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.)
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.
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.
>> 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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...