries where a $500 phone is a gigantic deal.
deltasevennine 4y ago
I don't think you understand the extent of what's going on. It's not that people are trying to make hardware last forever. It's that these devices are being deliberately designed to break down in a couple years. There are actual design decisions to force consumer behavior into purchasing new things every couple of years. This doesn't just apply to things that follow moores law. Almost every product in existence nowadays is literally designed to break earlier then they usually do. Companies in certain cases actually spend more money creating a design that ensures that a product will break early so that consumers will buy a new thing within some years. This includes cars, computers, phones, microwaves, lightbulbs. Etc. Your personal need to buy a new car, new phone and new clothes is the result of market manipulation over the last 10 decades or so... morphing our culture from one where we kept tools around for years into one where we need to buy new things all the time. It was not like this at least 1 or 2 generations ago. The result of this endless buying behavior is good for business and the economy but it has devastating effects on the environment and our resources. Worth watching if you have 15 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE The actual story of how companies colluded to make lightbulbs not last as long.

deltasevennine 4y ago

Planned obsolescence for electronics is a recent development in terms of human history. My parents remember times where hardware was incredibly reliable and could've bought electronics and products that lasted for decades. Nowadays there are deliberate design decisions in every product that cause these things to break down before their time.

yborg 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel There has been planned obsolescence in human economic activity whenever it could be made advantageous to do so. You also discount the increasing capability of electronics, which in many cases involve including more or more complex circuitry, which reduces the lifespan. You can certainly design for reliability, but this generally increases the cost, and consumers almost always opt for the cheaper product. The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel).
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  >The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel). Not true. Entire industries can move in lock step without formation of a cartel. Phones, cars and fashion is one example. All of the aforementioned products are designed with planned obsolescence in mind. It's sort of a behavioral phenomenon, the same way a flock of birds stays synchronized in the sky. Additionally, competing Companies in industries can still deliberately design things that fail earlier without losing profit margins simply because humans are too myopic to judge the difference between a phone that fails in 8 years vs. one that fails in 3.

kazinator 4y ago

> But buying gear with batteries sealed inside is kind of like buying a car where you can’t change the tires. We just don’t realize we’re doing it, or how it’s contributing to our climate and sustainability crises. Changing tires is better than throwing away a car whose tires are worn out, but it's not without impact. Tires don't recycle into anything useful; there are only so many bouncy playgrounds you can build from shredded tire rubber.

ThunderSizzle 4y ago
What's the reasonable alternative? For most people who currently need a vehicle, that vehicle will need tires. Perhaps there's breakthroughs that can be made, but you can't expect people to just start trying to drive without tires.
exodust 4y ago
> Tires don't recycle into anything useful; Would be good to get a source on that claim. Or if not a source, then a reason why tires can't be recycled into anything useful.

deltasevennine 4y ago

This is called planned obsolescence, and it's not just electronics. Practically every product nowadays are designed with a death date to perpetuate a repeating buying cycle from consumers. It's very real. To learn more here's an interesting short video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

exodust 4y ago
> This is called planned obsolescence No kidding. It's only mentioned several times in the article.
ornornor 4y ago
I enjoyed the video, thanks

Helmut10001 4y ago

Reverse anecdote: I still use my HTC HD2 from 2009 - works flawlessly, on its 7th battery now.

hubraumhugo 4y ago

I'm building a crowdsourced website that collects data about these "death dates" to fight planned obsolescence. http://ExitReviews.com http://ExitReviews.com is a database of broken or worn-out products to identify common stress points and how to fix them.

SergeAx 4y ago

I would happily buy a smartphone with replaceable battery, which will be surely available in 2-3 years, but those are just not made anymore. Europe mandated all the phones have USB-C charging capability in two years. Maybe it's time to standardize batteries too?

fsflover 4y ago
Consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 or Pinephone, which are designed to be repairable and have lifetime software updates. The batteries are replaceable and should be available for a long time, too.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  I got myself Pinephone (not Pro) in December 2021. It was mostly unusable but very basic functions (make calls, send/receive SMS) out of the box at the time. Telegram client was very slow, Firefox had screen size problems, notifications were a mess. I think I should've tried to install another OS/env image, but alas I had no time for it. It was a nice try though, and I was impressed how far things got in mobile Linux ecosystem. Maybe something changed from the time, maybe Pro version is somehow better, but for now I think I'll abstain from experimenting for another year. Also, Serbia, where I am in right now, is notoriously bad with the procedure of receiving goods from abroad.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    I'm using Pinephone with Mobian as a daily driver. Installing Mobian is as simple as writing iso to a microSD card and inserting it. Telegram and Firefox are somewhat slow but generally work reliably. Noscript helps a lot.
    - SergeAx 4y ago
      Maybe I have to give Mobian a try, thank you!

pressurefree 4y ago

eternityforest 4y ago

USB-C has solved about half the power adapter problem and could solve most of the rest with some more adoption. Why do we not have universal batteries? In fact, we could probably just use USB-C directly. We are good enough at making small things that we could just choose a standard size, lile a Gopro battery, power bank form factor, with a male C connector sticking out one side. Would it be slightly wasteful to throw out the whole pack with all the electronics? Yeah kinda, but better than throwing out a whole device. Plus, it would guarantee any battery powered device can be run without a battery at all plugged into the wall. Failing that, they can just design a new futureproof chemistry-independant smart battery from complete scratch.

Grustaf 4y ago

This is not simply an evil plot to squeeze money from consumers, there’s of course a tradeoff between price, product size and longevity. A Macbook will easily last you 8 years, unless it has a butterfly keyboard, how many would be willing to pay extra for one that lasts 15 years? Or a phone that lasts 10? When it comes to products with strong brands, people will quickly learn what the life expectancy is, so you can’t really fool them. If they break easily, people will atop buying them. With generic gadgets like an electronic thermometer or something the incentives are different, it does make sense to have them break early. Btw, I’ve used my AirPods pro for at least 2 hours every day since they were released and the battery is still pretty decent.

throwaway787544 4y ago

Car parts fail reliably enough that the manufacturer tells you when you should replace parts of the car at regular intervals. They don't tell you the car will last forever, it's clearly in a constant state of breaking down. Electronics manufacturers should be just as honest. I think it's pretty funny when people pay more for an electronics gadget than for a used Honda Civic, and the Civic outlasts the gadget by 10 years (with maintenance). And the Civic's electronics, ironically, usually don't need maintenance.

Panzer04 4y ago
Electronics don’t fail reliably though. The vast majority of electronic failures are due to excessive mechanical stress that varies from user to user. The failures we can predict (like batteries) have gotten more attention, admittedly, but by and large it’s my experience that the actual electronic components don’t fail. The only wear part in most modern devices is the battery.

peanut_worm 4y ago

I am probably in the minority but I usually run my electronics into the ground and I have never had a battery fail or die permanently. I have always thought that the argument about planned obsolescence as it pertains to hardware was a bit blown out of proportion.

criddell 4y ago
While not necessarily planned, electronics often fail too soon. Sometimes they just wear out. Just this weekend my five year old NAS died because of a CPU flaw. AV receivers seem to last about 6 years before something fails (usually the HDMI board seems to fail). Wireless access points get worse after 4 or 5 years of use (I’ve been told the amplifiers wear out). It’s frustrating.

Trouble_007 4y ago

Planned Obsolescence : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

joecool1029 4y ago

I just rebuilt a lithium ion pack on my parents dustbuster (handheld cordless vacuum), they loved that thing but it was down to only a few minutes of battery life. Black & Decker refuses to sell replacement packs, and once you open one of the packs up it's easy to see why. All the brains of the vac are on the controller board on the battery pack. The rest is really just plastic, a switch, and a motor. My guess is the replacement cost of a pack would be about the same as a whole new unit, so they just don't make them for it. I bought a cheap spot welder ago on Amazon some years ago for re-celling packs. I bought the highest rated high output Molicel 18650's and it took about 5 minutes to spot weld them in with some nickel. Vac is now better than new, runs for a half hour or more on a charge. Probably will be good for years unless something else breaks in it.