5 ms·

The article is complete and utter nonsense, probably intentionally so because it's the type that will drive engagement. The reason planned obsolescence is insid

The article is complete and utter nonsense, probably intentionally so because it's the type that will drive engagement. The reason planned obsolescence is insidiously effective is precisely because the typical consumer does not take reasonable account of product longevity. You can easily say 'yeah I like how bright [or whatever else] this bulb is' but lifespans are scarcely taken into account. If they were then massive swathes of the market wouldn't exist - a typical example being the $20 coffee makers which you'll end up paying way more for than a decent one due to the fact they just constantly break. And all cartels are obviously built around maximizing income, so I don't understand what 'illegitimate reasoning' would be. The same thing is still certainly happening today, but without the paper trail. A clear example of it is in the video game console industry. All the way up until the PS3 era of consoles, both Microsoft and Sony were heavily subsidizing their hardware. The video card in the original XBox was worth substantially more than the retail price of the system itself. Then in the PS4 era they both stopped, at the same time and started releasing consoles in mid-range retail hardware with minimal subsidization. That makes 0 sense from a competitive point of view. If your main competition stops subsidizing their product, that's the exact time you subsidize harder than ever and claim the market for yourself. But it makes perfect sense if a couple of c-levels happened to have a chat and casually mentioned that ending the subsidization battles would end up being vastly more profitable for both of them. 'Yeah, I agree.'

mathgeek 3mo ago
> a typical example being the $20 coffee makers which you'll end up paying way more for than a decent one due to the fact they just constantly break. I chuckled a bit realizing that you probably meant a decent coffee maker to cost far less than what I think a “decent” one does. Took me a moment to shake “you could buy a $20 machine every couple years for decades before you break even.”
- somenameforme 3mo ago
  Yeah a genuinely nice machine is going to set you back plenty, but is built to last forever and can be easily repaired to achieve that. On the other hand a French Press costs like $10, lasts forever, and makes an amazing cup of coffee. But the $20 coffee machines are basically just a scam, but one that works because people just don't appropriately weight longevity.
  - brookst 3mo ago
    There are a lot of people for whom the choice is not “spend $20 every two years, or spend $200 today and never again” but instead “spend $20 today or just not have a working coffee maker”
    - somenameforme 3mo ago
      There needs to be a term for this argument, because I think it's frequently used but generally fallacious and primarily used to defend the indefensible. It's a sort of strawman, in that you're concocting some demographic as something being reasonable for even though that demographic either doesn't exist, or exists in negligible quantities. The pitifulman? And on top of all of this - again, French press. Cheaper than coffee maker and makes better coffee than a coffee maker. Are we to now invoke the same pitifulman again and claim that there's this same demographic that can't afford anything, yet works so much that even the extra 2 minutes you'd spend with a French press in impossible for them and their 7 part time jobs? I mean FFS we live in a world where you can earn $20/hour frying frozen precut fries at McDonalds.
      - mathgeek 3mo ago
        … but what good is a french press without a $200 gooseneck kettle? :)
    - zimpenfish 3mo ago
      cf Vimes' theory of boots[0] which is basically the same point. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
      - somenameforme 3mo ago
        Again I don't really think many of these concepts really apply any longer. I'm currently wearing $10 Chinese knock-off shoes that are lasting for years comfortably, while there are plenty of low income types running around in Air Jordans because of marketing. This is part of the reason I have a bit of a personal crusade against marketing and advertising. I think its currently one of the main things that is realistically keeping the poor poor. Endless creation of artificial demand and instilling false hope about what 'luxury' goods would do for a person is just screwing over poor people. Some hip hop and other stuff has started going down this track [1], but it's still outvolumed a few hundred times over by the culture of glorifying being exploited by corporations. [1] - https://youtu.be/QK8mJJJvaes?t=151 https://youtu.be/QK8mJJJvaes?t=151
mathgeek 3mo ago
Regarding the PS3 specifically, that was the breaking point for subsidizing because it ended up being famously and heavily used for compute clusters. We see the same effects today where any chip useful for high end gaming is also useful for AI.
- somenameforme 3mo ago
  While true I expect this likely paid for itself many times over in indirect advertising. People using PS3's as supercomputing clusters was phenomenal advertising for the PS3 that was a generally mediocre system for gaming. It seems that Sony was betting everything on dev's bending over backwards to maximize the system's highly unique hardware and leaving ports to other systems working as second rate citizens, but instead the exact opposite happened. The PS3 did poorly, but I think it would have done much more poorly if not for things like the compute cluster 'marketing.' Their mistake wasn't the subsidization but launching with extremely esoteric hardware.
  - mathgeek 3mo ago
    I dunno. At the end of the gen Sony had lost a billion dollars on the PS3 last I read about it.
    - somenameforme 3mo ago
      They lost money on the console itself, but were already profitable after accounting for software, accessories, and so on by 2008. [1] The console was released in late 2006 and was a beast of subsidization in part because of the heated blu-ray/hd-dvd war which now seems quite quaint. The modern business models are just really taking the consumer for a ride. If either company maintained the previous business model, they'd have made the competitor look like a clown. It was basically a prisoner's dilemma, but they both chose to collude. It's hard to explain that without assuming that they're colluding, which is basically a tautology. [1] - https://www.gamespot.com/articles/hirai-claims-ps3-platform-profitable-explains-new-logo/1100-6216228/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/hirai-claims-ps3-platform-...
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
pie_flavor 3mo ago
If you put numbers on a package, the consumer will choose the bigger numbers. Taking some statistic out of context like "the typical consumer does not take reasonable account of product longevity" doesn't make sense when the only two things a lightbulb can do better are 'be brighter' and 'last longer', and both are prominently displayed on the package. The typical consumer does not pick coffee makers based on longevity because the coffee makers don't put longevity on the package, they put the number of feature buttons, and then the consumer chooses based on that instead of inferring or researching a longevity, and the actual takeaway is that consumers are bad at inference. And on this you call the article's extensive description of how lightbulbs work and how lifespan trades off with efficacy 'complete and utter nonsense'? The video game system analysis is junk too. No, Sony and Microsoft are not in a cartel, you can tell by how they're in vicious competition with each other and Sony's winning. Assuming similar moves made at similar times is obvious proof of collusion is assuming that one party's move was just picked out of a hat, rather than market incentives prompting this move and applying equally to both companies causing both to come to the same conclusions for the same reasons. The actual reason the level of subsidization dropped, which you can find by googling for five seconds, is because they switched from bespoke hardware stacks to standard PC components, which were cheaper. No, you do not make the stupid financial move of making your hardware stack even more expensive just because your competitor made theirs more efficient.
- somenameforme 3mo ago
  The level of subsidization has nothing to do with hardware customization. You can have subsidized retail hardware or customized hardware sold at cost. They both went from high end heavily subsidized hardware to mid-range minimally subsidized hardware at the exact same time. Colluding in this way means they both dramatically increase their profit margins, and obviously does not preclude competition in other aspects. Though they are also overtly colluding in other areas. For instance console exclusives used to be a major selling point, but they greatly empower studios to the consoles manufacturers detriment. The PS1 and PS2 had around 500 exclusive titles each. By the PS3 we're down to 174, 49 for the PS4 and now we're down to 26 in the PS5 era. Microsoft trends similarly and it was a strategic decision, to the point that they made a big announcement recently about returning to exclusives. As if the idea of having a competitive edge is some novel or revolutionary concept.
audunw 3mo ago
But the article isn’t saying that no form of planned obsolescence exists. If you think it’s important to make people aware of genuine planned obsolescence, then use examples of genuine planned obsolescence. Using incorrect or highly misleading examples is doing the cause a big disfavour. You say the article is nonsense but all your points are about entirely different products/markets. So what exactly was nonsense about the article. It’s factually correct, and it’s raising awareness of something important: that we shouldn’t trust narratives just because they’re compelling and useful to make people engaged in a cause (the fight against planned obsolescence). The kind of standardisation we got with light bulbs is exactly the thing we want: the avoid companies trying to sell you a bad product (one that wastes electricity and dumps heat in your home whether you want it or not), so they can use some less important metric (buy this! It lasts twice as long the competitors!) to sell you stuff. Basically a scam. We don’t want to throw the baby out of the bathwater. Companies should be allowed to cooperate and set standard (NACS is a recent example) that is mutually beneficial to everyone. Then we create regulations to address egregious cases of planned obsolescence. Like EUs recent regulations for replaceable batteries - though as we now see it’s a double edged sword. Some products were made worse in a mildly significant way. That’s OK though as long as we decided that’s what we want through a democratic process.
- somenameforme 3mo ago
  The article is literally lying for clickbait. You can read a real article with actual research, quotes from the involved parties, and more here. [1] You can also read the government lawsuits with similar investigations. [2] The cartel's sole and only motivation was profit. Getting the bulbs down to 1000 hours was driven solely by a desire to increase repeated purchases - planned obsolescence. Most criminal organizations give themselves a moralistic argument, probably in part to ease cognitive dissonance as I think most people, including those doing awful things, are inherently moral. For instance many of the brutal drug lords during the hey day of Columbia's cocaine trafficking would spend significant amounts of money supporting education, religion, and other forms of local social services in various poorer areas in the country. The same is true of Mexican drug cartels in modern times. So it is true that one of the easiest ways to reduce the life of a bulb is to have it burn brighter, but that's largely incidental. It's akin to how Apple actively downgrades performance on older iPhones under the pretext of enabling them to operate longer with the reduced battery life. In reality it makes the phones miserable to use, far moreso than a reduced battery life, and drives users to go purchase new phones. Exact same business. The pretext is just a pretext. [1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy [2] - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/82/753/1755675/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/8...

mathgeek 3mo ago

> a typical example being the $20 coffee makers which you'll end up paying way more for than a decent one due to the fact they just constantly break. I chuckled a bit realizing that you probably meant a decent coffee maker to cost far less than what I think a “decent” one does. Took me a moment to shake “you could buy a $20 machine every couple years for decades before you break even.”

somenameforme 3mo ago
Yeah a genuinely nice machine is going to set you back plenty, but is built to last forever and can be easily repaired to achieve that. On the other hand a French Press costs like $10, lasts forever, and makes an amazing cup of coffee. But the $20 coffee machines are basically just a scam, but one that works because people just don't appropriately weight longevity.
- brookst 3mo ago
  There are a lot of people for whom the choice is not “spend $20 every two years, or spend $200 today and never again” but instead “spend $20 today or just not have a working coffee maker”
  - somenameforme 3mo ago
    There needs to be a term for this argument, because I think it's frequently used but generally fallacious and primarily used to defend the indefensible. It's a sort of strawman, in that you're concocting some demographic as something being reasonable for even though that demographic either doesn't exist, or exists in negligible quantities. The pitifulman? And on top of all of this - again, French press. Cheaper than coffee maker and makes better coffee than a coffee maker. Are we to now invoke the same pitifulman again and claim that there's this same demographic that can't afford anything, yet works so much that even the extra 2 minutes you'd spend with a French press in impossible for them and their 7 part time jobs? I mean FFS we live in a world where you can earn $20/hour frying frozen precut fries at McDonalds.
    - mathgeek 3mo ago
      … but what good is a french press without a $200 gooseneck kettle? :)
  - zimpenfish 3mo ago
    cf Vimes' theory of boots[0] which is basically the same point. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
    - somenameforme 3mo ago
      Again I don't really think many of these concepts really apply any longer. I'm currently wearing $10 Chinese knock-off shoes that are lasting for years comfortably, while there are plenty of low income types running around in Air Jordans because of marketing. This is part of the reason I have a bit of a personal crusade against marketing and advertising. I think its currently one of the main things that is realistically keeping the poor poor. Endless creation of artificial demand and instilling false hope about what 'luxury' goods would do for a person is just screwing over poor people. Some hip hop and other stuff has started going down this track [1], but it's still outvolumed a few hundred times over by the culture of glorifying being exploited by corporations. [1] - https://youtu.be/QK8mJJJvaes?t=151 https://youtu.be/QK8mJJJvaes?t=151

mathgeek 3mo ago

Regarding the PS3 specifically, that was the breaking point for subsidizing because it ended up being famously and heavily used for compute clusters. We see the same effects today where any chip useful for high end gaming is also useful for AI.

somenameforme 3mo ago
While true I expect this likely paid for itself many times over in indirect advertising. People using PS3's as supercomputing clusters was phenomenal advertising for the PS3 that was a generally mediocre system for gaming. It seems that Sony was betting everything on dev's bending over backwards to maximize the system's highly unique hardware and leaving ports to other systems working as second rate citizens, but instead the exact opposite happened. The PS3 did poorly, but I think it would have done much more poorly if not for things like the compute cluster 'marketing.' Their mistake wasn't the subsidization but launching with extremely esoteric hardware.
- mathgeek 3mo ago
  I dunno. At the end of the gen Sony had lost a billion dollars on the PS3 last I read about it.
  - somenameforme 3mo ago
    They lost money on the console itself, but were already profitable after accounting for software, accessories, and so on by 2008. [1] The console was released in late 2006 and was a beast of subsidization in part because of the heated blu-ray/hd-dvd war which now seems quite quaint. The modern business models are just really taking the consumer for a ride. If either company maintained the previous business model, they'd have made the competitor look like a clown. It was basically a prisoner's dilemma, but they both chose to collude. It's hard to explain that without assuming that they're colluding, which is basically a tautology. [1] - https://www.gamespot.com/articles/hirai-claims-ps3-platform-profitable-explains-new-logo/1100-6216228/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/hirai-claims-ps3-platform-...

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

pie_flavor 3mo ago

If you put numbers on a package, the consumer will choose the bigger numbers. Taking some statistic out of context like "the typical consumer does not take reasonable account of product longevity" doesn't make sense when the only two things a lightbulb can do better are 'be brighter' and 'last longer', and both are prominently displayed on the package. The typical consumer does not pick coffee makers based on longevity because the coffee makers don't put longevity on the package, they put the number of feature buttons, and then the consumer chooses based on that instead of inferring or researching a longevity, and the actual takeaway is that consumers are bad at inference. And on this you call the article's extensive description of how lightbulbs work and how lifespan trades off with efficacy 'complete and utter nonsense'? The video game system analysis is junk too. No, Sony and Microsoft are not in a cartel, you can tell by how they're in vicious competition with each other and Sony's winning. Assuming similar moves made at similar times is obvious proof of collusion is assuming that one party's move was just picked out of a hat, rather than market incentives prompting this move and applying equally to both companies causing both to come to the same conclusions for the same reasons. The actual reason the level of subsidization dropped, which you can find by googling for five seconds, is because they switched from bespoke hardware stacks to standard PC components, which were cheaper. No, you do not make the stupid financial move of making your hardware stack even more expensive just because your competitor made theirs more efficient.

somenameforme 3mo ago
The level of subsidization has nothing to do with hardware customization. You can have subsidized retail hardware or customized hardware sold at cost. They both went from high end heavily subsidized hardware to mid-range minimally subsidized hardware at the exact same time. Colluding in this way means they both dramatically increase their profit margins, and obviously does not preclude competition in other aspects. Though they are also overtly colluding in other areas. For instance console exclusives used to be a major selling point, but they greatly empower studios to the consoles manufacturers detriment. The PS1 and PS2 had around 500 exclusive titles each. By the PS3 we're down to 174, 49 for the PS4 and now we're down to 26 in the PS5 era. Microsoft trends similarly and it was a strategic decision, to the point that they made a big announcement recently about returning to exclusives. As if the idea of having a competitive edge is some novel or revolutionary concept.

audunw 3mo ago

But the article isn’t saying that no form of planned obsolescence exists. If you think it’s important to make people aware of genuine planned obsolescence, then use examples of genuine planned obsolescence. Using incorrect or highly misleading examples is doing the cause a big disfavour. You say the article is nonsense but all your points are about entirely different products/markets. So what exactly was nonsense about the article. It’s factually correct, and it’s raising awareness of something important: that we shouldn’t trust narratives just because they’re compelling and useful to make people engaged in a cause (the fight against planned obsolescence). The kind of standardisation we got with light bulbs is exactly the thing we want: the avoid companies trying to sell you a bad product (one that wastes electricity and dumps heat in your home whether you want it or not), so they can use some less important metric (buy this! It lasts twice as long the competitors!) to sell you stuff. Basically a scam. We don’t want to throw the baby out of the bathwater. Companies should be allowed to cooperate and set standard (NACS is a recent example) that is mutually beneficial to everyone. Then we create regulations to address egregious cases of planned obsolescence. Like EUs recent regulations for replaceable batteries - though as we now see it’s a double edged sword. Some products were made worse in a mildly significant way. That’s OK though as long as we decided that’s what we want through a democratic process.

somenameforme 3mo ago
The article is literally lying for clickbait. You can read a real article with actual research, quotes from the involved parties, and more here. [1] You can also read the government lawsuits with similar investigations. [2] The cartel's sole and only motivation was profit. Getting the bulbs down to 1000 hours was driven solely by a desire to increase repeated purchases - planned obsolescence. Most criminal organizations give themselves a moralistic argument, probably in part to ease cognitive dissonance as I think most people, including those doing awful things, are inherently moral. For instance many of the brutal drug lords during the hey day of Columbia's cocaine trafficking would spend significant amounts of money supporting education, religion, and other forms of local social services in various poorer areas in the country. The same is true of Mexican drug cartels in modern times. So it is true that one of the easiest ways to reduce the life of a bulb is to have it burn brighter, but that's largely incidental. It's akin to how Apple actively downgrades performance on older iPhones under the pretext of enabling them to operate longer with the reduced battery life. In reality it makes the phones miserable to use, far moreso than a reduced battery life, and drives users to go purchase new phones. Exact same business. The pretext is just a pretext. [1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy [2] - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/82/753/1755675/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/8...