2 ms·

Two things: 1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal

Two things: 1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff. 2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a name. I have been on the engineering side of many business and consumer products and swam in waters of the industry for years. No one has ever used that term. There is no engineering associated with it. No books or talks or specialists. It's purely a function of point #1. People want the lowest cost above all else, so lower quality parts get used. Warranty durations are pretty standard too, 1 year 2 year 5 year. You never see a 566 day warranty like you would expect from a calculated failure model. Also, the best way for 25 years now to make a product fail just after warranty is to program it in software. Everything has a microcontroller nowadays. How many devs here have written that code?

js8 1y ago
Regarding planned obsolescence, what do you think of Veritasium's video on the topic? Anyway, I think nobody in the industry needs to be aware of that term, and it can still be in play. Nobody in media really talks about Chomsky media filters, yet they arguably exist. As you mention, all that is needed for planned obsolence is if engineers only consider parts with expected percentile failure after the warranty, and then go by other criteria, e.g. cheapness. This will easily result in a situation where a product that would otherwise last relies on a cheap part that prematurely failed. For example, I had a monitor where the "on" button failed after couple years. I replaced the failed plastic hinge with a piece of cardboard and the monitor still works, good 15 years later.

js8 1y ago

Regarding planned obsolescence, what do you think of Veritasium's video on the topic? Anyway, I think nobody in the industry needs to be aware of that term, and it can still be in play. Nobody in media really talks about Chomsky media filters, yet they arguably exist. As you mention, all that is needed for planned obsolence is if engineers only consider parts with expected percentile failure after the warranty, and then go by other criteria, e.g. cheapness. This will easily result in a situation where a product that would otherwise last relies on a cheap part that prematurely failed. For example, I had a monitor where the "on" button failed after couple years. I replaced the failed plastic hinge with a piece of cardboard and the monitor still works, good 15 years later.