Slashdot Mirror
One Hoss Shay and Our Society of Obsolescence (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: The last time you replaced your smart phone, was the entire thing shot or had just one part gone bad? Pretty much every time it's one thing; the screen has cracked, or the WiFi stopped working predictably. But the other parts of the phone were fine. The same is true for laptops, or cars, or one-horse carriages. In fact this is a concept that has been recognized for well over one hundred years. The stuff we buy isn't meant to last forever, otherwise we wouldn't buy more of them. And for that matter, nothing lasts forever despite design. But what if everything was optimized to fail all at once? Instead of a single point of weakness, all parts wore equally and failed in the same time frame. Finding a balance between the One Hoss Shay model, and encouraging the return of user-serviceable parts would go a long way toward making sure that replacement is a choice and not a necessity. (And here's a nicely illustrated version of One Hoss Shay.)
We get it, you're a hackaday shill.
One-Horse Chaise
If (M,Ï) is a symplectic manifold, is it possible to embed (or injectively immerse) it symplectically into a sufficiently large (R2N,Ω), (with the usual symplectic structure)?
The only thing that I have found is a theorem by Gromov which is conceptually very nice, but which seems to be very difficult to use. First, I should construct some embedding i0 of M - I guess that I could use Whitney here. Next, I should check that iâ--0Ω belongs to the same cohomology class as Ï. Finally, I should check that di0 is homotopic through fiberwise-injective bundle maps :TMâ'TR2N to some symplectic morphism. This does not look easy at all.
Best understatement of the decade
end of argument. get off my lawn.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Components have a mean time to failure. Your design is already optimizing your choices for your market unless you're an idiot. There's some simple math for for calculating the time to failure or likelihood of a combination of components. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Nothing typically fails in my phones before replacement. My phone and most phones are replaced because we are enticed with a newer shinier phone and amortized or waived costs with a contract.
Everyone's use-case is different, you can't design it in such a way that all parts consistently fail at the same time.
And it is not "nothing lasts forever despite design" it is "obsolescence is in the design".
Article and idea too terrible to comment on. Creating a part to wear this way and maintain usable tolerances will cost way more then just a well designed part.
love is just extroverted narcissism
The last thing I'd want is for industry to cheapen products further than they already have. All the cheap, fragile plastic in products today seriously shortens lifespan. Of course, the problem is that industries are trying to keep their products at 'magic' prices points ($9.99, 99.99, 199.99 etc) that customers have grown accustomed to over many years while fighting inflation of the currency. Their only choices are to increase the price or cheapen the products.
Perhaps part of the solution is to reverse the inflation trend.
Usually when one part fails, the whole phone is useless. It's effectively the same thing.
I keep my smartphone (Samsung Epic 4G, of the Galaxy 1 generation) because no phone available now has the one feature I want to keep: a hardware QWERTY keyboard. Yes, it's stuck on Gingerbread and has an anemic amount of RAM (even for its time), but that just shows how much I hate on-screen keyboards.
I'm not convinced modular smartphones will ever be more than a niche product. The whole goal of smartphone design is to fit as much as you can into a tiny package, and modularization would require lowest-common-denominator physical dimensions.
Sounds too much like a Nexus 6 model...
If something is going to have a fixed lifetime that requires I make another purchase, then it better be cheaper than a durable model, you'd better pass the cost savings on to me.
Otherwise I'll buy something I can keep longer by caring for it well.
I can see the fnords!
That would get more than a bit expensive, wouldn't you think? I meant for the manufacturer, not the individual consumer (who also gets shafted).
I'll explain - the R&D into making everything fail at once (or enough to brick the device) would never be recouped...
* too much chance of the customer jumping ship to a competing brand that promises that their widget lasts x% longer. ...sure there's lots more involved, but think about this: some breakages can be repaired at relatively little cost, such as a cracked screen. Because of this, replacing an entire fairly-new phone (and then blowing all that time configuring/syncing the replacement) because the screen cracked is asinine (doubly so when you consider things like device insurance).
* too much chance that the failure wouldn't fail gracefully, causing something lawsuit-worthy
* too much chance that the failure would fail gracefully, but do so at the wrong time, again causing lawsuits
* too much chance that you mis-time your intentional MTBF, causing your entire customer base to simply stop using that class of device (after all, I don't *need* a smartphone to eat/sleep/shit/whatever, and if the cost is too high to keep replacing them, I'll simply do without.)
* too much chance that some group like Greenpeace (or worse) would use that pre-planned failure to whip up animosity towards you and your company.
Just at first blush, I don't see this idea working at all... it would require everybody in the industry to do it at the same time, and further require that a struggling company not 'cheat' by making and selling more durable products.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Do you want small, efficient devices that can't be serviced or big, inefficient devices that are modular?
The more customizeable or serviceable you make a device, the bigger it's going to be because the individual components need interfaces and power regulation and whatnot.
It had a bad transmission for the last 10 months, but the engine mount breaking and the engine block cracking is what really did the car in. The frame was almost rusted all the way through. The tires were dry-rotted, not really bad, but they were 7 or 8 years old. The battery was 5 or 6 years old.
I got my money worth.
Now, on my Mac, it is 6 years old in a few months, but the fans just went bad and I will replace them when the parts arrive. I would hope that the SSD, motherboard, and screen would last a lot longer.
Who in the world keeps a smartphone to the point of failure? I've always upgraded once the contract was up and the new-hotness was released. Laptops get donated to relatives or sold online, even accessories get donated, re-purposed, or recycled while they were still in perfect working condition.
It's only acceptible when the technology is rapidly changing. If it was an analog landline phone or tools people would want it to be over engineered.
And "being small" is a feature completely missing from every contemporary smartphone sold where I live. (By small, I mean dimensions smaller than 8cm x 5cm x 1.5cm).
>> replaced your smart phone, was the entire thing shot or had just one part gone bad
My family and I have owned about a dozen different phones now. None have ever broken. We really only get another phone because:
1) Another kid is old enough
2) I want more features
3) "My phone's full/slow"
Same thing with laptops/computers, etc. The side benefit is that a fresh new phone is new, non-gross and un-worn. Unless there was a regular and inexpensive "detailing" service for my phone, I'd still want to chuck my phone every couple of years just like I chuck running shoes.
Obsolescence is DELIBERATLEY limiting the lifetime of an object through design.
I've designed electronic products for over 25 years, and not once have I ever purposely designed obsolescence into a product, nor have I known an engineer who has (We are talking industrial/scientific equipment), and I'm not sure how you would do it for an electronic product short of firmware date methods.
Now: I have designed products, such a Alcohol Breathalyzers, that will refuse to work after a certain period of time because they need recalibration (this was to maintain a government certification), but re calibration restores functionality. The fuel cell wears out in those products; but again that is not planned obsolescence, but a limitation of the technology.
A cracked screen (user abuse), poor wifi (software driver, corrosion etc) are not Obsolescence.
Failing batteries is about as close as you can get to obsolescence.
I'm sure there are examples (especially for mechanical consumer devices with moving parts), but for electronics, it is not a 'thing' we do.
46137
While some folks might like disposable products since they "upgrade" so often, I am not in that market and I tend to keep items for a long time. I suspect in most modern phones the part most likely to fail due to heavy usage will be the battery because Lithium Polymers wear out with use. However in my Samsung Note 3, the battery is replaceable so that's less of a concern for me. I'll likely keep using my phone until it can't play youtube anymore. I'm still using a Vaio Z laptop made 5 years ago. It was state of the art in its time so surprisingly it still seems like a fairly modern laptop. It can't run as long on battery and the discrete switch-able graphics are a bit weak but thanks to impressive design, weight wise and size is a match to modern thinish laptop. CPU power is pretty decent too as an i7. So no, I do not like disposable items.
That's seems like a really dumb way to tackle a problem. Why not address the reason why the part failed to begin with and improving that? The biggest problem I've ever had with my phones are crappy MicroUSB that seem to disintegrate if a little pressure is applied.
Most people's biggest problem is the screen falling to bits if you stare at it too hard.
I wish manufacturer's would consistently offer spare parts.
I prefer only one thing failing at a time. That way it's economical to repair it.
I had a first-gen iPod Touch that lasted eight years before the battery quit holding a charge. Otherwise, it was perfectly fine. The replacement was an iPhone 5C because I needed a new phone after three years and it was $100 cheaper than a current gen iPod Touch.
When my old Windows boxen slowed down because of cruft buildup, I would give it a cleanout and defrag.
But my phone? throw it in the bin and replace it.
Are there solutions to phone buildup of cruft?
Go well
My experience with Hondas is that they are designed to last almost exactly 100,000 miles, at which point they start requiring significant maintenance.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If the camera fails, I can still use my phone. If the wifi fails, I can still use my phone. Hell, even if the mobile unit fails, I can still do VOIP until I get a new phone. Having it all fail because one part fails is just moronic.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
One Hoss Shay
His name is Juan-José, you racist!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Car manufacturers have been working on this for some time now.
... don't try to sell me on planned obsolescence!
When I was proofing goods for the sales floor at a charity second hand shop, here's the prevailing theme I noticed:
* Made before 1970: Pretty good
* Made during WW2: Awesome
* Made during WW1: How are we so blessed
Everything else is unserviceable fucking garbage, might as well throw it in the trash.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
We get it, you're a hackaday shill.
Yeah, it is a stupid article. People don't buy a new phone because some random part wore out. They buy a new phone because it is better, lighter, and more fashionable than their old phone. Phone manufacturers would be idiots to focus on longevity when that is not something that is important to most people, especially if they had to increase cost or decrease thinness.
That is, I'm sorry, stupid. It would take a large amount of effort, much of it directed towards making parts fail faster just so that the consumer can feel good about not having to throw something out just because one piece failed.
The correct answer is, of course, to make things repairable, and arrange so that the failed part can be replaced. But that would cut into profit margins.
On an unrelated note, have the new Slashdot overlords fired everybody but Timmay?
What you're missing with that list is that all the bad and disposable stuff has already been broken, with only the most durable, carefully made, and maintained goods surviving to modern day.
That, and especially for office equipment, intended duty cycle. A 3 hole punch produced around WW2 was expected to be used on reams of paper a day. One produced today is expected to be used a few times a day. Yes, you can get a punch built today that's intended for reams - but it's going to cost you, and to some extend the old high-quality hole punches that were hiding in closets and such satisfies the high duty cycle demands even today.
I don't read AC A human right
From my experiences modern day planned obsolescence seems to be implemented using a combination of nonreplicable consumables and introduction of "demons" which predictably and actively work to tear the machine apart in a controlled manner.
Between significant variation in usage, environment and tendency of sourced components to be used in a wide array of applications it is probably prohibitively difficult to outright design non-consumables to fail predictably enough not to be hit with warrantee liability or earn yourself a reputation for producing cheap junk.
Examples I have personally witnessed:
Nonreplicable soldiered on clock batteries in small devices such as point and shoot cameras which when expired create a short preventing the device from working at all.
Performance hard drives with firmware configured to park at 8 second inactivity intervals knowing full well it will create an oscillation with modern systems continuously logging disks wracking up multiples of the rated park cycles after first year of use and then using this parameter as reason to deny warrantee replacement.
Front loading washing machines using completely unnecessary and laughably wrong sized screws to secure baffles to drum such that balance, bearing or spider failures will eventually cause a hole to be scraped clear thru container and when combined with water leakage essentially total the whole thing.
Small devices with custom sized, failed nonreplicable batteries.
Of course Hanlon's razor applies. What I might believe to be an intentional act could simply be a case of incompetence. One thing is certain - even if you give the benefit of the doubt and assume incompetence vendors sure as hell are not going to admit it or provide any useful information to help affected customers.
IMHO you're wrong. Battery failure is the biggest reason to "upgrade." Availability of software updates is a close second. CPU, screen res etc are already overkill even on a 4 year old phone. Many phone lives have been extended by replacing the battery, though the industry is "on" that "problem" now.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Have a 3 year old droid that, outside of a much shorter battery life, works well. Except the thing iisss slllooowwwwwiiinnnnggggg wayyyyyy dowwwwwnnnn. Games that, 2 years ago, played fine now take 5 minutes just to get to the start screen. Pull up the make a call screen and it's a minute to bring up the contacts list. We had a power outage yesterday, I pulled up the web browser to see if there was an ETA for my power, took 5 minutes to bring up a page. Then it did an auto refresh, which took another 5 minutes, at which time another auto-refresh hit, etc. Hell, a lot of times when I turn it on I get a blank screen with "loading..." for a good 30 seconds.
It's not a bunch of apps running, I have none but the bare minimum. It's not a lack of storage, all my apps are on a SDCARD.
This phone is barely on the edge of usability now due to it's slowness. Again, everything else works fine.
> Yeah, it is a stupid article.
I don't think so. When we think about the usefulness we get from products, it's a shame very good products stop being used because of planned obsolescence.
Printers won't work with your computer, because the driver requires a more recent version of the OS (happened for real!), a scanner will no longer work because a new driver version for your new computer won't be released (happened for real!). The printer had to be returned; the scanner was transferred to an older computer (a XP one, still available for some months), but I saw an identical model dumped as "electronic trash" at a shopping center.
> People don't buy a new phone because some random part wore out.
Yes, they surely do. I myself (well, my daughter) had one of a very famous brand (which shall go unnamed). It stopped making calls, but as a smartphone, all other parts worked: could browse the internet via wi-fi, had an awesome 720p video capture, could play games etc. It was one year old, not too expensive, but also not exactly affordable (after all, it had a "griffe" unit).
> They buy a new phone because it is better, lighter, and more fashionable than their old phone.
Ok, as long as we agree this is kind of a bad reasoning: a new model is not 100% better than your current one; more like 10 to 20% better, perhaps. Yet, you will pay 100% again. Just like there was very little to gain from Office 2007 to 2010. Many features were already present in 2007 and that program would be enough for 80% of users. But everyone thought it was a good idea to get a new version with a new computer -- truth be told, there are special upgrade prices.
But regarding hardware this is uncommon. I would like to get an upgrade of my phone and pay a small amount. The best one can do is enter one of those fidelity plans where you promise to pay the operator lots of dough and get a "free" phone.
> Phone manufacturers would be idiots to focus on longevity when that is not something that is important to most people, especially if they had to increase cost or decrease thinness.
Indeed, you're right, why would do a marketing campaign to tell people their new amazing model does the same the old one did, just with a slightly more powerful CPU, 1 inch bigger screen and some 5mm less thick? "Come and pay us for a new phone with much the same hardware you have and a new fantastic software version?"
Even if everyone falls for that, it doesn't mean I should follow the trend.
Apples push to be thin is driving this.
Even the mac pro has fallen to the looks over what is really needed
Make the whole thing fail at once? That would be an engineering accomplishment on the same order as making a device that never failed.
Why on Earth would you want to do this? It's idiotic and I feel like a sucker for even responding to this steaming pile of "news story".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
We'd like stuff you could repair, instead of throwing away and having to buy a new one. Even replacing the battery on some models is problematical, as it's glued to the inside of the case that requires a special tool to open.
I have tools that are older than I am, and I'm soon to be 63 years old. I've seen and used guns that are far older than I am (wish I owned some of them). The oldest book I own is close to two hundred years old, and there are many that are much older. Everybody has seen houses and buildings that are hundreds of years old. The universe has lasted billions of years, but it had a master builder!
I have a burial plot and casket that will probably last until we're all gone. Of course I won't care about those two things!
Majority of devices fail with perfectly functioning hardware, because software is no longer updated, with the last available release usually being horribly slow and bloated. Installing a custom ROM often does wonders for usability. We should first demand that that bootloaders are unlockable and at least the interface expected and provided by driver binaries is well documented. Fully open and user serviceable hardware would be great, but even modest steps will keep lots of stuff out of landfill.
Two topics here.
1. Planned obsolescence - planned to keep working to specs, but to no longer mesh with current technology or fashion.
2. Planned failure - designed to fail sooner.
Example: many phones fall into the planned failure category as they irreparably fail early because the battery is unreplaceably glued in.
Whereas pretty much all smartphones are rendered obsolete by the advance of many technologies - they still function, but begin to be surpassed by newer phones with more desirable features.
Don't step on the baby.
We get it, you're a hackaday shill.
Absolutely. And the title is realy stupid. "One Hoss Shay" - if the horse dies, get another horse, and vice versa. No need to throw everything out just because the horse died, same as no reason to throw a vehicle just because the engine died.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Just because it wouldn't make calls any more is no reason to junk a smartphone. Making calls is the least used feature on smartphones. And since the internet worked, she can still communicate via email, facebook messenger, skype, twitter, etc. And there's always texting if that part still functions. And it's still a pocket-sized media player, camera, music player, radio, video camera, etc. For calls, she can get a cheapie flip phone if she really needs it - but since she's the next generation, she probably doesn't.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm an HVAC/R mechanic, and this is becoming a huge problem with modern "high efficiency" furnaces. Sure you may save 100 bucks a year on natural gas over the, say, 10 year life of the furnace. But the inducer motor is an ECM (electronically commutated motor) and despite them being basically a fricking shaded pole electric motor, they are very expensive to replace.
I replaced one in a Carrier furnace this morning and it cost the guy $717. Now that's just part cost with zero mark-up or labor. So factor in those 2 things and the customer has actually lost money going for a high efficiency furnace instead of an 80%'er mid efficiency one that doesn't have all these fancy expensive parts in them.
Dirty secret of the industry right now: Carrier's furnaces of the past ~3 years or so, they used a shit design and basically the acidic condensate water from the flue gases are getting backed up inside the inducer motor instead of draining out, and are burning these motors out in as little as TWO YEARS!!! Can you imagine buying a $5000 furnace and 2 years later you wind up with a bill for around $1500 to replace a wrecked inducer motor? I would be livid!
We get it, you're a hackaday shill.
Absolutely. And the title is realy stupid. "One Hoss Shay" - if the horse dies, get another horse, and vice versa. No need to throw everything out just because the horse died, same as no reason to throw a vehicle just because the engine died.
Sigh.
Don't kids learn anything these days? Or do they just hear-and-respond without any thought at all?
http://holyjoe.org/poetry/holm...
Pioneered by Henry Ford ferkrisesakes.
How about instead we make everything modular and put together the device we want or can afford and then replace modules when the tech or our budgets improve.
Oh wait, that was the PC.
Phones are, for a lot of people, fashion accessories, status symbols, you buy the latest "just because".
A phone, failing? What? You can't afford to buy a new one every year? Or every two years, even. It's about 1% of an average IT salary?
Do you wear clothes until they start falling apart?
I mean, people crave novelty, I don't care if your phone is built like a brick, we want new toys on a regular basis, that's why the market provides them.
It's not a conspiracy to steal money from your pocket. There's simply no demand for a phone that lasts 10 years.
This idea is idiotic and always has been. More trash to deal with in a time where we as a society only give lip service and barely know how to talk about how deal with our current garbage and pollution impact on the planet without really devoting necessary resources to deal with that impact. It seems to me like quality took a huge nosedive as internationalization and trade opened up with china and other countries back in the 70's and manufacturing stopped being done locally.
How big would apple be if people didn't upgrade their phone every single generation?
Stuff like this happens in all our consumer products these days whether its openly acknowledged or not. I've done those mttf analyses on consumer electronics before and it always saddened me about the waste impact of those devices and products. I don't work on those types of products or projects anymore, because I feel the negative impacts on our environment outweighs the positive.
I'd rather people designed for upgrade. The obsolescence thing actually happens quite commonly whether its openly admitted and acknowledged or not, and it greatly saddens me and always reminds me of that old anti-trash/pollution crying indian commercial from the 70's.
One very public example from the past, that many claim started the trend has to do with the lightbulb. They didn't wear out fast enough, so the manufacturers banded together to design them in such a way that they would fail more often.
Link if you want to read more: http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
I'd rather people took the approach of our grandfathers and grandmothers who took pride in the quality of their work and exceeded design rules and expectations and built for maintainability. For example, I have two fans, one from the early 30's and another from the early 40's that work great. My tube stereo tuner and turntable is from the 60's and sounds better than pretty much every modern one I've heard. The fans may not be the most energy efficient fans, the stereo needs some time to warm up when you turn it on, but the quality is superb and they are insanely reliable. I've had to fix the fans (because a motor came unbalanced because it was dropped, or the switch got gunked up and needed cleaning) but it was simple, they were built to last easy to maintain. I have 100's of vintage tubes to replace a burned out ones (thanks again dad), but never even had to replace a tube in 30 plus years of me owning that stereo. ... now stop polluting my water and get off my lawn.
No, I upgraded mine because it basically stopped working. Touch screen wouldn't work on demand. No user serviceable parts. Shame because it was less than 3 years old, whereas the phone before it lasted nearly a decade.
Oh that's crap. Yeah some people do, but not everyone just likes to burn money. People still on dumb phones (they still exist hand have week long battery lives) buy new ones when the old ones break. People on smart phones, who want a working phone, upgrade them when the old ones turn to shit. For example, the still perfectly functioning Galaxy Ace is just horrid to use now.
By the time you've reset it and upgraded all the necessary apps to get improved security there's no space, it's slow as fuck and you can barely install any new apps.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But what if everything was optimized to fail all at once?
The only ones to benefit from this are the ones selling the crap - and they don't see any incentive either. What difference does it make whether people discard their old HW because 1 compnent is broken or because all of them fail? A far better concept, for the consumer at least, would be if all gadgets were repairable and upgradeable. It is perfectly doable from tachnical point of view; it is not really a big challenge, whether is is phones, tablets or computers - or even cars. The only reason we don't have it is that producers don't like it, as it would cut into their profit margins. Just imagine a world where all parts for all cars were standardized, so you could find any spare part for any car from a large number of producers - and even better: you would be able to gradually upgrade from you smallish, cheap set of wheels to a flash superbeast. Suddenly car manufacturers wouldn't have a virtual monopoly on certain things. Same thing with everything else. The technology needed to make a small computer like a smartphone repairable and upgradeable is well understood, and again the only reason we are not already heading down that way is that manufacturers don't want to. Well, that and historical reasons: concepts like modular computer systems, clustering etc have evolved alongside the hardware, but we could actually do it now.
The handle was replaced three times and the blade once...
Stop considering the individual components of a piece of equipment for a unit that can be repaired. It is the wrong layer of abstraction.
In modern electronics a single electronic component has long stopped being the unit of repair. If your electronics gets fried, you change at least the entire circuit board. Personally I rarely get electronics repaired. Rather I will replace.
The new unit of repair is whatever not requires human intervention. A modern phone is assembled by robots so the entire phone is cheaper to replace and get a new phone you know is working. Instead of risking the uncertainty of getting a non-fixed device at unknown human hourly wages.
Max M - IT's Mad Science
I can't tell if you're being ever so droll, or not, but I'm going to assume the former.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
in the snow, last year, and sat there all day until we came home from work and found it. It has a shitty generic plastic case, granted, but it's still going over a year later and works for what she needs.
I just replaced the battery in my S4 yesterday for ~$7 from ebay. I don't see a compelling reason to upgrade anything that's working and that I don't feel some limitation that irritates me enough to pay the exorbitant amounts they want for a decent phone. Both of ours were Verizon that have been paid for and are off contract now (still Verizon month to month, more than I'd like to pay but few options where I live that are good) but I don't even think they do pay-the-phone-off-over-time shit anymore and I'm not spending $600+ to get a new one.
Internally the phones look like cheap shitty netbooks I'm frankly shocked they've lasted as long as they have (~2.5+ years).
Dropped my Moto G 2nd gen and got a hairline crack. Still works, only slightly annoying. I do not understand why we can't just use hardened plexiglass instead of this heavy, brittle glass crap. My old Nokia 5230 had plexiglass and did not get scratched, despite actually coming apart several times because of the abuse.
The LCD is intact, but the digitizer is bonded to the front glass and the LCD is glued to the glass. So the entire unit needs to be replaced unless I am prepared to break out the heat gun. The same is true for my Nexus 7 (2012) unit.
My proposal to extend life for mobile units is simple: Get rid of the glass, this saves weight and makes the units more rugged. Then switch to a touch technology that does not require any digitizer panel.
I recently interviewed at Pronode Technologies AB in Sweden. They and their sister company Neonode makes input devices based on optical sensing that does not require you to actually touch the surface.
They created smartphones with this technology back in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This would allow for far easier sourcing of parts and maintenance of the units, bringing down both retail price and service costs.
Have to call bullshit. Your own assertion supports the OPs point. I've replaced the battery in my current iPhone twice (and the screen three times). If "battery failure" was really the primary problem with old phones then people wouldn't upgrade for $1000, they'd replace the battery for $30. The primary reason to upgrade is that people want a new phone.
It's a standard feature of emerging technology. The new thing is much better than the old thing, so people use any excuse to upgrade. When the technology becomes mature there's much less impetus to buy a whole new device. Digital cameras and desktop computers are now pretty mature. Smartphones are fast approaching.
What kind of phone did you have that had less user serviceable parts than a car? When your car needs an oil change do you junk it too?
Yep. My Bondi Blue Agfa scanner from the late 90s still works fine. Unfortunately, I can only use it with my laptop running an older OS, (10.6), and a third-party driver. When that much newer laptop dies, (CD/DVD drive already non-functional), I'll have no choice but to toss both. Obviously, they didn't intend for anyone to continue using it this long.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I have a Victor Victrola that was built in 1917. It works as good today as the day it was made. It is a damn fine piece of engineering, and was the high-tech, must-have device of its day.
Once upon a time, products were built to last darn near forever. Why don't we get back to that, instead of engineering everything to break at once!
The article is crap. There is NO excuse. And references to a dog cart (single-person carriage in england) in the title are so f*ing contrived - the shill is a poseur and a hoser.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The One Hoss Shay comparison would be valid if:
- Genetic engineers were madly trying to evolve a horse and still debating how many legs it should have.
- Mechanical engineers were still debating the optimal number of sides for a wheel. Somewhere between 3 and a lot.
- Structural engineers were still debating whether the frame should be made out of stone, iron, transparent aluminum or wood
- Behavior scientists were still debating what direction was best to drive the thing in and which orientation. Landscape or portrait driving mode
Obsolescence of parts is uninteresting when they have a half life significantly greater than their practical application.
Designing a One Hoss Shay in 1905 that would last a hundred years would be very useful for about 5 to 10 years. Then everybody will trade it in for a Model-T, 20 years later for a Model-A, after that figure 5 to 10 years as a function of economy.
Pretty much. However, I would like to point out that one big problem I see on smartphones is the shitty software. After a few years, the phone gets ridiculously slow and pretty much unusable because the software has gotten so bad (or infected, it's hard to know really since it's all closed-source).
I would have hung onto my old HTC phone for longer if it hadn't gotten so slow. But instead of futzing around with some unsupported and ancient build of CyanogenMod, it was a lot easier to just buy a newer phone.
It's not that different with PCs: a lot of people still buy new computers (though not as much as years ago) simply because the software had gone bad. So instead of re-installing Windows, they'd go buy a whole new computer.
This is really pretty shameful, considering how easy it is to update software, but it's not in the manufacturers' interest to support software very well because it'll just slow sales.
My god! What shameless company posted this?
I'm old enough to remember when even simple tools were built to last. On my grandfather's farm laborers had to shovel across 40 acre fields to allow excess rainfall water to drain into water furrows. Three hundred seventy eight 40 inch rows across a quarter mile, six different cuts down the length of the field, six or seven times during the season, on three different fields.
The shovels they used lasted for years. The older ones had a hole worn in the wooden handle where the workers thumb had gripped. Only when the metal blade had ground down too short was the shovel retired. Now if you put any muscle to a wooden handle it will break in two. You have to get a very expensive steel or fiberglass handle. Then after a few years the blade will fracture and break. You can find commercial heavy duty tools but sixty years ago or more all tools where considered heavy duty.
Lower quality consumer grade tools are fine for home owners, no way I'm going to use a shovel long enough to wear a hole in the handle. Just as long as the price reflects the quality. In case you want to know, today one man drives a hundred thousand dollar tractor equipped with an articulating 30 ft wide blade through the field to cut the cross furrows. At the right place in the field the blade is dropped and the sections use hydraulic cylinders to push in opposite directions to form a cut across the rows. Yes I did have some experience with the shovel method, the tractor is much nicer.
This was HTC One X. Case is glued on, no screws. No service center to fix the screen, etc.
> Just because it wouldn't make calls any more is no reason to junk a smartphone.
Hi. As I typed the above reply, the same occurred to me. I have another pest, er, offspring which is much younger and thinks plants and zombies are the Bee's knees (I bet he'll never know what's that...). If only I can find it in this lost world I call home... he started to call his aunt's smartphone as "his phone"... luckily she also plays the game so they trade secrets. He even watches review videos on the internet! Why can't he watch videos about something more useful like KDE Plasma or Customizing Xfce? Hmm, I'm starting to see a pattern...
> Making calls is the least used feature on smartphones.
It is so now. That phone is from some 4 years ago (720p video was important back then). She wasn't using whatsapp at that time.
> And since the internet worked, she can still communicate via email, facebook messenger, skype, twitter, etc.
The 3G stopped working; all the above really worked, but only at home through wi-fi.
> And there's always texting if that part still functions.
SMS seems dependent on 3G/2G, so it didn't work (it's really a long time since I tried).
> And it's still a pocket-sized media player, camera, music player, radio, video camera, etc.
Indeed. As it happens, everyone gets all these functions in their smartphones, so the device remain without use. But my too young son, which has no need to phone anyone might use it.
Lately, I have been worried about that, though, when things appear on his aunt's phone and I hear from a distance: "Hey, Auntie, let's buy that!" I remember that guy whose son spent about US$ 5,900 in just under a week and start to tremble.
> For calls, she can get a cheapie flip phone if she really needs it - but since she's the next generation, she probably doesn't.
Unfortunately, she's quite demanding in the hardware department. :-[
At work, we scan a lot of papers (for digital legal document processing). We usually set the scanner (a modern multifunction printer, actually) to "B&W text", 200dpi to reduce document size (picture a thousand pages). Almost any scanner can do that.
Unless someone takes it behind the house and put it out of its misery. Which is what they intend to do with your device.