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Why Do Gadgets Break?
TurboTurnip writes "A post on the Crave blog at CNET asks: Why are modern consumer electronics so easily broken? It argues that the 21st Century is 'The Age of the Flimsy' where 'your gadgets will simply break within the year.' Post author Chris Stevens talks about how computers are fast enough for the average user, and the only way to make consumers upgrade is 'increasingly poor build quality ... Engineers have built obsolescence into mass-produced technology since the 1920s. There are two kinds of planned deterioration in a product: one is technical, the other is stylistic.' The writer compares the build quality of a 20 year-old IBM XT to the modern Motorola Razr phone and concludes that modern gadgets are 'delicate, beautiful supermodels that can't go the distance.'"
Where can I pick up one of those delicate, beautiful supermodels gadgets everyone's talking about these days? At an Apple store?
-Teiresias
People drop them, spill water on them, http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t= 8764 put them in the washing machine, etcetra. People are stupid and careless.
In addition, capacitors and other parts DO have a limited lifetime.
http://pinopsida.com
An original IBM PC cost thousands of dollars when they were new. An iPod costs 200 dollars new, approximately. Surely a 10-fold difference in price reflects more than advancements in technology, it also must reflect a decline in longevity/quality based on price? If you made a $2000 iPod and focused that money on making a lasting piece of equipment, it would probably come out significantly longer-lived than the $200 model.
stuff |
Keyboards these days are neither supermodels nor even remotely stylish. Yet they are exceedingly flimsy. If you bludgeon someone over the head with a keyboard these days, it simply shatters into dozens of pieces. The old XT keyboard, however, could have been used to dispatch Jimmy Hoffa.
--
BMO
You might not be able to just throw gadgets around with impunity, but be a little careful with them and they'll last for at least a few years.
Examples:
- Powerbook: 4+ years
- Palm: 3 years, no problems
- Cell phone: 2+ so far
- iPod: almost 4 years. Battery is shot, but that's a physics issue, not a quality issue.
The company has more incentive to make products that will break after 2 years of use so that you will be forced to purchase a new product from them. Why make a TV that will last 25 years when I can sell you a high end plasma that you will have to replace in 5 years? By making products that break it ensures that customers will continue to buy from the manufacturers.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
it's obvious... youre living in america. Do you think ipod nanos didnt exist 7 years ago. Of course they did... but why sell someone ONE mp3 player when you can sell them 5 or 6 of increasing HD space and smaller sizes... that way everyone enjoys getting something "better" while you sell the same product 6 times to each customer. Love America
Rubbish. The RAZR is the rebirth of a much older Motorola design, the Startac. This was the point where mobiles stopped being bricks and started being stylish. Even though the startac had to accommodate a credit-card sizes SIM card it was still only the same size as the RAZR. The Startac was a beautiful phone and easy to use. I paid over £300 for mine almost 10 years ago.
Some phones I guess are like clothes, they come in and go out of fashion. RAZR is just a remake of the classic older design. The design of the Startac and the RAZR are timeless.
Don't blame me - this
I will testify to their sturdiness! They are being used as blocks, to hold up my 1962 Jaguar XJ12 - itself another of those time-honored robust technologies, in contrast to today's delicate and tempermental flim-flams!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Because that's what consumers demand. They'd rather have features than durability, probably because by the time the gadget breaks, there's a better, cheaper one available.
Why does Walmart import tons of cheap Chinese goods? Because customers want them.
I found my Razr after it was missing for three weeks. Somebody had buried it in the backyard.
There was not a scratch on it, and it worked just fine after a recharge.
This guy must be using one of the pink ones- those are sissy phones.
And if you compare my new washing machine to a 20 year-old umbrella, you'd reach the opposite conclusion. How about comparing the Razr to a Walkman or a Swatch, not to a cinderblock of a product from a mainframe maker?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Giles Slade's book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America is a good read on the designed obsolescence and market force.
When I bought my DVD player, I got a *really* good deal, and spent $400 on it. I don't even know HOW many years it's been (10 or 11 years, if I recall), and it still works just fine.
These days, people spent $35 on one, and whine when it breaks in a year. C'est la vie.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Is seeing how much older electronics are still around compared to new. I have tube amplifiers that are over 50 years old and still operate because the parts are easily servicable. IMHO most of the electronics that fail early are due to bad solder joints. Your average tv is probably assembled by children in an open air factory somewhere in the pacific. Parts are bought from different suppliers constantly to save a penny here or there. Remember the recent rash of motherboard failures due to leaking capacitors?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I've dropped my share of gadgets and I have to say that it is exceedingly rare that they actually break. My cell phone (A Blackberry 7100t) has been through a considerable amount of abuse in the two years I've owned it (partially due to the badly designed belt clip for this phone, if you run or jump with it the phone will fly out). Other than some scratches on the screen, it's as good as the day I bought it.
The only computer motherboards I've ever had die were an actual IBM motherboard (back before they even formed Aptiva), and a Soltek Socket A that fell victim to cap explosions (which were an epidemic at the time). Otherwise, my tech has all been replaced due to gross obsolescence rather than actual breakage (which is a shame when you're waiting for a Matrox G200 to die so you can upgrade your video card, and eventually just have to buy a Geforce 5900 because the new motherboard didn't support high voltage AGP).
There is a caveat here: When I buy stuff I don't buy it if it feels flimsy or is a cheap knockoff made by a no-name company. Perhaps the lesson for the author is: Stop buying cheap crap and maybe it will last longer?
I read the internet for the articles.
No no you misunderstand .. stuff you buy nowadays .. you dont really own. You're renting it for the warranty period.
Proof:
If you owned something you would be able to open it up, reverse engineer it, and find out how it works. Why? CAUSE YOU OWN IT.
Remember when you could do that? When TV's came with schematics?
Modern devices quite intentionally are designed to fail.
1. Design specifications intentionally limit durability
2. Business decision to make the device fail. If I can't sell any more widgets, then how will I stay in business?
3. No consumers want something to last for decades.
Stories like this are an embarrassment of riches.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
An original IBM PC weighed 28 pounds with two floppy disk drives. A cell phone (err... mobile?) with a heavy gauge steel case would probably be pretty durable, but I wouldn't want to carry one around.
Engines are the same. Get a factory rebuild block from ANY auto maker or even a engine rebuilder and you will get an engine that will only make it 100,000 miles.
Proper rebuilding techniques like polishing the crank (Ok stop the snickering) and other things that are SUPPOSED to be done in engines when building them are not being done.
Thus cars dont last very long or handle stress well and break easy.. same for gadgets. they are made as cheap as possible to get the highest profits possible.
Almost nothing is made for quality and longivity.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's as easy as that. Many but not all people are less than likely to purchase a new gadget if the previous one is still considered cool and is operating properly. And this is a way to make the new purchase more probable.
Over the last couple of years I've been impressed with quality of "cheap" electronics. It's pretty remarkable that companies can cram the amount of functionality into gadgets at the price.... look at cheap gigabit switches... 8 port gigabit for around $150... or wireless routers.... lots of features, small and should last 3 or more years... Most of my gadgets are replaced because I want more functionality or cooler features, not because they broke.
I still have 4+ year old PCs happily working and other electronics that live a long life....
The quality of most devices is extraordinarily high.
I accidentally washed and spin dried my new USB stick and it still works. You go try that with a 5 1/2" floppy and tell me how well that works out for you.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
"MADE IN CHINA"
Seems to be stamped on my crappiest gadgets. They have improved quite a bit, though. Still, I actively look for "MADE IN JAPAN", "MADE IN KOREA", "MADE IN USA", or "MADE IN MEXICO" preferentially and in that order. Sometimes the same model will be available from two or more source factories, even if it's a bit pricier. "MADE IN KOREA" used to be bad, but now is as good or almost as good as Japan, so presumably the Chinese stuff will improve as well and we'll have to get our cheap crap somewhere else.
Note that I'm not dissing the Chinese. Rather, in my experience, it is the fault of western, Japanese, and Korean companies who expect to dump their existing manufacturing processes into a new Chinese factory and get a similar result. Different culture, different source vendors, different results.
I'm also not dissing Europe, but very few European-built gadgets are available in the US so I didn't bother mentioning them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Taking good care of your electronics is the key to making them last. Especially if you pay a bit more for a well engineered one. I know of a lot of original Gameboys that still have life in them.
... your gadgets will simply break within the year".
I'm an electrical engineer. While there may be system-level/market-level planned obselescence (based on outdated protocols, DRM, or style -- think iPod G1-4), there certainly is not one at the component-level (chips/ICs). Microprocessors are reliable as ever.
This essay lacks references. And, following argument is groundless: "The electronics industry has clearly spotted this problem, and
Explain.
idm owns me
Well, I once had a senile landlord who was convinced that consumer products where "designed to break" nowadays. The problem in his case was that he always choose the cheapest crap he could possibly find, thereby, in a sense, "proving" himself right.
If people stopped fooling themself buying stuff that breaks, we would push the inferiour products off the market.
But, alas, a fool and his money are soon parted...
Johannes Schöön
p.s. The design lifetime of a Swatch is 20 years. (No, it is not designed to break down then. It is supposed to survive that long, at least.)
who today wants to keep their cell phone for more than 1 or 2 years... in 1 or 2 years there's better cameras, more storage, nicer/smaller designs, etc... products don't need to last long anymore, because the industry is changing too fast!
Yes, the original IBM PC (from which the XT differs only at the motherboard and power supply level - the case is identical) was a tank. I had one. It had a ~60W power supply (same size as the 600W and 800W supplies today) and a couple of internal 5.25" floppies. The case was probably three times as heavy as the aluminum case that my last PC was in.
This is precisely my point - consumers don't want big heavy tanks. At the same time, almost none of my electronics die before they are simply obsolete. Hell, I have a panasonic laserdisc player that's old enough to have cost $1100 new (though I got it at the flea market) that's still working almost as well as it ever has - sometimes the front door doesn't shut itself, which I could probably fix with some grease. It works well enough though, so instead I leave it the hell alone and just use the damned thing.
I actually have a Motorola RAZR and it's an incredibly well-designed little lump of electronics. Yes, it is fragile. This is because it is small. I could have stuck with my V555, which was significantly more sturdy, but I wanted a smaller phone. I was willing to make that tradeoff. You can still buy non-flip phones, which are sturdier. That wasn't what I wanted either. And actually, it's not really ALL that fragile, you just can't use it to prop up one table leg like you could with something with the heft of an IBM PC. Sure, we used to have cellphones you could bludgeon people to death with... but that's not a feature. Having it fit nicely in my pocket is a feature.
You CAN buy quality hardware. Most of us don't. We want small and cheap. We get it. I agree that the e-waste problem is serious but it can be solved through manufacturing. Materials science is currently the limiting factor in electronics durability, because consumers want small and light devices.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
more complicated = more parts = more likely to break
As much as I love a good conspiracy products like the RAZR are flimsy because that's what the market demands. People want something that looks cool and is light and... uhm... looks cool. Surprise! You don't get heavy-duty parts with that.
On the other hand the original IBM PS2 tower (which the article doesn't mention by name, but was of that same era) was marked "Two person lift" complete with nifty stickers of people injuring their backs on it. It wasn't supposed to be light and pretty, it was meant to win a fight with a Mack truck.
Two person lift towers are out, Mac minis are in. The market wants pretty...
in addition (and this goes for products as a whole, not just consumer electronics) the market wants the cheapest thing out there. Cheaper! Cheaper! Cheaper! Why buy a $2000 computer when you can have one for $500? Guess what... this means cheaper, flimsy parts.
Offer the author a 5lb $800 cellphone that can be dropped from the top of the Empire State Building and he'll pass, just like the rest of the market.
They're flimsy because the mass production scales cut costs by automating out repairs by humans in favor of manufacture and replacement by machines.
Replacement for wearing out offers the chance to get a new one with some incremental features, and the newer styles that have so much social value.
The hidden cost remaining in these gadgets is discarding them. Either labor-intensive recycling, or environmental pollution plus increased scarcity of materials. The original seller doesn't pay most of that cost, so it doesn't show up in the sale price. But it costs the consumers in increased aftermarket costs and labor.
We should take the flimsiness that economics encourages to the next step: biodegradeablility. Make them flimsy not just to human mechanical use, but to our ecosystem, including bacteria. Or even feedable to our pets. That will cut the costs of discard way down. Which will leave us more money to buy new ones.
Until we can get those little buggers to reproduce themselves. Eventually, they'll be recycling us.
--
make install -not war
I still use (hell, cherish) my HP calculator I got in 7th grade. It was built like a tank sometime around 1980.
I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
Article Summary:
My name is Chris Stevens and I like to whine because I dropped my Motorola RAZR and it broke.
Get over it. If you wanted durable, you wouldn't have picked the RAZR. It's pretty obvious to everyone else that it wasn't meant to be durable. Why don't you get a cell phone the size and weight of your precious IBM XT and tell me what you think.
yes, yes, planned obsolescense etc...
/few/ people would pay the $120 it would take to create and sell a heavy duty all metal, robust keyboard, it would not be enough to compete with the millions that won't pay over $12.95.
The #1 reason that modern gadgets break is because market pricing pressure makes then that way. They are cheap cheap cheap. While a
I work in the hardware industry and pricing pressure causes manufacturers to do crazy/dangerous things to reduce the cost of every single component in a 1000 component product. Farm out calls for 1000 parts to the lowest bidder and you can pretty much guess what the total end result will be on the quality.
ISO 9000 has pretty much gone out the window in the last few years as being just too expensive to implement and manitain by the entire supply chain. Thus we are now constantly (Yes, still even today) dealing with capaciters that explode after 100 hours use, switches that break after 100 presses and an almost infinate variety of unplanned but inevitable hardware failures.
And in the end, if that means that someone has to buy a new phone and a new keyboard every year well, the companies that make them could have worse things happen than selling another product to the same customer. Even if the customer gets mad an never buys from that company again, it doesn't matter, pissed off customers of the competitor will come running back to THEM. As long as their quality is not significantly worse than their competitiors anyway.
But in the end, the age of the flimsy is mostly the end result of the age of extreme consumerism where everyone must have everything and it must all cost 12.95 or less.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Then buy a phone which has durability as a feature. Nextel has a bunch of motorola phones that will survive all kinds of abuse. I've had an i90 for going on 4 years now. I've gone through 3 faceplates, 2 batteries and 2 keypads.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
If people stop using their optical drives as cup holders, rashly flipping open their cell phones like the way they do in movies, and stop downloading files like "pr0n-nude-naked-porn-boobs-sex-dogpron-fuk-angeli najolie.jpg.exe", yes we would see less broken electronics.
Improvements in the tools (CAD/CAM) and the methods (finite element analysis) are to "blame" for this "problem."
I love overbuilt gear, too, but a RAZR built with 14 gauge galvanized steel would weigh a pound and cost as much as your old XT did when new. I for one welcome our cheap-gadget-engineering overlords.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Actually, some people just want a phone that works as a phone.
Sure, there are other reasons behind it, but ultimately the reason mass-market goods are as poorly made as they are is that the market - that's you, your friends, neighbors, everyone who posts on slashdot, and all the rest - has consistently chosen to buy the shoddier (hence, usually, cheaper, of course) goods rather than the better made ones. The thing is, in a field where there's such a rapid rate of obsolescence for other reasons, buying cheap stuff that's just good enough may make a lot of economic sense, so the crappy state of typical PC hardware may be inevitable; ditto the limited market share for Apple's [once?] arguably better built hardware.
Unfortunately, much the same appears to apply to the market for politicians these days, though the emphasis there is on sleaziness rather than shodiness...
Collect underpants.
Break underpants.
Profit!
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
I've still got a Tandy PC-1 pocket computer from the early 1980s. It was built by Sharp and re-badged for Radio Shack. It's got an extremely slow processor and less than 1.5 kilobytes of RAM for BASIC programs.
It was made in Japan and you can tell that it was built to last for decades. The chassis is sturdy metal with almost no flex to it and the keys are of very high quality. By today's technological standards the thing's a joke. But I bet it outlives my HP Pocket PC.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I'd reply with a comment but my keyboard's broken.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
"Made in China"
'nuff said.
About 20 years ago at work we estimated the build cost of a piece of complicated equipment using a program called PRICE (I believed developed by RCA). Two of the key determining factors of cost were size and weight. We thought no way are weight and size that important. Over the years I have decided this not to be true. For similar items as weight goes down so does cost. Yes making stuff light weight means it is less rugged but cheaper. Think of hard drives. My first one was a 10 meg that weighed 5-10 lbs and took up the space that two 5-1/4" CD drives do today. These disks failed quite often and cost several hundred $ in the 1980s. Just bought a 120G byte drive on special for $49. Maybe it weighs 1/10 of the old drive.
It would also be a waste of money and materials. In 1981 you didn't replace your computer every couple years, so it made sense to build them like tanks. Today manufacturers know that you're going to get something better (bigger / faster / etc) in a couple years, so designing their product to last for 15 years would make it 10x more expensive than their competitors with no real benefit to most people.
Then again, the iPod is a bad example of this. They're built like tanks. I have an original 2001 iPod (5 gigabytes!), and it's still as good as the day I bought it. It may outlive me, and I'm still pretty young.
The electronic gadgets I have whose designers knew they wouldn't be obsolete in 3 years generally did a great job at making them last. I have an inexpensive laser printer, and a reasonably-priced stereo receiver, and both are *solid*. Laser printer and stereo receiver technology isn't improving at the rate of, say, computers, so they're engineered to last much longer.
It's not as simple as "everything's cheaper, and you get what you pay for". Cars are much cheaper now than they used to be, and also far better. In fact, many things are.
Nowadays engineers can find the exact minimum amount of materials and the like to use to acheive their goal. Back int he day they'd find an approximate and double it too make sure. That'd be my guess.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I have boxes full of perfectly working electronic gadgets that have become obsolete. It is rare that anything electronic ever fails on me.
I would love to throw away a lot of stuff but as long as it keeps working, I think that I may use it some day so I save it.
Some stuff:
- a box of about 15 PDAs (Palm and PPC) dating back to the invention of the PDA - 10 years ago. They all work perfectly.
- a box of about 15 cell phones dating back to the invention of the cell phone. They all work perfectly. (My current cell phone is one that is 4 years old I reclaimed from my daughter who apparently used it as a hockey puck judging from the dents and scratches on the case. It works perfectly.)
- a box of about 10 wireless home telephones dating back about 15 years. They all work perfectly. I'm even still using one that's about 10 years old.
- my office is stuffed with old computers (desktops and laptops) going back 20 years that I can't bear to throw away even though they are all obsolete (I still have an original Compaq luggable). They all work perfectly. I needed to retrieve some data from some old backup tapes and 5" floppys so I fired up an old Windows 95 computer last week and it worked perfectly.
- lots more stuff that never breaks
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The Diamond Rio MP3 player talked about durability when it first came out. I think they named it after the Diamond Rio trucks which were supposedly really durable. I have my original Rio 600 from 1998 and it still works fine.
This is simple. These items have now been commoditized. When the original PC came out, it was like $7K. Now you can buy a Dell for $300. Maybe less if you have a coupon. (IBM didn't have any coupons.)
:)) are telling manufacturers with their credit cards that they desire cheaper products, not better products.
Consumers (except for Apple customers
When I got my first job out of college, the development cycle was 18 months. By the time I left there 6 years later, it was down to 6 months. They also changed to a "we're going to have regularly-scheduled releases" mentality, rather than "we'll ship the product when it's ready". The focus is now on getting a [semi-functional] product out the door.
And, of course, Microsoft has taught the world that it's perfectly acceptable to ship things that aren't ready. Most Windows admins won't touch a new MS product until SP1 comes out because they expect the initial release to have huge bugs.
The good company pays attention to what their customers do with their purchases and upgrades so that the next version will be able to do it better.
A lot of products have a dropproof/waterproof/dustproof alternative, at an increase in cost. People opt for the cheap model. The consumer makes the choice in the end.
Dude,
If your XT works, than start writing your column on that. Otherwise, pour yourself a nice warm cup of "shut the hell up" because you are part of the problem. You wanted the small sleek phone, and now your stuck with it. If you pull out the suitcase phone that Danny Glover used in Lethal Weapon and start using it, that would be practicing what you preach. Damn, your sites homepage is pushing a column called "Mobile Phones to Upgrade Your Life". Howz that workin out for you? Fscking Hypocrite.
I was looking around this thrashpile house of mine, while trying to figure out why my wireless Logitech Trackman trackball does not work 15cm from my receiver, and saw my digital camera, with a dead pixel (sony dsc-whatever) after a2 months of use, next to it my nikon, 1 bad pixel after 6 years .... next to it, JVC miniDV, just returned from the states after a CCD change, came with a dirty head, so bad it could not record ... hey my free service did not include a head cleaning or checking if the crap was working ...
... on top of my toshiba laptop (that has 10 minutes tops battery time) my brand new HP laptop, 2 dead pixels.....
.. uhm, its empty socket .. since the unit died during an infrared transfer and despite the "you get a new one in a week", for 4 weeks - no news ... my Swatch dive watch, that starts timing dives on the surface, and the AOC widescreen display that is not the nicest quality, but hey, the second exchange does not have dead pixels at least ..... over me, hanging an epson projector - its went is soooo loud i hd to mount it on the roof so I can watch a movie, it's projected black is at best mild grey, but hey I should not complain ... Ohh, behind the desk the ipod's headphone that broke after 1 week of gym use, and next to it the great ITRIP from griffin, that sucks batteries like nothing else ... oh they sound like shit too .... my ipaq's broken external battery, ductaped on, the second exchange of wifi adapter rottening in it unused for months, even when it was brand new, battery died way too fast for even a short wardriving .. next to it my dead t68i showing it's dead face through the transparent drawer .....
.... stay with mechanics, or sports ..... but wait
.....
.....
.... because today's manufacturers do not give a shit, they have better lawyesr, and for most of the people problems like a dead pixel, short battery life, or a squeeeking sound or slightly burnt smell DOES NOT MAKE A DIFFERENCE ....
on the left, my Sony Vaio in pieces, plugged in, went black, no one figured what has happened
next to these MY UWATEC dive computer
Let me not continue, but I think I STOP buying junk. I really have to think if I need all the problems associated with these devices, and maybe just look into an other source of entertainment and forget about electronics, keep it for the workspace
I am waiting for my car at home, this is the 2nd day they spend installing an alarm, but since BMWs are sooo complicated, they cannot make the central lock work...
In fact I had to pick it up yesterday, to notice that some service lights are on (airbag light).... remote starter, window rollup, central lock did not work, and they did not connect the brand new pioneer radio to the antenna - > they did not have the right connector (WTF ???)
OK, if BMWs ar really complicated (hey it is a 95 model), then let's see my VW (gol, simplest after polo). 2 days in the shop and they could not start it, 3 mechanics ($600 in parts), and the belts still make a sound.....
so here is my advice: stay with stuff / only buy stuff
1.that was made in the last century,
2. whereever you live it is a local product
3 has as little electronics as possible (get a car with a Carb, injection is waaay too complicated)
for fun:
play in the sandbox, go for a bike ride, walk your dogs
OK but more seriously : lately I am so annoyed about the quality of products (ANYTHING) that I am really considering changing profession and dumping my current hobbies, and start something completely away from gadgets and computers
One more thing I figured : no matter how much you make, and what price range of products you buy, you will have the same problems with you $50 memory stick, your $200 mp3 player, your $1500 projector or $4000 plasma TV, and even your $10k, $20k, $60k car
I've dropped mine several times. It still works like a champ.
Same for the previous Nokia candybar phones I've had...
Comparing the XT to the RAZR is apples and oranges. How about the old skool 80s brick phone vs. the RAZR?
If I can talk on it and send text messages, that's enough for me. I don't think you can get much smaller than today's phones without them becoming really uncomfortable to use.
-b.
... which cannot support the weight of a car, as seen here.
The writer compares the build quality of a 20 year-old IBM XT to the modern Motorola Razr phone and concludes that modern gadgets are 'delicate, beautiful supermodels that can't go the distance.
Funny, I've had my RAZR since August 2005, and the only thing I've had to replace it the SIM card which, coincidentally enough, just died a little over an hour ago. I've never had a problem with the phone itself, and it's had it's share of accidental drops.
From the article,
"The keypad emits a constant whining noise, like the shrill battle-cry of a wounded pheasant. The screen intermittently flickers on and off, and it occasionally dials random numbers. While the latter is an exciting way of regaining contact with friends you've neglected to call for months, it's not a great testament to the build quality of modern electronics."
This article is clearly just a rant by a RAZR user who probably beat the hell out of his phone. Seriously, what did he really expect would happen when he abused a phone made of metal, plastic, silicon, and even a little bit of glass, while weighing in at a mere 98 grams?
Part of it is that people treat expensive items more gently and carefully than cheap items, but the other part is that some electronics are engineered to tougher durability standards than others.
My pet peeve are flip phones. Every one I've had busted the hinge eventually.
-b.
I want to keep my cell phone for more than 1 or 2 years. My phone is used mostly as a, duh, phone! I don't want or need better cameras, more storage, nicer design (although smaller is cool), or any of the other stupid features they try to sell us.
If my phone fails, I will loose my contact list. I will loose various notes to myself, and SMS-messages I have stored on it. I probably will have to live for a few days without a phone (or at least one day, as the battery needs charging). I will have to spend money on a new phone, most likely at a time where I don't need extra expenses. And so on...
Even if somebody gives me a new phone with new features, I don't want to switch. I know my old phone. I don't have to learn something new. I don't want to spend time transferring contact lists. And I don't need the new features. If I can make and receive calls and SMS, as well as keep my contact list, I'm happy.
If the manufacturers at least gave me an easy option to buy the same model, easily transfer data without fiddling, and a guarantee against failure and loss of data for e.g. a year, I might consider regularly replacing my cell-phone. But I see no reason why I have to upgrade.
My RAZR broke after a week! ....although I had gently inserted in my anus with vibrate enabled
The razor has many known issues and is just an anecdotal story. I have many electronics purchased for the past few years that have no issues and will probably still work in 20 years. The original NES was from the same time period and those had all kinds of problems. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with the time period so much as 1) The disposability of the product 2) Quality of the workers themselves 3) Maturity of the technology. I wouldn't exactly expect a cheap phone to last as long as a multi thousand dollar PC anyway (poor quality of the razors aside). One you throw in the same pocket as your keys, drop, throw, will get wet, sand, dust, heat, cold, etc, etc. I remember older TV's had wood cabinets (we all had one). They lasted a long time, but were expensive as hell. Have you seen how cheap you can get a TV today? One that may actually even last _longer_. This whole argument is complete bullshit and today's electronics are as durable as ever. You just have to do even comparisons and not compare a cheap phone with a multi thousand dollar computer.
Regardless, I have no problem with cheap technology that will only last me a couple years if the sum total of purchases is equal or less than one that will last me 10 years. It's like the people who purchase a 5,000 dollar computer thinking it will last them 5 years. I've never paid more than 1,000 dollars for a computer. Say I get a new computer each year for 5 years. By year 2 or 3 my computer will be faster than the 5,000 dollar computer. By year 5 the 5,000 dollar computer will be so painfully out of date no one will want to use it and it probably won't run any modern software. On top of it, I'll probably have at least 1-2 additional working computers family can use.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
There are at least 1 Enter 1 + of us.
Man, you really need that seminar!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Adjust that for inflation as well and it's staggering. An IBM XT Model 5160 was $8000 for a full system in 1983 when it came around. Adjust that for inflation today and that's about $15,500. Turns out, you can get some pretty serious computer for 15 grand, one that will be pretty well built.
However if you want a $400 computer from Dell, which would be about $200 in 1983, well don't be surprised if there's some compromises made and it doesn't last all that long.
Also something people seem to forget is that the examples of old things around today that we see are the good ones by definition. Sure that XT that still works today is reliable, but what about the ones that failed? Well you don't see them because they are on the trash heap. Just because there's a few examples of old items that have survived doesn't mean they were all well made, may have just been some that were particularly lucky.
1) DON'T blame the user - when you're selling an MP3 player, phone, etc, dropping it from waist height to a floor surface *IS* normal usage, and the product should be designed for that.
2) DON'T say the problem is anybody's illusion, consumer products in general and personal electronics in particular are lasting less long over the decades. I'll concede that's from personal experience and those of friends, not some study, but I've got data running back 50 years - my Mom kept a notebook of "major purchases" and the dates they occurred - and they're coming closer together every generation.
2) DON'T say the lifespan is "what you should expect" - it is not just possible to design things to last longer, it costs VERY little more money.
I have *drawer* now of electronics, every one of which failed not because the hugely sophisticated electronics let the team down, the chips are all still great. They break because a cubic MILLIMETRE of plastic broke off that was the catch that held the battery compartment closed. (1 MP3 player, 1 cell phone, one camera). They break because the female 1/8" audio jack loses contact with the wires inside as it loosened. (3 MP3 players, 2 CD "discmans", 3 cassette "walkmans") of the eight jacks, six lost the right ear contact, only two the left ear. (OK, that's probably just a meaningless statistical variation.)
Few of my personal electronics lack rubber bands around them - I like the big thick wide ones that hold broccoli together in the store. The rubber bands hold closed the battery compartment for up to a year after the catch breaks, or pull hard on the audio jack in one direction that makes the right ear sound keep coming in for a few months before it loosens even further. And needless to say, all that rubber wrapped around it adds a layer of cushioning when it gets dropped.
WORST was the goddamn "Logitech Wireless Headphones" that were supposed to eliminate the wire altogether. (Catching the earphone wire on my bike handle or with a moving hand was a frequent reason the player gets yanked off my belt.) But the first set of headphones just lost bluetooth connections after a month, the second set, the plastic simply broke when I dropped them down on a table from about eight inches height. Just...broke. From eight inches. A weak seam where the thin plastic was joined. I didn't bother to return them again, why spend hours of travel time and hassle time to get another pair when the product is that frustrating? I'll just never buy Logitech sound equipment again.
MOST of this crap could be eliminated by:
- using more than a tiny dot of solder on the audio jack connection.
- making the internal structural members cast into the plastic of the case 30% thicker (that's twice as strong in terms of stiffness).
- making the case material a millimetre thicker.
I don't know if it's a big "conspiracy" to sell me the next player - I think it's more about them regarding money as wasted if it makes the device last one day longer, not than the warranty, but longer than the owner tends to keep the receipt and be up for the hassle of the return. (As opposed to getting the latest & greatest.) The warranty is usually a year, but the "receipt+hassle" period is more like 4-5 months.
Perhaps this reasoning will work less well when "the end of Moore's Law" means the next years model doesn't have twice as much Flash RAM or whatever. I'm starting to look forward to it.
I would LOVE to deal with this as a consumer by paying a little more for products that are made by people who care about a rep for reliability and solid workmanship - the BMW/Mercedes/Volvo of electronics. But I can't FIND such a manufacturer. You'd think it would be Apple, but one still hears the same complaints about them.
So, recently, I started buying CHEAPER MP3 players and so forth - why pay more when it's not going to last a year? Alas, the MPIO MP3 player I got was the first to be
And will they run Linux?
steampunk web design
It's very simple. People are idiots. That's why gadgets break. Not because people break them, but because when people see things like the iPod that have a battery that you can't replace yourself, they buy them, anyway! What kind of idiot buys a gadget with a battery sealed in it? I know that I certainly wouldn't, but millions upon millions of people continue to throw their dollars at these pieces of crap, and when they die, they buy ANOTHER one, often from the same company.
The companies are laughing all of the way to the bank. They have mindless drones buying everything that they release, no matter how shitty, and the people come back and buy more! With so many stupid people buying these pieces of crap over and over, the only incentive that the manufacturers have is to make cheaper crap that breaks even quicker, because they know that no matter what, people will buy them again, and again, and again...
Oh yeah. This was typed on a IMB XT keyboard that I bought at a thrift store for one dollar. It was manufactured in 1993.
Well, let's see. In the last year or so:
* Homebuilt PC had its *second* fan die
* Son #1's HP desktop Maxtel hard drive gives boot warnings
* Son #1's HP (replacement for above) laptop drive dies within 100 days of purchase (fixed under warranty)
* Son #1's Moto-branded MP3 player hard drive dies (fixed under warranty)
* Son #2's Dell PC fan dies
* Son #2's Inoi MP3 player has battery problems
* Wife's Creative MP3 player hard drive dies
* My Cowon MP3 player had loose connections causing massive static (fixed under warranty)
* My Toshiba 5005 mobo finally died (being fixed under warranty)
Meanwhile, my very old Palm 515 keeps on keepin' on.
I think it's communist EMP rays. Tinfoil hat time.
Design for Use, not Construction!
More to the point, you maximize efficiency if the product lifetime is nearly equal to the length of time before the average person wants a new one. Its like serving size at a restaurant, too large and you waste food/money, too small and you lose more customers than you make up in cost savings.
Sure, some folks like to keep their old cellphones for year after year, and others want a new one every six months. You can bet that the manufacturers are going to aim somewhere in the middle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescense
OK. Comparing an IBM XT with a cell phone (of any type) is comparing apples to oranges. How many cell phones were around when the XT was built -- and what was their built quality? Cell phones in particular are made as cheaply as possible with as many features as possible. They have helped push the envelope of surface mount technology probably more than any other device. Surface mount parts are intrinsicly more subject to failure than through-hole connections, but it is absolutely necessary to achieve the size, design, and form factors of modern cell phones. Of all our consumer products we use today, cell phones are probably the least reliable and most prone to failure for more reasons than just surface-mount technology. The use/abuse they take on a daily basis far outdoes any other device you use. That and cell phone companies WANT you to upgrade your phone every two years (typical service contract length). While I don't think phone designers specifically design them to fail in two years, it is a pretty typical life span for a device that sees so much use and abuse.
I'm sorry, but consumer demand is what has caused the apparent lack in quality of today's consumer products. Faster, smaller, cheaper -- that's what the market wants and that's what manufacturers continue to strive for. The result is products with more features and style, but shorter use life due to cheaper materials or contruction methods used to save cost. You want bullet-proof build quality, you pay for bullet-proof build quality. Look at Panasonics toughbook laptop series or the many military grade laptops out there. These were meant for extreme use, but you pay through the nose for it -- usually with inferior performance to boot.
Comparing todays tech gadgets with anything mechanical (washer/boots/whatever) isn't fair either. A better comparison would be something like a Mac (classic) and today's machines. See the old, through-hole populated motherboard? Works great, but it's expensive and space-hungry (my Mac II still works great). Our technology is becoming more and more complex, with increasing risk of failure with each increase in complexity. I don't buy into the corporate conspiracy theory that much of this stuff is designed to fail -- it just reaches that point sooner in some cases because of modern (read: cheaper)construction methods -- which also result in a lower price. The way we use technology has also changed. We have it with us at all times. Used to be the cell phone brick was left in the car of house for special occasions. Now everyone has them at all times in all sorts of environments.
Why are modern products flimsy? Because people are cheap.
That's really all there is to it. That's why McDonald's is more popular than [INSERT_FANCY_RESTAURANT_HERE], that's why WalMart got so huge so fast, that's why the Chevy Cavalier/Cobalt is so incredibly popular. They're all cheap.
People care about quality, until they have to pay for it. When push comes to shove, they'll buy what's cheapest.
I have little doubt that companies can make longer-lasting products. It just costs them more money, and people will flock to their (cheaper) competitors. It's a cut-throat market out there, and the winner is the one with the lowest sale price.
On the other hand, however, I'm convinced that there are certain products which could be improved dramatically, but which are intentionally designed to fail. For example, light bulbs. Incandescent light bulbs have been around for over 100 years, yet their design is almost completely unchanged. They're good for a few thousand hours, then the filament burns out and you have to buy more. You can't convince me that light bulb manufacturers haven't figured out how to build a light bulb that will never burn out. How hard could it be? Make the filament just a fraction thicker, maybe devise a technique to remove a higher percentage of the oxygen from the bulb... something, anything. I'm positive they know how, and I'm positive they're simply choosing not to, because if we only had to buy a dozen or so lightbulbs over our entire lives, they wouldn't make nearly as much money. Obviously, it's more profitable for them to keep us buying a pack of lightbulbs every few months.
Cars are similar. I'm sure there are techniques they could use to make cars last much, much longer than they do. Airplanes have to endure far more punishing environments than cars, and yet their lifespans are undeniably much longer. Why hasn't some of that aviation construction know-how made its way into roadgoing vehicles? Because if Corolla's lasted 20 years, Toyota wouldn't make as much money.
Just my opinion.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Hmmm... I wonder how this thing works. *Goes searching for screwdriver*
There are two bridges over the Firth of Forth. The rail bridge was opened in 1890. The road bridge was opened in 1964. One is facing closure within the next decade due to wear and tear, the other is not. Guess which one is which?
Things like this are market driven. When the market determines that it values reliability and is willing to pay for it (or not pay for the unreliable "gadget"), the industry will build it.
Right now, reliability is not typically foremost on people's minds. Some don't care, some don't believe it's possible but the end effect is the same. I've worked in marketing and sales for a few years now and I can tell you that price is king. It's the walmart mentality and the people have spoken.
No, I don't like it. I drive Japanese cars, I read consumer reports, I buy based on reliability and service but I do not a market make for many of these types of things. Sure, there is a market for reliable cars because a lot of us feel that way. There is a market for reliable appliances for the same reasons. Not so for tech gadgets. Really, how long do you want your phone? Something better will be out in a month so do you really want a brick that lasts 10 years? If you answer yes and I know some will whether you mean it or not, you probably don't account for enough people to make a market.
Here's an example of where the market turned the industry around.
Do you remember when most hard drives had 5-year warranties?
Do you remember when they pretty much all dropped to 1-3 years?
Do you remember replacing tons of hard drive?
Have you noticed that 5-year warranties are becoming more common again?
Drive quality sucks. It has for a long time. Manufacturer pushed the envelope and reliability dropped but our desire for reliability didn't. When they reduced the length of the warranty, the hand full of 5-year drives became very popular.
Market Drives these decisions. Think about that when you get pissed at the RIAA and MPAA. If the market really wanted them to go away/stop/play nice, they would. We just need to make sure the market expresses itself. To some degree that has already happened. Remember that the RIAA didn't want downloads? Remember that the RIAA wanted to charge more than $.99/song? Remember when Apple made about 200% profit on each computer and was completely proprietary? The market didn't allow it.
In short, you can't make something people don't want and you can't charge more than people are willing to pay for very long and what it costs to make has absolutely no bearing on the price.
If anyone could make that same microwave part, or that same auto part. It would cause the industry to compete around more standardized parts and force competition to rotate around quality AND cost. Right now, it centers around cost to the extent that a competitor can make a part with the same kind of functionality in another product, but patents guarantee that you don't have switch and swap parts across competitive sectors. The one exception is that you can't patent interfaces (though many have tried), and it's very easy to see how that had a profound effect on many systems peripherial parts.
ways modern electronics are less likely to survive. So much for running XP SP 287 on a classic PC.
The modern consumer is stupid. They sacrifice quality to attain an increasingly lower price point. No matter that, in the long run, the low price point cost them more money, they only care about the price at the moment.
Design to cost is all very well, but you need to understand what your customers value. For instance, redesigning a safety feature so that it failed on occasion might not be a good idea.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
... And Sam Walton is surely turning over in his grave. I found an article in my Grandmothers house where Walton played up buying "towels" from an American producer rather than one in Hong Kong. After he died, WalMart lost any semblance of principles the collective company once might have had.
See Patrick Buchanan's New Deal For U.S. Manufacturers for one take on how the "market" is rigged to screw american workers.
(I always thought cosmopolitan was just the name of a magazine, then I looked it up...)
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
They break because everyone and their cousin decides to dissect them in order to find out whether or not they can run Linux.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
I've had my phone for about 3 years. The camera on it isn't of the greatest quality, but who cares, it's a teeny screen anyways, and I rarely use that feature. I got it because it was a decently-sized flip phone at the time and, for the most part, it still is a nice size, other than being just a little thicker than most new phones coming out today. The only reason I'm about to be in a market for a new phone is because this one is starting to die on me. Batteries no longer last very long (not the fault of the manufacturer, as all batteries now will eventually be useless after X uses/time, and I don't want to spend $40 on a new one, if they even still have them for this model) and the charging node is coming loose, most likely from years of dropping it while it's plugged in. Coverage can be spotty, but I blame that on Sprint in our area more than the phone itself. The only thing holding me back now is price of new phones; I don't want to have to sign another 2-year agreement just to avoid paying $200-300 for a new phone.
Will you also loose the dogs?
If you're not backing up your phone data, you are a chump.
Ah yes. I know my washboard, too. And my flintstonesmobile.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are quite a few items I've purchased and used that are marketed and priced higher since their selling point is higher build quality. Example: Canon "L" series or professional lenses. I've picked up two of them used, and they've held their value for several years and are built sturdily enough to be suitable for home defense if necessary. To those who would say that lens technology hasn't improved in decades, please look up "Image Stabilization" and "low ud glass" for counter-examples. Neither of these lenses has the newest features, but they're still prized for build quality, longevity, and image quality.
Another example is Honda and Volvo cars. They cost more, and they last significantly longer than their American counterparts on average. People know this, and the resale prices reflect this as well.
In short, there's room in the market for quality goods sold at a premium, but only if demand supports it. For most consumer electronics, I don't think this is true. People are cheap, and the market responds accordingly. There is no fate but what you make.
jb
There's good hardware out there. You can buy more rugged phones, especially for Nextel's network. The Motorola i530 meets the MIL-STD-810F ruggedness specification. It has all the usual stuff (camera, Bluetooth, web browser, etc.), it's much tougher than most phones, it's about the same price as most phones, and it's not much thicker. Available in black or bright yellow.
Shuttle PCs, the little breadbox units, are very well made mechanically, with good internal rigidity, support for cards on multiple sides, and a liquid cooling heat pipe system that really works in high ambient temperature environments.
You don't have to buy the crap.
I think build quality has declined with the ever increasing desire to keep costs down. I see several problems. First, companies seem to be so eager to do business in China that they're willing to tolerate anything. When it's a company's primary goal to cut costs, why would they want to spend any more money than necessary to ensure a higher standard of quality? The consumer is clearly content with the current standard of quality at low prices so why bother with anything more? So they dump manufacturing in Chinese hands and let them deal with everything. In the end, all many companies are doing is slapping their own logo on the product.
Which leads me to the second problem. Too many American companies seem to have given up on producing quality products and instead have focused on being cheap. This means that they are no only outsourcing manufacturing, but design as well. So instead of having products that are thoughtfully designed and aestetically pleasing we're getting an overwrought messes that aren't particularly easy to use. How many American companies are left that are actually involved in every step of the design and manufacturing process for consumer products. One of the few is Apple and they do an amazing job. But look at Dell, or HP who are essentially sticking their logo on someone else's product.
These companies are going with Chinese suppliers because they adhere to the same principles of cheap manufacturing. The end result, of course, is something that doesn't look very good and isn't particularly reliable. The Chinese don't yet have the product design experience that the Americans should have, and the Japanese and many Europeans definitely do have.
The problem ultimately is that American companies seem to have gotten obsessed with making money first and foremos. Pride in quality products has taken a back seat. There are American companies out there that used to produce respected products that now only offer crap products. They want to do things that require a minimum of effort but produce a maximum of income, hence the apparently popularity of web-based businesses. The Koreans, by contrast, have done quite well because they have a lot of nationalistic pride. They want to outdo the Japanese in every way they can. The Chinese are also quite ambitious so although they're still well behind most of the world they're making a lot of headway.
The Taiwanese also produce excellent products, but there in a similar situation as the US. They lack a lot of the pride other asians have and they continue to try to stick to the easy way of doing things. The problem is that the Chinese can do what they do more cheaply. So their chance for success is to move upmarket much in the way Japan did in the 70s and the Koreans more recently, pushing their own brands and improving quality.
That's an important point... It's why the Japanese and some Europeans to a lesser extent thrive. They're not competing for the bottom of the barrel. They're producing higher quality products which offer both technological innovation and design sophistication. They care about making quality products. To many American companies seem to be stuck producing the same old crap and constantly reminiscing on the supposed glory days of the 50s and 60s.
Here's a example I face on occassion. I walk into a Staples looking for office supplies. Because I'm in design I care about having a space that actually looks appealing. But all I see at office supply stores in the US is garbage. Complete and utter garbage. Completely uninspired and bereft of any design sensibility. It's all industrial-looking transparent crap. Why? Couldn't they hire some damn designers and an engineer or two to put a little effort into something that feels durable and looks good? Contrast that with when I was living in Taiwan and I could walk into any of a number of Taiwanese or Japanese supply stores and find some neat looking stuff that actually worked well. Some of these products even had ingenious little features.
I guarantee you, however, t
yeah, they never go the distance. so intimidated are they by our geeky stamina.
"the point of built-in battery is exactly so that "any putz with a screwdriver " would not open it and mess with the internals."
I don't know about you, but I must have at least twenty different things that take batteries, and perhaps I've owned a hundred or more of them in my lifetime. I've never messed up the internals while changing a battery. The builders were smart enough to divide the battery compartment from the rest of the delicate insides.
The point of the built-in battery is to make damn sure there's an end-of-life for the unit. By pricing the battery replacement out of the future predicted value of the unit, they've ensured you'll be shopping again.
I, too, am of the "sometimes a phone is just a phone" mindset. Crazy, I know, because I am 22, which should mean that I only want the newest and flashiest product. I simply want something that works to make calls and send and receive messages. If I want a camera, I will use my D-SLR (Canon 30D, which, oddly enough, does NOT play .mp3s or stream video from the web). If I want to play games, I will use my Gameboy (which, oddly enough, does not keep track of my contacts or credit report). They are sturdy products that cost a bit more than a knock-off, and which have been designed to do one, and only one, thing.
If you pack too much tech into a device, you drive overall cost up. So, to make a product that is in the comes in at market price for similar, predicate devices, other components have to be cheaper. Nicer camera, need to cut back on the other components. Sturdier LCD, need to cut weight in the case. All of a sudden you have a phone that can do everything to some extent, but nothing well.
If you build something that has a few high-quality components and cuts the crap out, then you can charge the same, make the same profit, and still satisfy those people who just want something that works (I have yet to figure out how to wring service subscriptions out of people whose devices don't support them, but that's another story).
Give me something that will last a long time (I would call 3+ years a long time), that is simple and well designed, and I will pay more for it and expect it to survive, and then tout the company's greatness to all of my friends (who will buy the other feature-heavy products). Give me something that I expect to last no more than two years, that is overburdened with feature creep and where's-the-kitchen-sink-on-this-piece-of-crap design, and I will pay less for it and expect it to break, and then explain to my friends why they shouldn't buy products from such a stupid company.
Come on, man. You're a slashdot reader... supposedly you have a remedial education. The word is "lose".
"Loose" is what one's bowels are after eating at my mother-in-law's.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Every company builds in obsolescence. It's part of the game. How long something will last vs. consumer expectations. If it breaks too soon, you won't buy that brand again. If it lasts too long, that company won't sell enough of the newer models. Take Maytag as a perfect example. Their advertising for years showed a Maytag repairman bored out of his skull because supposedly Maytag products were so durable so he had nothing to do. But that is not reality. You won't find a Maytag dishwasher that will last 10 years. If you do, it's called Miele but it costs thousands more. My mother's original fridge lasted 30 years, back when things were built to last. Almost nothing is built to last these days, else what incentive would you have to upgrade? One of the quirks of a capitalist society, but hey, it is better than having no choice at all! DD.
Plastics. Metals are inherently strong than plastics and can resist wear and tear. But plastics are much easier to form and have lower cost in machining and formability. In the 1920s steel was king and many consumer electronic goods had a metal casings. These days, its hard pressed to find the same except for a few scenarios.
Murphy! I've had the monkey live on my back, all my life!
... its gone dead just after the warranty period. thankfully, the current generation of computer parts have longer warranty and are cheaper than a couple of years back.
...kidding. maybe there IS some truth in it, any product designer in here who can shed some light on it?)
CDRoms & writers fail just after the warranty period, just about every part in my last PC dint last the distance - and to rub salt into the wounds
so, my question: are they built specifically to last only such a distance ?
(for some equipment maybe yeah - the prices are lower too. but for some others - it does not seem so. for something decidedly low tech and with very few moving parts - say an Iron, it should work for a long time right ? but it does not! even other white goods! the conspiracy theorist part of my brain hollers that, there's a timer chip in there!"
Well, I've never had an original Sony Walkman, but I did have a portable cassette player during high school and university. Does that, in your opinion, qualify as a valid comparison?
;)
The thing was almost literally as big as a brick, half as heavy, and it was mostly a mechanical thing. As in, you would actually push a button hard, and some metal levers and cogs would move inside. You didn't have a CPU taking those buttons as input, but literally if you wanted to rewind, you'd push the rewind button until it locked into place, and that would push the needed levers and cogs into place so the thing would start rewinding. In fact, forget CPUs, it was also a very low tech thing: it actually had transistors and whatnot on the PCB, not ICs.
It also took 4 AA batteries normally, and went through them in a couple of hours. But I had made a pack of 4 _D_ batteries that fit snugly in a pocket of my jeans and you could hardly see the wire to the walkman. Now _those_ offered some serious play time.
Yeah, so it's one of those "back in my days" stories. Uphill hrough the snow both ways
The thing is, that thing lasted me for, oh, I think some 7 years total. And even then it wasn't because it failed, but because then I finally upgraded to one of those newfangled CD players.
And did I mention through the snow, uphill both ways yet? Because the thing was with me through snow, dust, or through my getting caught for one hour in what seemed like a re-enactment of the biblical flood. Not just a rain, but really, more a case of some air in the water than the other way around. And the thing was unprotected at my belt, not even in a pocket or anything. (I didn't have pockets that big anyway.) It has had its share of being nudged, pushed accidentally off a nightstand, rarely kicked, and occasionally disassembled. (That's how I know it was a mechanical thing.)
Oh, it got scratched and dented all right by the end of those 7 years and all that abuse. But it didn't actually break.
And see, far from considering that some unreasonable thing that idiot users subject their poor delicate electronics to, I think that's what a portable gizmo should be like. I don't want something that needs to be treated like a newborn human baby. I want something I can just take with me and forget about it. The whole purpose of the damn thing is to serve _me_, whatever I might be doing at the time and in whatever environment I might be. It's not supposed to be the other way around, with me having to change my habits and be responsible for the gadget's well being.
Heck, I don't even want to have to remember to recharge it every evening. I miss those battery packs, really. If the thing ran out of juice, I'd just open it and shove 4 new batteries inside, right there and then. Even in the middle of a bus or train ride, you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So I was sitting in front of my computer despairing over the recent fact that I couldn't play high-end graphic games, when someone told me about something going on in WoW, I decide to check it out real quick, hoping I could log in and out before my graphics card fails on me. I start it up and get the familiar buzzing sound of my video card fan dying on me. Then two Kchunks, which is not a usual sound. My fan had fallen OUT of my Ati x600. Literally fallen out. That just really made me sad, I am thinking of switching to Nvidia because of it. =\
you really think the consumer is going to buy from the same company after being screwed once?
I agree that (for a variety of reasons), much of today's "chic kit" is flimsy.
On the flip-side, that chic kit tends to be the desired kit. The durable kit is available as cast-offs, which can be a major benefit. For those who are not into the chic, of course.
Cases in point: I generally don't buy new computers; instead, I cherry pick the discards. My main internet facing computer is an IBM PC 365. Yes, it weighs ~15 kilos, but it has seen 11 years and counting of duty. My workstation is an HP Vectra VL - a bit lighter, but much the same story. My keyboard? An IBM Model M. And I use a Wyse 30 terminal. An IBM 300 GL works as a file server. Nothing new -- and I expect these to last as long as I want or need them to.
This also has the benefit of keeping this kit out of landfills.
Another strategy is to purchase well behind the curve, to get excellent prices on the new "flimsy" gear. Twenty bucks will get you a 256M or 512M flash MP3 player.
Personally, I would like a "robust" cell-phone. I didn't do it, because the phone I have was "free" with my contract. And, the provider will replace the phone in two years, with renewal of the contract. Since I expect to renew, build quality didn't matter much. There was no personal "skin in" financially for me. On the other hand, my Moto StarTac is still kicking... (analog only, though)
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I used to work for and electronics sub-contractor who produced units and pcb's for several companies. Those companies want their items built for as cheap as they possibly can. Sometimes that would involve using "recycled" components sometimes it would mean that only a potion of a batch would get tested.
If there is a corner to be cut you can bet that it will be.....
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
The US Government issued ruggedized GPS units to SpecOps soldiers that could withstand the most grueling conditions imagineable: dust storms, snow, rain, etc. These things could be dropped from thousands of feet and survive, and were still accurate to within half a meter. I won't pinpoint a price but the units cost tens of thousands of dollars each.
SpecOps soldiers never used them. They were too heavy and the battery didn't last long enough. They instead spent a few hundred dollars of their own money and got simple off-the shelf GPS units that were "good enough."
well my comment was based on electronics in general, the phone was just an example (and of course you have exceptions, but i was thinking for the majority)
I was given a CF-50 'Tough'book because someone spilled a little soda on it. The soda fried the keyboard interface and the hard drive. Toughness points awarded : -2
Now I've used the machine (with an external keyboard) heavily for more than a year. Here are the results:
The plunger for the switch that detects when the lid is down broke when I wiped the case with a paper towel. Toughness points awarded : -1
The PS2 plug wore out from excessive pressure on the plug. This one was my fault, but couldn't a 'Tough'book have a slightly deeper spot for the plug that cradle the connector? Or would this mean some connectors don't fit? Toughness points awardded : 0
I am, however, very impressed with the power connector. In contrast to the devices the parent uses, this connector really is tough! I've dropped the laptop from a height of around 4 feet and had it land on its power connector twice now. Any other laptop would be dead. This connector is free to move inside, so the plug just leans way over in response to pressure and you can just pop it back into place. Nice. Why don't they all do this? It doesn't seem like much more effort. Toughness points awarded : +10
The blogger is moron but also a typical consumer.The typical consumer is expected to make unrealistic demands. I mean, you can drive your new car into a tree at 50+ MPH and walk away - what would have made that possible except for the mass stupidity and ridicuous demands of customers!
I suppose it's possible to build a drop-proof PC that you can back over with your car, are you willing to pay for it?
> Computers and mobile phones that last a lifetime can already be built.
Bullshit on that. Ever heard of Moore's law? I have a 22 year old Mac Plus that still works fine but it's not of much use except as a digital clock. It is simply not possible to build a computer now that will usably load software produced 20 years in the future..
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Mods, show the parent some love. I thought this was so obvious it hurt, but halfway through the discussion, this is the first time I've seen this comment:
The submitted article is also an apples and oranges comparision. Tell me sir, does your IBM XT fit in your pocket, operate for days at a time without external power, and make phone calls? Also, is your 20 year old desktop a clamshell design, has it been repeatedly dropped while you try to take drunk pictures of your friends with it, and how many total hours of use does it have compared to your phone? Perhaps a better comparison then would be your shiny new smart razor versus a circa 1995 flip phone. Not that I don't expect a somewhat similar results from that comparison, because of the point the parent made.
If durability is important to you, it has to be one of your criteria when you're shopping. It doesn't just happen. It's the same old engineering adage: Cheap, strong, capable - Pick two.
Manufacturer's generally do still make durable products if you're willing to pay a little bit more or lose some features. A clamshell presents an obvious failure point. If you want lightweight or slim, you can bet there's going to some tradeoffs in body design. If durability is really high on your list, you'd better be reading reviews or looking for items that are designed with durability in mind, like Nextel's military-spec'd phones.
Tune in next week for our kitchen special: Why do Plastic Sporks Break? - A comparison of picnic flatware to cast iron frying pans.
I accidentally dropped my last blackberry in a toilet last year. After immediately removing the battery and propping it in a hotel heater vent for 2 hours it was revived and worked just fine even a year later. This doesn't even count the 50 or hundred times that one fell out of its belt holster. It was much more expensive than many of the phones with gimmicks but I haven't seen an equal in Motorola or Samsung that comes even close to this kind of longevity.
This is exactly the same with vehicles. Back in the day they had nice steel or rubber bumpers, so when you hit something (at a relatively low speed) you would just keep going because there would be no damage. Todays cars, you tap something and your plastic bumper is completly busted. Manufacturers want to keep building disposible products. This also reminds me of when my father would sell Silos. Farmers would be ticked cause it would cost so much ($20k+ for a new one) but then they also last for 30+ years with minimal maintence. He would then state, well how many cellphones and vehicles have you went threw in that time?
I once read a comment from a Ford designer regarding the Pinto. He stated that it was DESIGNED to only last 5 years. Yet I still see them on the road.......albeit, in pretty bad shape most of the time.
My point is that it was designed, by the company that made it, to only last a certain amount of time. Why? Obviously, to sell the consumer another car in 5 years.
I work with automotive computer systems and I see it first hand all the time. I will cite the most frequent example I see.
Mercedes uses Bosch components in its computer controlled systems and fuel injection systems. I cannot state how many times I have had a customer come in with a "check engine" light on (in various models) only to hook up a scanner to pull trouble codes only to find NONE. Yet the car runs like crap, the light comes back on after being reset and the customer is still not amused.
After diagnosing quite a few of these I now do one thing soon as I get in the car. I look at the odometer. If it has a little more then 60,000 miles on it(the warranty period has JUST expired), I can almost ASSURE you the cause of the problem. A "faulty" Mass Air Flow Sensor.
Why can I say this? Because Bosch, and more then likely Mercedes, have designed and installed a component with a "desired" life span of just over 60,000 miles.
The reason for this is money (sales). The device fails (parameters within spec, no trouble codes set)in such a way that standard trouble shooting procedures will not locate the problem. The "average" independant shop then refers the customer to the dealership(Mercedes)thus assuring the dealership (and thus Mercedes) of the repair sales AND the replacement sensor. And ALWAYS after the warranty has run out.
It got to the point that we kept several "known good" sensors of various part numbers around the shop to simply install one and see if the problem went away. It usually did. The dealership, having a parts department, foregoes standard diagnosis and simply throws a new sensor at it. They then charge you for a "full diagnostic scan and testing".
So, not only have they found a way to charge you to replace the part, but to charge you for service to diagnose it as well. This repair, by the way, if done at the dealership, usually costs the consumer about $750-1000, parts and "labor". This also has the added benefit of making the dealership "look good" in the eyes of the consumer because they were able to fix it and the independant was unable to. Thus, the consumer returns to the vastly more expensive dealer when something else goes wrong.
Planned obsolescence is a reality. Even supposedly "well made" products are subject to this. Simply look up the "reliability" rating for autos and you will see that Mercedes sucketh quite badly in that department. They figure that if people can shell out 60k+ for a Benz, they can shell out $350 + "labor" for a new sensor every 60k miles.
They only cure for this is to research products and their reliability before buying them. Eventually, when sales slumps, they will curtail the practice to some extent (again, I cite Ford here. In the 70's Ford had a HORRIBLE reliability record and suffered heavy sales declines because of it. They changed their ways. At least until the last decade. They are doing it again........)
When you have stuff made buy people making $0.20 a hour this is what you get.
I honestly don't understand your attitude. Are you willing to pay twice as much for a TV that doesn't die for ten years? You are losing money (interest income) on the deal, and you spend five extra years watching a crappy old TV!
Thank you /. for posting a story that speaks volumes about the current state of electronics and really resonates with me. I'm so fed up!
This crappy quality problem has affected cars for years... now it's backfiring and the north american automakers are scrambling to catch up to the surge in demand for quality engineering. For once people got fed up and started buying better made cars.
This is also true of electronics. Every single remote control in my house has either a rubber band holding the batteries in... or a paper-clip connecting one end of the batteries. So sad that these cheep pieces of junk can't survive a drop from a coffee table.
I've had so many hard-drives crap out on me too. I've become paranoid about backing stuff up because I expect to lose it all any moment. My HP desktop was the worst. I know have a custom built PC and I already had 1 fan die and 1 harddrive. Arg!
This is true of junky dvd players, VCRs, too. I've never had a DVD player that would play flawlessly.
My samsung CD player/stereo I got in 1996 still plays perfectly and only has a few burnt out leds in the display. The rest of my family has gone through 5 or 6 CD stereos and the CD changers keep dying in them. All made in the 2000's. Crap all of it.
I'm now much more aware of brands- I reward those with quality and I don't blindly buy a brand out of loyalty. Consumer loyalty is the height of stupidity.
Only consumer demand will change this trend of garbage quality products.
A "20 year-old IBM XT" used what? 30Lbs of steel? If we all wanted our gadgets to weight as much as a tank, then I'm sure they'd be as durable. IBM, to my knowledge, has never made sleek & sexy equipment. No... they specialize in big and large industrial machinery that is built to take a beating. That means big, metal, and heavy.
As far as cell phones go, there are several "work" phones available that feature thick plastic and rubberized shock absorbers. Some even offer water resistance. I've seen a few keyboards made for industrial shop work that are chemically inert (really important in my line of work as a coder) and resistant to spills.
I think that general consumer products are definitely more fragile, but only because we all don't need chemically inert surfaces or shock absorption to last a twelve foot drop. As long as you don't throw your gadgets, sit on them, or toss them in the toilet they can last a really long time.
People are saying this based on the computers from long ago that have survived. They are forgetting that computers from the 80s also failed - and at higher rates than today's computers and consumer electronics. The differences are:
1. Computers and Consumer Electronics today are cheap enough that repair is often no longer practical. So people throw them away and get another when the break insteading of paying a repair bill. This makes it seem like todays items are less durable.
2. Todays electronics ship in much higher volume than in the 1980s. The people who were users in the 80s are considered elite power users by today's standards. The people buying computers today are less tech savvy. People report "problems" that are often user error. This makes it seem like todays computers/electronics are more problematic - because there are more problems even though the percentage of users with problems is lower.
3. Todays software is easier to use on a feature by feature basis, but is harder to use overall because it is more complex and has more features. Also, see the previous point (more people using computers means more stupid people using computers). So, you hear more volume of "problems".
Cars today are much safer than in the 1950s, yet we have about the same number of traffic fatalities. The reason is we have much more traffic than in the 1950s.
Todays computers are much more reliable than those of the 1980s, yet we have more "problems" with computers today. That is because there are many more computers and computer users today and todays software is more complex in terms of the amount of functionality present.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Draw a triangle. At the first point write "Good". At the second point write "Fast". At the third point write "Cheap". Below the triangle write "Pick any two."
"Planned" obsolescence is not a conspiracy to get you to buy more stuff. It is a natural evolutionary trend in products; and it is mostly a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. (Secondly, it's mostly not true. How often did a car in the fifties require a tune-up? New plugs, points, distributor cap, etc.? Every 10,000 miles or less for my 62 Ford Galaxy. My car today requires it's first tune up at 100,000 miles.)
Consider: My first IBM PC was $1500 bare (at a discount): No hard drive, no floppies, no monitor, no RAM. Just a box, a motherboard, a power supply, and a wonderful keyboard that felt so nice compared to my older Apple ][ minus. The keyboard alone had 500 parts. I know; I took one apart to "clean" it--bad idea. RAM cost $120 for 16K ("K"--not "M" not "G"). A 160K floppy drive was $350, down from the $500 I paid for my 144K Apple drives (traded a Honda 350 motorcycle for one). The first hard drive was 10MB for $1000. Total price of the Apple with all the cards, accessories, etc.? $7,000 in 1979. The IBM was a little cheaper in 1981. Those are 79/81 dollars so each one today would cost in the realm of $15,000 (assuming inflation halved the dollar--I don't know for sure.)
Was the IBM well built? Like a tank! Would that tank be useful today? Sure, if I ran DOS 3.3 and Word 1.1 that came on two floppy disks and its own mouse in the box, printed on a dot matrix Epson MX-100 ($1000 for one of those) and was content with GW Basic and ASCII character art. Of course that didn't happen and that old box is in a landfill somewhere and will be for a few thousand years. Hopefully someone recycled the case--it was heavy metal, but the rest is toast. Did I overpay? For me, not really. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. I made the money back in software sales and it boosted my career tremendously. I got a lot out of the whole deal at a lot of levels.
But it's not about ME. It's about millions of people who couldn't possibly ever spend $15,000 on a PC who can now pick up a fully functional one for less than $500, maybe half that. It's about companies that can now afford to put a PC on EVERY desk and network them together (Not just a Mac for the Art Department.) The result is a tremendous productivity gain. Without it we'd be back in the stone age seventies. As a whole, we'd all be a lot worse off. "Cheap" PCs have empowered a generation. But the fact is in five years you're going to want another one anyway because the present one simply will not do all the new cool stuff that requires more RAM, bigger disks, greater resolution, 3-D displays, etc. Add it all up and you still have paid exponentially less than you did for that battle tank in 1981.
For you guys who have a broken RAZR--c'mon--you didn't buy that because of function. You just had to have the sleekest, coolest phone around. I've had my Treo 600 for several years, dropped it dozens of times; it doesn't care. Of course, it IS kind of bulky and fits in a huge case on my belt like a -er- geek. Those new thin phones WOULD fit in my pocket a lot better. The key pad is pretty cool looking. Nothing wrong with the Treo, but a new thin phone wouldn't be THAT expensive. I could pick one up pretty cheap, maybe for Christmas, then put my Treo in a drawer (Oh, there's my old Treo 170! Forgot it was there!)
So who planned this obsolescence? I think I just did!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
And therein may be the problem -- a washer must be carefully broken in for maximum life.
Start with walnut sized items, such as binkies and duplo blocks, that cause no harm and can be easily fished out. Gradually move on to small items that can be caught under the agitator, such as miniature stuffed animals or lego, and begin including items which have small hard pointy bits that will break under centrifugal force and be sucked into the pump, such any happy meal toy. Finish your breakin period with a load containing jeans with the pockets full of 8-12 wax crayons (crayola best, also good for breaking in the dryer) and a torn dog blanket. The crayons, dog hair and blanket should form an unbalanced mass that causes the washer to vibrate violently or even start walking during the spin cycle. You can consider your machine broken in at this point.
I used this method and got four cross-country moves and 16 years out my last washer. You can too!!
Any why is this limited to gadgets? Everything is like this. Try to get a solid board game. Connect Four won't last more than a couple games.
In a capitalistic society people try to give less for more, it's the rule of business when you don't care about the customer. When short term goals outweigh longevity, and a national memory that ahrdly lasts more than a year or two, who can blame them?
The answer is to start caring, and it won't start in the business world.
Have you read my journal today?
Consumer electronics don't make much money which is why 95% of the PC companies are dead and gone now compared to the early-mid '90's. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple and everyone else. So if you're only making 2-5% on every sale what can you afford in terms of quality. For an extra hundred or two hundred bucks you'd have a hard time convincing a consumer that the engineering life of your product is longer than the economic life of your product which is probably 3 years whether it continues to work or not.
I have a house full of PCs which will probably be the last MS OS code I ever buy. Buy the time it comes to replace the machines, which I'm in no hurry to do, the hardware costs for whatever is MS code current at that time will be too costly for my taste. So I will go with down level machines and run something else like Linux or perhaps just scrap them all and buy cheap mini-Macs. But if I was the kind of person who slavishly followed MS's lead and ran out and bought new machines just to run Vista, I'd find myself in an endless upgrade cycle to keep pace with all of the MS requirements. So it's entirely probable that my 'old' hardware would only have to work for 2 years or so. Given that most hardware lasts for more than two years and the vendor gambles that x% of their market churns their machinery every two years then the value I place on having that hardware last reliably longer than two years is almost zero. I can use cheaper parts, purchased on commodity market with little or no QA or standardization. I can assemble it in the cheapest factory I can find and I will make more money not less even if a large percentage of the product fails between 2 years and some arbitrary date but less than a 'reasonable' period of time.
I addressed this earlier in another post that was flamed when I suggested that MS be assessed a recycling tax for every turn of the OS version crank based on ever increasing hardware requirements that drive needless hardware sales. If they want to sell more software then they need to absorb the cost of churning the old hardware. If they want to pass that cost on to the consumer then we'll see just how receptive the consumer is to the real cost of bloated software. It's really the flip side of the same issue.
Baby boomers remember "Made in Japan" to mean two different things. When they were growing up it meant cheap junk than broke easily. Then when they were leaving college it meant stuff better than made in America.
The rest of Asia is having a similar learning curve. Not the best quality when starting out, but improving.
...is just not there. No proof, no references in TFA.
We don't sit in meetings and say "What should we make breakable?". Ludicrous.
BWilde
When I worked for my father making gears for textile machines we would make gears out of
steel, nylon, plastics, and softer metals. The softer items like nylon was designed so
that if there was a jam it would break. The mill would typically have a box of these gears and simply
replace it when the teeth would break off. It is better to replace a smaller, cheaper, and easier
to reach item than have to tear down a whole machine.
I remember hearing an engineering professor talking about how a lot of newer products are often lighter and less strong because of the newer tools and computing power available when designing them. Like parts for cars; it used to be that it wasn't worth it to figure out exactly how strong a part needed to be built so you would just do a rough estimation and end up with something that could probably take twice the amount of abuse it was built for. But now all the numbers are just plugged into a computer and it's easy to design things exactly to specification.
I wonder if a similar thing has occurred with technology related devices? With better manufacturing systems and more experience in designing things like MP3 players and laptops, perhaps companies are now building these things to only take a specific amount of abuse that fits into their pricing scheme where before they were overbuilt to take into account unknown factors and manufacturing issues?
People aren't idiots. It's just capitalism. If folks wanted a quality gadget, one that never breaks, doesn't have any design issues, etc., then they'd pay for one. However, most folks would rather have a cheaper gadget, and take the risk that it might crap out on them, or may not be 100% what they're looking for. On the flip-side, you also have the early adopters, that are willing to pay more money to get a gadget sooner, despite whatever quality/design issues the initial versions may have. Again, that's what they want. There's a business for it. If it didn't exist, companies would be catering to them.
Personally, I don't fall into either camp. I'm willing to pay a little bit more, wait a little longer, do some more research, and find exactly what I'm looking for. But I can understand that not everyone wants to do that. Calling them "mindless drones" though is being very holier-than-thou.
-- jchenx
Remedial does not mean "basic" or "rudimentary"; just look at the root of the word, remedy. Not to overestimate my fellow Slashdotters, but I surmise that most of us have not had remedial education. Surely a fancy gentleman like yourself, with your very fine hat, should know the correct usage. :)
(Full disclosure: I had to be set straight on this misuse a couple of years ago. D'oh!)
Steven N. Severinghaus
People are stupid and careless. In addition, capacitors and other parts DO have a limited lifetime.
Let me relate to you a story about my Rogers cellphone, and I'll ask where would you reasonably draw the line...
I obtained a Motorola phone from Rogers Wireless a bit over a year ago, and almost from the start I found I could not get good signal strength on most occasions. I thought it was just crappy coverage from Rogers but then a friend of mine notices we got the exact same model of phone from the same provider and her phone reported full strength and mine showed one "stair step" even when put side-by-side. Obviously Rogers is doing their job so it must be the phone.
I took the phone to a Rogers service centre, where a well-pierced-and-dyed punk looked at it and said "hmm this looks wierd dude...maybe there is a firmware or SIM card problem--we got a couple recalls on this model" (Hey Motorola, where'd you learn your testing and QA procedures from--the old-Microsoft-school of paying-customers-as-testers? People don't like to buy their stuff already broken). Lucky me, after running some tests and looking in ther database it appears that Rogers fixed my phone before issuing it to me (How uncharacteristically thoughful of them!). "Must be something wrong with the radio hardware" said the cellpunker, "We'll have to send it to Motorola in Vancouver. They ususally take 4 weeks to look at it so we'll give you a (crappy) courtesy phone.
After the wait (at least it wasn't delayed) I received my phone...working much better! But it appears that the journey through Rogers, the courier and Motorola was a rough one, as there is now a crack in the pretty brushed-metal front cover. Stupid and careless SERVICE people! I'm then told that such cosmetic damage is not covered under warranty and they'd replace it but I'd have to pay...for THEIR carelessness! Oh well, I can live with the hairline phone fracture.
I'm further told how to minimise the risk of things like this happening again. Don't expose it to cold for too long (HOW cold? It's nearly -30C here right now--it THAT too cold? For how long? Can I keep it in my coat pocket when I walk to the 7-eleven or is that too long? "Just be on the cautios side" I'm told). Don't leave it in a hot place for too long...like your car in the summer. Don't leave it on the charger too long. Don't take it off the charger too soon for too often. Cellphones are sensitive electronic devices, make sure to avoid static discharge (in -30 weather that can be a tall order).
I understand these environmental hazards can be a design challenge...but it's a CELLPHONE...a MOBILE DEVICE. It can be dropped, it can be zapped, it can be exposed to temperature and humidity extremes. It's sold with 2 and 3 year service contracts SO THE DAMN PHONE SHOULD SURVIVE AT LEAST THAT LONG.
My old-school Nokia survived well past the original contract. It was rained on, it was dropped (and the faceplate cracked, but it was removable and replacements were cheap...and the phone sitll worked). It was operated and transported in a temperature range exceeding 60C. It was done before...why can't it be done now? Because cellphones are so much more sophisticated? That's crap. If you cand feature-flood me without making the product flimsy then ditch the extra features. As for limited lifetimes...if the capactitors cannot even last 3 years they are pretty sh*tty capacitors and a new supplier should be found immediately, especially given that a cellphone is a relatively low-power device and that the majority of the internal parts are solid state (the only moving things in them are electrons). To me, this isn't about user abuse or the natural lifetime of internal components--it is about maintaining corporate revenue streams.
Yeah, didn't take much effort here, just 10mins, and presto good as new. Retail is $16 or so USD, or $29 au.
So all you others stop bitching about ipods batteries being not replaceable, they are easy for anyone with
a decent IQ, though not your typical housewife pushing 50, get the kids to do it. Geeks, no problem.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Ontic evil.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
It's pretty simple I would have thought. If gadgets were durable and repairable, people will buy less and profits would decrease. From the companies viewpoint, it's pretty obvious what you'ld choose.
Privatizing garbage collection and disposal -- making people assume the full cost of proper disposal of what they buy, by charging them per pound -- would go a long way towards making people realize the true cost of overpackaged, cheap crap.
That being said, in an industry where today's "new hotness" becomes tomorrow's old and busted over as short a time period as now, there's no incentive whatsoever to build parts that last. What good does it do you if your Voodoo 2 board still worked today?
Goddamn! As I was reading this my headphones snapped!
With limited field experience, design of a first generation device is overbuilt to ensure meeting "expected life" requirements. As field experience builds, engineers/designers learn where they can substitute cheaper parts where they have less impact on "expected life". Fortunately, in many circumstances, the high cost of first generation technology coincides with the smaller field of competition. As price pressure builds, either through competition or by striving to maximize profit margins, future designs get closer to the expected life requirements which are usually shorter than the actual lifetime of the initial incarnations. In highly competitive arenas, there is pressure to reduce the expected life requirement in order to attain cheaper build costs. The result is that the maturation of a product does not necessarily lead to a better product (counter to everything we are advertised to believe).
MADE IN CHINA.
The problem is that between planned obsolescence, user convenience and marketing (i.e. grotesquely oversized or elaborate packaging), we are generating trash at an ever-increasing rate every year.
It bothers me that there is apparently no market incentive to improve this situation, but many reasons to perpetuate it. I'm no environmental extremist, but I am constantly reminded and saddened about how much waste we generate, how almost nothing repairable, and how everything becomes more and more disposable.
My TV is almost 20 years old, and I'm dreading having to replace it. I have no intention of getting into HDTV or other technologies simply because the market seems to want to sort out which technologies are best by letting early adopters go through several models until they find what works best.
I kept my last car for 17 years, and my current one, which is 5 years old, is still "new" as far as I'm concerned (I drive Hondas). I keep my computers for a long time too, although in many cases a computer upgrade is gradual because after a couple years I've replaced everything but the case, one by one.
But I've gone through 3 laptops in 6 years and am on my 4th. One upgrade was strictly and upgrade, because my wife wanted my old one, but the other 2 cases was because it had become too expensive to fix compared to replacing, especially when repairing a laptop is a crapshoot because you never know when another major component (i.e. something bigger than a harddrive or memory) is going to go.
Then when it comes to the kids... some toys are practically pre-broken for your convenience, and any kind of cheap consumer electronic device is much the same. I've gone through several cordless phones in the past 5 years. I'm happy to repair rather than replace, but my time and effort is worth money too, and it doesn't make sense to spend two hours fixing something that you can replace for $5 or $10. It usually doesn't make sense to spend hours and pay shipping, etc, for something that costs less than $100, and I wouldn't even bother trying to get a VCR or DVD player repaired any more.
In cars, the tiniest malfunction can run to hundreds of dollars, because everything is packaged into sealed components that have to be replaced whole (and who knows if they are repaired and refurbed or just tossed). About 10 years ago, the car repairman told me an alternator problem I had was probably just a bad brush that he could replace for pennies, but it was a sealed unit, so there's $100 or so. I had to replace my entire steering column unit (the thing with the turn signal, light and wiper controls, etc, that wraps around the steering column) because the hazard light switch was busted and I needed that for the State Vehicle Inspection. $400+, and I'd taken the car in at the last minute, so I really had no choice or face fines from Maryland's finest. It was all one sealed unit (or I got totally ripped off by the repair place... either way I was screwed).
What's it going to take before we become sane in our usage of resources? I'm not talking about World War II style rationing, unless that somehow becomes necessary, but there is just so much excess, so much waste, that is completely unnecessary. We don't have to be Luddites or Scrooges to live a little more intelligently, but there are often no real alternatives that don't cost exorbitantly more, take up huge amounts of time or effort, or are simply not as advantageous as they would appear.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
One need not look to elaborate schemes by major corporations to explain this phenomenon. It could simply be viewed as a response to market forces.
As several people have noted, consumers tend to select on the basis of price, and to some extent bullet-listed features. One question that I'm not seeing asked is why people select this way. I submit that it is because one can very easily tell if one product is more expensive than another, and to a large extent whether or not it has more useful features. It is very difficult, however, to quantify the quality of a product. Quality and longevity of a product require somewhat elaborate testing to ascertain, and even then, the results can be difficult to interpret.
Slightly off topic: I think that this is largely why dollars are used as a metric in many different places (and equally inappropriately). For example, GDP is used as a metric for economic _progress_, even though it only measures the amount of economic _activity_. One is not necessarily a good proxy for the other, but it is much more quantifiable.
Spending extra money on developing things that last a longer time seems almost unreasonable in today's world. How can you look trendy with that cellphone the size and shape of a cinder block? If you take a look at the habits of the consumers, they usually will buy an new up-to-date phone or computer way before it is even outdated or ready to be thrown out. (Phones are especially the case. Computer, since they are pretty expensive in comparison, people will tend to retain them longer) In my views, spending extra money on increasing the lifespan of a gadget, will only result in less money for the companies themselves for research and production, and more functioning gadgets collecting dust in the top shelves of your bedroom.
So items break down so that I buy more of them?
Hmm, that may explain why my small town family doctor keeps hitting people with his car.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
I use Gentoo, and I upgrade every day.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I don't know, I've got 3 C64s in the garage that were made around then, cost about $200 new, and they all still work. If I run across a C64 in a garage sale, I expect it to work. The power supply...That's another story, but the computers usually work fine. Of course your right when you say that the ones that still work were the ones that were well made by definition.
It's not just price, it's population. As the population increases, and industrialization spreads out into new areas, products are increasingly cost-reduced to meet the same pricepoint. Look at furniture, for instance. In the old days everything is solid wood. These days you pay a premium for particleboard with stickers on it. The same is true of consumer electronics. Miniaturization increases the power of chips, but it also reduces the raw materials used. And switching from metal to plastic. In the old days all VCRs were mostly metal. Some years back you started to see VCRs that had cases made of 100% plastic. Same deal with computer cases. Computer cases used to use a really solid sheet metal. Now they are mostly plastic with very flimsy metal innards. And the metal on car bodies are almost as thin as aluminum foil. You can dent them with a fingernail and the paint is ultra thin. Maybe you can give cars a pass if their aim is to reduce weight, but the paint shouldn't make much difference. It's getting to the point that the quality of plastic in products used is also going down. Today's plastics are thinner and more brittle. Metal hinges on doors of components are being replaced by plastic tabs that can snap off. Most candybar phones easily shatter their tabs when trying to open them to get to the internal flash cards.
I had a phone that, along with me fully clothed, got pushed into a pool at 2am for about 2-3 seconds. It wouldn't even turn on after that, but the girl who had pushed me in(had to forgive her, she was hot) told me that if you put it under a lamp for a long time, the water will evaporate and it will work again so I did and it did.
Had a similar experience with my laptop, spilled a screwdriver(drink) on my laptop and wouldn't turn on and had some strange blue light go on. But I blow dried it with a hair dryer and put it under a light and low and behold two years later its still works (though the processor has gone to hell due to the carelessness of playing online games on a laptop).
One bit of warning however tho, do not place the said object directly on or too close to the source of heat. A friend of mine dropped her phone in the toilet and I cockily said that I could fix it. Since I didnt have my usual high powered desk lamp, I placed it in the top of a regular lamp rite above the bulb and half of the screen melted away. But it once again worked still!
My theory on why this works so well is that most electronics automatically shut down when they sense water on them (as shown by the blue light on the laptop or how when you take your phone back to the store they can tell it has had water damage) so thus it is just a bunch of metal with no current running through it. Therefore, it will not work until you remove the water residue but once you do, it has not reason not to work.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
TV is a bad example. The US Government is going to break your TV in 2009 when it is ILLEGAL for anyone to transmit the analog signals needed by "old" TVs. They are going to force everyone to go digital, to put more money in the pockets of the electronics manufacturers and so they can put force DRM down consumers throats - making it illegal under the DMCA to exercise fair use rights.
Thank you Michael Powell (of the FCC). You did this!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Hehe.. Thanks. :)
Just today I fished out a pencil out of my washing machine. Pencil which was torn to bits lengthwise and some of the more pointy and sturdy bits had got to the rubber isolation wall between the drum and the glass front. The insulation is now somewhat "broken in" and I'm considering if I should call a repair guy to look at it before using it again
(Yeah, there's some water on the floor)
Bot Assisted Blogging
We live in a disposable world.
Prime example, how would you react if you broke your 49.95 or 249.95 phone?
I dropped my $350 phone two stories 3 days ago and was upset but then again now I have the new version of that same phone. Yeaa
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
To have a gear or cam designed to break under mechanical overload is stupid. The proper way to provide a mechanical weak point is to use a shear pin. This is a plain cotter pin in an accessible drive shaft coupling, or in the hub of that gearwheel, that will shear under overload. It may be mild steel, or even aluminium in a light mechanism. Such a part is much cheaper to replace than a gearwheel, and can even be made by the user with basic workshop facilities rather than having to go back to the manufacturer.
Shear pins are common in machine tools for example, and are the mechanical equivalent of a fuse, which answers your point about electronics.
When you consider he's comparing a huge, space wasting, immobile computer to a constantly moved and abused, pettite cell, I would say the RAZR is _at_least_as_ sturdy as the XT.
My wife is constantly dropping (try that with an IBM XT), losing, angrily closing, and otherwise abusing her phone. It still works great! I don't know what he did to his RAZR, but I wouldn't lend him my cheapo phone.
I think that many are forgetting that modern technology is more complex than it's predecessors. Even with great engineering practices, there are many more components to todays gadgets and as such it is more likely to fail. This is an inherent property of any system where complexity is involved.
A while ago, in my search for a small, dedicated word processor with a long battery life, a big screen and a proper keyboard, I bought an HP Jornada 820. It's a great little machine with no moving parts and a flashcard port rather than a hard drive. Awesome. I use it all the time for writing on the go in ways that make regular lap-top and palm users go, "Wow! I wish I had something which served me as well. How much did you spend? Really? Wow. . . If I gave you some money, could you get one for me also? eBay scares me."
The problem, and I was told to anticipate this, is that the screen on the Jornada 820 likes to break off after a period of use.
So when mine did, I pulled it apart to see why. It's pretty amazing! I discovered inside a set of re-enforced bolt holes in the chassis where some scrupulous engineer figured the screen hinging system ought to be attached. But somebody, somewhere, made the call to ignore those bolt holes and instead use these single, weenie screws in a rather less than strong part of the chassis. A ploy which was clearly designed to have HP's cute little Jorna break with ease. And they do. Thank you so very much, HP!
But since planned obsolescence is a given these days, I was overjoyed!
I simply drilled out the never-used re-enforced bolt holes and employed proper bolts to re-attached the screen. (And because I like to do a really good job, I used some spring-steel and washers to make the whole thing even more rugged. Barring accidents, the screen will never come off again.)
So now I have a computer which by design was supposed to be dead several years ago, but which works just fine for me. And unless the (evil) designers were able to sneak any other time-bomb flaws into the device, my little word processor should last me for a very long time. This makes me happy!
The moral of the story? Learn how to fix things or get used to spending hoards of cash because several somebodys over at HP and similar companies are spineless villains.
-FL
One nasty "acronym" RoHS. Reduction of Hazardous Substances. A EU "directive" that affects the rest of the world, because electronics is a truly global trade.
Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoHS#Criticism
and you will learn why electronics have been getting steadily less reliable over the last 5 years or so. There is no lead allowed in solder any more! The way electronics have been made for decades.
I have no problem with restrictions on the other 5 substances. Those are known to be bad news. And lead leaching from old TV screens in landfills is a problem. But for the lack of a tenth of a gram of lead my f*cking iPod died (yes, RoHS. Cracked solder joints under a BGA part.)
It could take several more years for the electronics industry to fully deal with lead-free solder and get reliability back up. Meanwhile... buy the extended warranty!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
What I hate is when I buy a new device because it has a must-have feature, and the device sucks so much that I can't wait to replace it. Examples are my old LG phone, (I bought it because it had simple PDA functionality,) and my Motorolla HDTV-DVR from Comcast.
No, I will not work for your startup
Why do products break? Because one pays one's money up-front when buying them. If all such products were sold on hire-purchase agreements with 120 equal monthly payments with payments ceasing automatically when the product breaks because of poor workmanship (wilful destruction excepted), then the quality of products sold would be far better.
Many such products have warranties that only last 12 months. And these are warranties, not guarantees. Such warranties often have restrictions on claims which make it harder to get one's money back, and in most cases one cannot choose to get one's money back because such a choice is made by the manufacturer. Often, all one can do is get a replacement of the same shoddy product.
Products these days are supposed to break. Manufacturers get more money that way because the products must be replaced more often. It's why iPods don't have replaceable batteries. It's why modern cars don't have bumper bars any more. It's why so many products break in the first 12 months after the warranty runs out.
So what can we do about it?
Stop buying this crap.
Sadly, that is easy to say but difficult to do. The difficulty is the consumers cannot make informed choices about which products are good and which are shonky pieces of crap that are likely to break within two years.
I suppose the best approach is to spread the word whenever a product doesn't last as long as you hoped. Tell your friends. Complain in your blog. Find product comparison websites and post there. Make sure people know that the piece of crap you bought with your hard-earned money is worthless and that other products from the same manufacturer may also have a short life expectancy.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
After reading through your various comments about technology of various forms breaking, I have but one question: what the hell? I've got a crappy dell laptop thats survived a car crash while sitting on the hood of my car. I've dropped cell phones down garbage disposals and pulled them out somewhat the worse for wear but still functioning. what do you guys use your laptops for? stopping bullets? propping up your cars when you change the oil? are the technology gods just extra pleased with me and thats why my stuff all works?
...they're made in china with cheap quality of build materials and poor quality of soldering. How else do you think prices have gone down in the last decade or so?
Markets aren't 100% efficient and only support a finite # of suppliers. They often can support fewer suppliers than there are permutations of consumer demand. The lament isn't that there are no suppliers willing to take an unprofitable stance on a small market segement. The lament is that other conusmers have made the "quality" demographic too small to support through shortsightedness that actualy costs them more in the long run to boot.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
I have had few electronic devices break or malfunction on me. This includes Cell Phones, TVs, Computers (which I build myself which probably helps that point), printers, etc. I worked for 5 years in an electronic retail environment and the most replaced and repaired items came from Motorola and Sony. Now not all of their lines were awful but they both had their moments. I found the general rule with Sony was that if you could take it with you it will break and malfunction. Sony's TVs, home theaters, and stereos are excellent as far as durability are concerned, but their line of portable devices (including laptops) are overpriced and much more prone to malfunction. Motorola is hit and miss with their product lines. Their DVRs/PVRs are problematic, which I will admit that it is technically not their fault since its the hard drive that fails in them, however they are the one that chooses what hard drive goes into their devices. Most of their Cell Phones have big problems with the exception of the Startac and the V60 both of which tend to withstand the test of time. Motorola two-way radios (not FRS, don't get me started on that) were and are extremely durable and reliable, they did that one right. ;) ;)
Now my favourite companies, not only from experience but from return/repair rate at the store, would have to be Panasonic and Nokia. These are two companies that seem to not only last but put up with abuse. I have yet to have a piece of Panasonic electronics to stop working on me. I have one of the original Shockwave Metal portable cd players (for those who don't know, it was a portable cd player with a casing that wasn't plastic, but cast aluminum) that is now on it's 11th year and still working like day one. I've had DVD players, TVs, Microwaves, Vacuums, MP3 players, home theaters, stereos, alarm clocks,digital cameras and even batteries and chargers that have lasted more than 5 years before I sold them (and some I am still using to this very day). Panasonic seems to be one of the few manufactures left that actually design, engineer, manufacture and assemble all their own hardware without out-sourcing it to other companies. Yes it costs a bit more than the norm, but less than the "high-end", such as Sony. Maybe I'm just lucky.
The next point, which was really the reason for writing this, is the overall quality of Nokia. I have owned Motorola Cell Phones in the past and was never excited by their durability and quality. I took very good care of them and still had them break, not from abuse but just plain failure. Any Nokia phone I've had I only replaced it because I wanted to upgrade to a newer model for the new features. Any Motorola phone I've had I have upgraded to get rid of it to get something more reliable. When I say reliable I don't mean better signal or anything beyond the manufacturers control. I mean less time in the repair shop and more time in my hands. My last purchase was a Nokia 6620 and normally I treat my electronics, big or small, like a new-born child, with care and compassion. Why? Because I paid a good amount of money for it (the phone not the kid haha). However, going through a divorce didn't help the fact that the Nokia 6620 is just enough of a handful to make a good projectile. Yep I lost my cool on more than one occasion talking to the ex on the phone. This phone has realized its potential for true mobility. It has been thrown across rooms into walls of gypsum, wood and concrete. It has traveled 100 yards across my lawn and into a soggy ditch. It has been thrown to the ground in gravel, sand, pavement, and mud. I have dropped it in the sink and put it through the daily grind of use. And no I am not a violent person by nature and would never wish to cause anyone pain or discomfort (lets just get that one out of the way). Yet, 2 years later it still works fine.... sure I've put some scratches on it and a small crack on the camera window (which doesn't show up in photos) but it works like the day I bought it. Lucky I know, maybe next time I go through the airport they will find they will find that horseshoe when they search me
Anyway, I would just like to thank Nokia for being there for me throughout my divorce
Yes, that's the word you're looking for...crapitalism.
Among the printers in my office, I have an HP LaserJet II that is 19 years old, has seen 800000 pieces of paper go thru it (not all mine), and takes about 2 minutes to configure under most operating systems. I also have an HP DeskJet that is low on ink after 100 pages, took 45 minutes to install 50MB of crap files, ultimately only working with 32-bit Windows XP without the ability to share with other OSes.
I use a 22 year old IBM AT keyboard. Buckling-spring keys work and feel perfectly, I can touch type any function key combination. Nothing compares to these steel babies, even if you don't like the key layout.
Hard drives. I trust my 2GB SCSI drives more than any 300GB SATA.
Given that this is the same guy who thinks Paris Hilton is one of the top 10 girl geeks of all time, I'm not sure that he's qualified to operate complex machinery. As such I suspect this current article is PEBKAC fueled.
don't mess with those geekgrrls
Zune, meet Hammer.
When you design a product to withstand 100% of what end users throw at it, you end up with a kind of hardware bloat (think Volvo). Designers quite reasonably address what most people want, and throw in whatever else they can do cheaply or easily.
It's all comes down manufacturing costs. Everything is bid out to the lowest cost manufacturer that can meet requirements. Products are now made to spec and no better; flimsy motors, gears, glue, etc. are used where they will pass quality tests, but won't last for 20 years like the old stuff. The specs have lowered standards as well to control costs. My mother still uses the Kitchen Aid blender she used 30 years ago when I was a kid - imagine that today; the idea is laughable.
On the other hand, all that manufacturing price pressure quickly ends up leading to cheaper consumer prices when competition copies also substitutes cheaper parts. Now you can buy a blender for $10 instead of $150, even if the motor will burn out after six months and the blades will be dull and warped the first time you give it something challenging.
If you want quality, you can generally still get it buy buying the "industrial" models at a higher cost. That won't work on mobiles, but who cares - do you really want that old Nokia from 1995 to still work - the network probably wouldn't even support it anymore. Any industry where people upgrade every 2-5 years doesn't need to make 20 year products.
I've read, for a long time, the assertion that, essentially, things these days, they just don't work like they used too.
And y'know what, there's nothing to it. Things are pretty much made the same they were (INSERT FAVORITE NUMBER OF YEARS HERE) ago.
You can talk about how you see old cars on the road, or you have some old piece of machinery that still works.
First, on the cars: You don't see old cars on the road. If you do, they've had thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of restoration work done on them (read: replacing broken old parts with new parts, or refurbished old ones.) Ask anyone who owns a 60's Mustang... you see lots of them, but it's not because nothing breaks on them.
That's what it comes down to, when you see old stuff that still works, it's because it's either a. really simple, like a hammer or a lamp or b. lots of work has been done on it to keep it going.
Walls and floors are getting harder!!! :-]
Jaj
I'd have said that build quality was getting better. Here in the UK, in the early 80's we had native machines of very dubious build quality (ZX series), but they were cheap and succeeded in getting computers out to the masses. These days everyone has a computer and the machines they use, even the ones that are built here, are far better than they were before. That's because peoples expectations have changed. They aren't experimenting any longer. They know they want/need the machines and so they are prepared to invest more in quality.
If you have a 25 year old bit of kit still going strong, the chances are you just had a good sample. What about the other 999 made that day that are now in landfill because they failed in one way or another?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Today's consumer goods are of less quality in order to make the consumers buy new gadgets a few years down the road.
My aunt has a working refrigerator from the 60s...while I had to change refrigerators twice.
I have bought countless Nike shoes because after a few months of athletic activity, they break. I have and old 15 yold pair of Asics Tigers (athletic brand produced in eastern Europe) which I use to do for rough work like repairs, lifting things etc which are still in good shape.
So it's all about the economy...
Like so many things, predicted by the late, great, Douglas Adams. But for shoes.
From Wikipedia:
In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
What the gadget designers need to do is get with the clamshell designers... you practically need plasma cutters to get the gadget out of the packaging. ...or maybe the clamshells are so strong because the gadgets are so frail?
In the past Engineers were not as good as today. They didnt have data as good as today so they had a hard time estimating how much needs to be put into a product so generally to be safe they overengineeered it thus giving you a product which lasts years when its not supposed to and a lot more expensive than it needs to be. Nowadays with more data available Engineers know how not to over engineer. If you are offering a 1 year warranty than you design the product to last a little more than 1 year. If you design it to last 5 years you would offer a 5 year warranty and correspondingly higher prices. Why should you complain if a product breaks out of warranty? You are supposed to replace it at the end of Warranty and any extra service you get out of it is just bonus
**Life is too short to be serious**
Maybe the RAZR phones just suck. That would seem to be the case, anyway - I've not heard a happy word from one RAZR phone owner so far, even with all the advertisements for them. However, my Sanyo flip phone (the MM7500 as provided by Sprint) has been going strong for most of the year - and the hinge has remained solid and normally flexible since I got it. I explicitly avoided flip phones for a long time, as I figured I'd break the hinge right off the bat, but this phone has been surprisingly well built.
My parents got two of the RAZR phones through Verizon - they're not happy with them, but they use them as they'd rather not have to re-buy mobile phones with no good reason. (It's expensive if you're not getting them as part of a contract renewal.) Consider the tiny package that all the SMT chips and PC boards are being crammed into - it's a poor phone jammed into a necessarily flimsy housing. And people are surprised that they quickly break? Here's an idea - make more sensible choices about your technology. Less fashion-driven, more purpose-driven. You need something sturdy? Go for sturdy, not flashy. Don't be mad that the manufacturer sold you something flimsy and you bought it. Be more discriminating about your purchases. Take a little responsibility for your buying choices.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Apparently not all RAZRs are created equal. I have had a V3M for a few months and it has been abused enough to get some deep gouges on the exterior. A recent fall revealed something interesting to me. The entire outer case of the phone is aluminum. A deep scratch on a black part of the phone revealed the metal underneath. Even the battery cover is metal. I was impressed enough to get a pink V3M for my wife. Sounds like the V3 may not be as sturdyily built.
I Don't Work Here
Laserjet 4 Plus... a little boxy, but Ill take it over any new piece of crap they put out any day. that was a product that lasted.
I'm old enough to easily remember when "Made in Japan" universally translated to "crap". Actually, I think the transition time to quality in this cycle is amazing. Every linux person here using an nVidia card raise your hand.
Antique tech was often terrible. Vacuum tubes that sucked energy, threw heat and burned out? A car with points and condenser that needed a tune-up every six months? I can very vaguely remember crimped metal toys. You could rip a fingernail or cut yourself on exposed edges -- and the wheels still fell off.
Progress in product design has been overwhelmingly positive. On the other hand, I could go on about the joys of my alarm clock (free, c. 1968, needed an AF output transistor) with a real clock motor and a couple other things from the past....
I'm curious how a company that in a very obvious way built things with quality/longevity as top priorities would do nowadays. Would I spend twice what I might otherwise on a product expected to last 3x as long? (My answer: depends on the product). It seems that some here are unhappy with certain products quality, how much more would you pay for something expected to last 2x as long? 3x as long? For the rest of your life?
And would this prevent you from taking advantage of improvements/technological advancements? I would never have dreamed 15 yrs ago that washing machines would change much, but now I can save serious $$ by buying a modern one.
I'm sure some economist(s) have written about this, I wonder what they say.
Cars have gotten more reliable, computers more standardized and easier to find off-the-shelf parts for, and portable electronics have become more solid-state and therefore more rugged in recent years. I went through two Sony Discmans back in the '90s inside a year, where my aging RCA Lyra, Net-MD, and presumably the cheap off-brand player I picked up back in oh three and sold off to a colleague later, are all still operational.
It's true that you'll get a less reliable product as an early adopter, but if you have more money than sense, you'll probably just end up with a fully functional, but soon obsolete piece of electronics. The rest of us, the ones who'll buy one gadget over another because it takes AA batteries, or seems to have a superior build quality, as opposed to "oooh, the pretty color!", can usually depend on our stuff to work properly and have a decent lifespan.
Anyway, if the guy who wrote this really just wanted to replace a phone, he could've picked out a proven candy-bar or flip phone design. He went for the flashy multimedia-experience type device, which any cynic (realist) would've predicted would be less functional as a phone, and more delicate.
Everyone knows electronic gadgets run on magic blue smoke. When you let the smoke out, they stop working.
"If your parents never had children, chances are you wonât either." -Dick Cavett