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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.)
We get it, you're a hackaday shill.
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".
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.
LOL. The things we inflict on ourselves on behalf of our stupid hangups... Just amazing.
>> 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.
... 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.
Same here.
Products are not 'designed to break' but rather to last a certain amount of time. A good example f this are spacecraft, or more specifically, the Martian rovers. Say they are designed for a target mission of 90 days. That means you want a 97% probability of lasting 90 days.
If each of the 10,000 components that went into building it had a 97% chance of lasting 90 days, the thing would statistically fail before you got to Mars. You have to use parts rated much higher than the mtbf of the entire system That's why you often end up with missions lasting years beyond the nominal time - because each individual piece was picked to last 10 years. This is very complicated stuff because you have to factor in each failure mode and how an individual failure will propagate through the whole system.
I think the closest thing you get to planned obsolesce is the person who sets the product lifetime targets. Designing a widget to last for five years is not the same as destining it to fail in five years.
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
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.
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...