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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.)
IIUC, Ford used to study which parts in his cars failed least frequently, and then change the design to make it cheaper. This *should* be another way to achieve the same end.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I prefer only one thing failing at a time. That way it's economical to repair it.
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.
... 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
But the poem itself is called "The Deacon's Masterpiece or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay."
So pedantically I am not going to get off your lawn.
And yet you're perfectly happy to start a sentence with a preposition. Disgusting!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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
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
Check out the sheer number of chain and chain guides in newer Audi's.
http://i.imgur.com/t5XUfav.jpg
And this is the end facing the firewall, so to service any of this shit you will be removing the engine.
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.
"Chaise" doesn't sound anything like "shay".
> 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.
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.
Yeah, "hoss" is horse. A "one hoss shay" is a type of one-horse carriage. It will make more sense if you read the article, as the summary doesn't connect the allegory.
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...
It's a french word, and it is is definitely pronounced with a "sh" at the beginning, not a "ch" sound.
The woman in the commercial got it right. If you don't want to pronounce it right, just say "chair" instead of telling people who can speak french that they're saying it wrong.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Boy, there are a lot of people who think otherwise. You can't own a Honda with 100,000 on the clock and even casually discuss selling it without getting people coming out of the woodwork asking if you're selling it. We've sold two Hondas with 100+k on them in like the same day for better than Blue Book prices. One couple wanted the Pilot so bad they tolerated our clusterfuckery for needing a replacement title.
We'd owned both cars for 11 years and while they seemed mechanically flawless, we were just kind of tired of them. I sold mine to a friend who took it to Arizona, drove it for a year and then sold it to his girlfriend's daughter who drove it for a year and a half and then sold it to someone else -- my friend says he still sees it around town, although I have no idea what kind of work its needed beyond consumables and maybe an AC recharge.
I frankly expected both cars to ultimately lose a transmission. The Pilot had AWD and the Accord transmission struck me as kind of jerky for a 4 speed automatic, but neither car showed any operational problems, especially in the motors.
Select "Factory reset." on startup. You'll have to play around with the on-off and volume buttons a bit to get to the boot menu when you restart. For a more limited cruft removal - Settings | Backup and reset | Factory data reset.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.