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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.)
The US spelling is "shay".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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It's not really that simple except for reasonably large, well studied components. But if you are doing the design of say, a motherboard or a the main board of your cell phone, you are essentially constructing a new thing, based on components that themselves may or may not be well understood even under their own environments. Processors are a crapshoot, many of them (including our favorites) don't have an MTTF at all, or any reliability data period. In fact quite a lot of smaller ICs are like that too. In a mature organization we do study the lifetime curves of the components (in some fashion or another), and there are standards of acceptability based on the market, but that is definitely not a good assumption to make about most consumer electronics (for example). A lot of those are made in some shady fly by night environments.
The whole topic in context of consumer electronics is kind of dumb. Nobody designs things to fail in a given window. It's hard to do even if you have reliable statistical models. You design not to fail in a given window, and inevitably outside of that window something eventually goes wrong somewhere. In reality you are often against some sticky design choices (quality, reliability, cost, pick one). My favorite is selecting decoupling capacitors for big digital ICs like CPUs. Failure to have adequate decoupling will result in random and unpredictable failures, yuck. Proper decoupling is frequently physically impossible, some people who make chip packages don't think this through real well and don't simulate. Yay. But the designer does the best he can, trying to find the smallest parts to get in to all the nooks and crannies, with the least inductance he can introduce. In choosing that small package he has chosen quality over reliability and cost: the smaller package will have a lower voltage rating and thus the MTTF will be lower (often very much lower in practice), and you often add cost in choosing those components because they require SMT lines that support small parts, the smaller footprints have larger manufacturing fallout (tombstoning, bridging, etc.) and sometimes they just cost more because only one guy sells them, etc. No one will ship if the derating curves are too bad, but at some point we say "a life of 3 years is good enough", and that's that. In reality decoupling in many environments is black magic, no one has the technical data to know how much is enough, and we massively overdesign it, and even as components fail nobody ever notices!
Then there's mfg variability. Your design may be absolutely correct on paper, it may even have met your DFM criteria for your factory. But there is a non-zero probability of failure in fab and assembly of every part of the design. Things happen, I mentioned surface mount part tomb-stoning (literally turning at 90 degrees to the PCB, like a tombstone) but that's just one of so many things. Not all of these produce a hard failure immediately, many of them make it through whatever physical and functional test you apply to a device after it is manufactured. But they fail early because the circuit as designed by the engineer, as hopefully studied for standard component failure, is now outside of its design spec, and is going to fail early. Or possibly someone mishandled a component and induced a latent ESD event to a device causing its lifetime to be reduced. So all that work above, designed to make sure your design works "just long enough" gets ruined horribly when it gets physically assembled.
In reality, yes we are making lifetime choices based on the market, but not in any devious technical way. Given the low costs the market demands on consumer goods, and the fast design cycles a number of less than optimal choices are being made that impact the final product. There is no way to predict what is going to fail first, all we can do is look at failures that come in and identify where the weaknesses must have been (even that is usually only done for the first 90 days, or maybe 1 year). However since products change so signifi
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!
"Chaise longue" - it is a long chair, not a lounge chair. "Chaise lounge" is a 19th century American misspelling.