5 ms·

I am assuming you are an ee (like myself)...I have never designed a product with a built in expiration, nor have I ever seen any app notes or write ups on the e

I am assuming you are an ee (like myself)...I have never designed a product with a built in expiration, nor have I ever seen any app notes or write ups on the engineering of it - something engineers love to do. What I have seen done is cheaping out on parts in order to get the price as low as possible, because customers shop primarily on price. Not to lash out, but it kind of hits a nerve for me, because people think we design products to purposely fail. Hell no, we try really hard to do the opposite, but everyone just loves to buy the cheapest shit. The $25 LED bulb that will last for eternity will rot on the shelf next to the $3 bulb that will probably be dead in 6 months. And one more "they build these things to fail" complaint will be posted online.

belval 2y ago
To be fair this is hardly limited to EE and is the issue with the race to the bottom in all product categories. Make long-lasting high-quality 100$ pants? People prefer spending 10$ on Shein. Additionally, the issue is that as a consumer, it's not easy to differentiate between quality markup and greedy markup. I don't see the cap manufacturer on the box so the 25$ light bulb might last 10 years or it might last 6 months just like the 3$ one. At least with the 3$ one I can come back and buy another...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Make long-lasting high-quality 100$ pants? People prefer spending 10$ on Shein. This is just fashion, right? As something becomes commoditised, it starts to become subject to fashion, which means cheap and looks fashionable is more important than durability. So you can buy one every year and keep up, and throw away the old one.
- xp84 2y ago
  > as a consumer, it's not easy to differentiate between quality markup and greedy markup This is so true and insightful. Even plenty of so-called “luxury goods” are trash. And outside of luxury, it seems like most markets are dominated by roughly 90-99.9% products that are all identically garbage, just ranging from 1%, 2% up to 800% profit margins. So the person buying the high-end brand and the one buying from Aliexpress both have the same quality components (trash tier) and sometimes the same PCBs and designs. If you want a good quality refrigerator, you can buy a Viking or something for $9,000, or spend any amount of your choice from $800-5000 for something that will die in 2 years and be outside of warranty. It makes my blood boil, especially in areas like appliances, where the amount of waste, by tonnage, is super offensive.
  - pxx 2y ago
    it's also not like the Viking refrigerator will last appreciably longer than a cheaper make... their warranties can be noticeably shorter than their competitors even though they somehow charge 2x-10x the price.
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
I seriously doubt it's ever a deliberate conspiracy in engineering apart from shenanigans like what happened at VW, but it's net effect of product managers, accountants, and contract manufacturers who modify PCBs and BOMs after it's passed off to them to save money on retail products. And so it's likely unintentional with negligence, but it benefits the company. Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 which seemed to fail just after their warranties expired. I suspect highly-optimized designs for "consumables" like incandescent lightbulbs and parts for cars use data to tweak design life, more often than not, in their favor. And, with the pressures of multinational oligopolies and BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street.. there is little incentive to invest $100M into a moderately-superior incandescent lightbulb using yesterday's technology that lasts 100kh and 5k cycles and sells for $1 more than the next one. Maybe if we (perhaps a science/engineering nonprofit thinktank that spanned the world and gave away designs and manufacturing expertise) had quasi-communism for R&D, we could have very nice things. It's not my fault if other people are too dumb to comprehend TCO because I would buy the $25 bulb if it had a 30 year warranty.
- kube-system 2y ago
  > Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 which seemed to fail just after their warranties expired. And? That just sounds like they have good engineers. If you are designing a machine, you have an target lifetime. You'd obviously want the product to last through the warranty period, because warranty claims are a cost to the company. Every choice of a component affects lifetime. Designers of mass-market products can't just use premium components everywhere -- the mass market will not pay steep premiums for otherwise equivalent products. Value engineering and planned obsolescence are not the same thing, but they are often confused. That being said, Samsung appliances suck and I hate them. Mine failed within warranty several times. > And, with the pressures of multinational oligopolies and BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street.. there is little incentive to invest $100M into a moderately-superior incandescent lightbulb using yesterday's technology that lasts 100kh and 5k cycles and sells for $1 more than the next one. It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first. If you release a light bulb that is identical to the best selling one on the shelf, but claims 10x lifespan, your competitor will do something like gluing a weight in theirs, putting some marketing BS on the box, and will put you out of business. Consumers just don't pick products based on actual quality.
owenversteeg 2y ago
I agree with what you said - engineers do the best they can with the budget but the budget is small because people won’t pay for things that last - but it’s worth saying that any boards with electrolytic capacitors have an inherent built in expiration. Any product with rubber has an expiration. Any product with permanent batteries, glued or sealed assemblies, or no spare parts. Much of that is with the customer’s budget, sure. But these days, even among expensive things, nearly nothing is built to last.
sillystuff 2y ago
Not LED light bulbs specifically, but... "The Phoebus cartel engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb and gave birth to planned obsolescence" https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
- RulerOf 2y ago
  It's true that the Phoebus cartel arranged to have light bulbs die after a certain number of hours, but bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption. The cartel-defined lifetime limit sits very close to the sweet spot for all of those metrics for incandescent bulbs. Technology Connections explained this well in a video about a year ago: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    > bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption At a specific temperature, using specific materials. There is no reason to suspect that material science would not advance. Or other constraints would change. A specific company choosing that particular sweetspot for a particular product line is fine. But a collusion between companies dictating that specific constraint (in lieu of, e.g., wattage per lumen) is too clear a marker of anti-consumer intent.
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      >At a specific temperature, using specific materials. The temperature of incandescent bulbs is directly related to the light that they give off, and tungsten is the obvious best material, there's no other materials on the horizon giving an improvement for the tech. It really is a pretty well understood tradeoff surface on a very mature technology (which was then displaced by completely different ones).
      - dotancohen 2y ago
        Advancements in materials led to LED bulbs, which operate under different principles and run fall cooler. Yet the time-limited bulb lifetime remains.
graemep 2y ago
The problem is that consumers cannot tell whether the more more expensive one is high quality or whether it is just the same as the cheap one, just priced higher. There have been plenty of discussions on HN about brands that used to produce durable products no longer doing so. I mostly buy cheap stuff because I assume that everything will be built as cheaply as possible, so I will get something that will not last anyway.
- xp84 2y ago
  Yes, so tragic really. The few people out there not just churning out disposable crap, are not even getting the business of people like you and me, because we know so few can be trusted that we just buy the cheapest thing.

belval 2y ago

To be fair this is hardly limited to EE and is the issue with the race to the bottom in all product categories. Make long-lasting high-quality 100$ pants? People prefer spending 10$ on Shein. Additionally, the issue is that as a consumer, it's not easy to differentiate between quality markup and greedy markup. I don't see the cap manufacturer on the box so the 25$ light bulb might last 10 years or it might last 6 months just like the 3$ one. At least with the 3$ one I can come back and buy another...

robertlagrant 2y ago
> Make long-lasting high-quality 100$ pants? People prefer spending 10$ on Shein. This is just fashion, right? As something becomes commoditised, it starts to become subject to fashion, which means cheap and looks fashionable is more important than durability. So you can buy one every year and keep up, and throw away the old one.
xp84 2y ago
> as a consumer, it's not easy to differentiate between quality markup and greedy markup This is so true and insightful. Even plenty of so-called “luxury goods” are trash. And outside of luxury, it seems like most markets are dominated by roughly 90-99.9% products that are all identically garbage, just ranging from 1%, 2% up to 800% profit margins. So the person buying the high-end brand and the one buying from Aliexpress both have the same quality components (trash tier) and sometimes the same PCBs and designs. If you want a good quality refrigerator, you can buy a Viking or something for $9,000, or spend any amount of your choice from $800-5000 for something that will die in 2 years and be outside of warranty. It makes my blood boil, especially in areas like appliances, where the amount of waste, by tonnage, is super offensive.
- pxx 2y ago
  it's also not like the Viking refrigerator will last appreciably longer than a cheaper make... their warranties can be noticeably shorter than their competitors even though they somehow charge 2x-10x the price.

magic_smoke_ee 2y ago

I seriously doubt it's ever a deliberate conspiracy in engineering apart from shenanigans like what happened at VW, but it's net effect of product managers, accountants, and contract manufacturers who modify PCBs and BOMs after it's passed off to them to save money on retail products. And so it's likely unintentional with negligence, but it benefits the company. Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 which seemed to fail just after their warranties expired. I suspect highly-optimized designs for "consumables" like incandescent lightbulbs and parts for cars use data to tweak design life, more often than not, in their favor. And, with the pressures of multinational oligopolies and BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street.. there is little incentive to invest $100M into a moderately-superior incandescent lightbulb using yesterday's technology that lasts 100kh and 5k cycles and sells for $1 more than the next one. Maybe if we (perhaps a science/engineering nonprofit thinktank that spanned the world and gave away designs and manufacturing expertise) had quasi-communism for R&D, we could have very nice things. It's not my fault if other people are too dumb to comprehend TCO because I would buy the $25 bulb if it had a 30 year warranty.

kube-system 2y ago
> Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 which seemed to fail just after their warranties expired. And? That just sounds like they have good engineers. If you are designing a machine, you have an target lifetime. You'd obviously want the product to last through the warranty period, because warranty claims are a cost to the company. Every choice of a component affects lifetime. Designers of mass-market products can't just use premium components everywhere -- the mass market will not pay steep premiums for otherwise equivalent products. Value engineering and planned obsolescence are not the same thing, but they are often confused. That being said, Samsung appliances suck and I hate them. Mine failed within warranty several times. > And, with the pressures of multinational oligopolies and BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street.. there is little incentive to invest $100M into a moderately-superior incandescent lightbulb using yesterday's technology that lasts 100kh and 5k cycles and sells for $1 more than the next one. It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first. If you release a light bulb that is identical to the best selling one on the shelf, but claims 10x lifespan, your competitor will do something like gluing a weight in theirs, putting some marketing BS on the box, and will put you out of business. Consumers just don't pick products based on actual quality.

owenversteeg 2y ago

I agree with what you said - engineers do the best they can with the budget but the budget is small because people won’t pay for things that last - but it’s worth saying that any boards with electrolytic capacitors have an inherent built in expiration. Any product with rubber has an expiration. Any product with permanent batteries, glued or sealed assemblies, or no spare parts. Much of that is with the customer’s budget, sure. But these days, even among expensive things, nearly nothing is built to last.

sillystuff 2y ago

Not LED light bulbs specifically, but... "The Phoebus cartel engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb and gave birth to planned obsolescence" https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy

RulerOf 2y ago
It's true that the Phoebus cartel arranged to have light bulbs die after a certain number of hours, but bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption. The cartel-defined lifetime limit sits very close to the sweet spot for all of those metrics for incandescent bulbs. Technology Connections explained this well in a video about a year ago: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
- dotancohen 2y ago
  > bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption At a specific temperature, using specific materials. There is no reason to suspect that material science would not advance. Or other constraints would change. A specific company choosing that particular sweetspot for a particular product line is fine. But a collusion between companies dictating that specific constraint (in lieu of, e.g., wattage per lumen) is too clear a marker of anti-consumer intent.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    >At a specific temperature, using specific materials. The temperature of incandescent bulbs is directly related to the light that they give off, and tungsten is the obvious best material, there's no other materials on the horizon giving an improvement for the tech. It really is a pretty well understood tradeoff surface on a very mature technology (which was then displaced by completely different ones).
    - dotancohen 2y ago
      Advancements in materials led to LED bulbs, which operate under different principles and run fall cooler. Yet the time-limited bulb lifetime remains.

graemep 2y ago

The problem is that consumers cannot tell whether the more more expensive one is high quality or whether it is just the same as the cheap one, just priced higher. There have been plenty of discussions on HN about brands that used to produce durable products no longer doing so. I mostly buy cheap stuff because I assume that everything will be built as cheaply as possible, so I will get something that will not last anyway.

xp84 2y ago
Yes, so tragic really. The few people out there not just churning out disposable crap, are not even getting the business of people like you and me, because we know so few can be trusted that we just buy the cheapest thing.