One Hoss Shay and Our Society of Obsolescence (hackaday.com) 220
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.)
Correct your spelling Editors (Score:2)
One-Horse Chaise
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
the poem was "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay." (Score:2, Informative)
end of argument. get off my lawn.
Re: (Score:2)
end of argument. get off my lawn.
But the poem itself refers to "chaise" and "chaises". So pedantically I am not going to get off your lawn.
Re:the poem was "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay." (Score:4, Informative)
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!
Re: (Score:2)
US misspelling at one time. Contemporary spelling of the word preserves the original French. E.g., Chaise lounge [amazon.com]
Re:Correct your spelling Editors (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
"Chaise" doesn't sound anything like "shay".
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki... [wikisource.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm.. nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
I get OS support failures in my phones. They usually stop getting manufacturer and carrier support about a year after they're released. Even my flagship Android devices that are under 2 years old are running 5.0.x. It's only very recently that some manufacturers have finally started to provide security updates for "obsolete" devices so at least some of my devices are safe from years-old exploits. But they'll still be Left Behind in a few more years when apps require 6.x or higher.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So, your provider contract model is broken - making your existing phone obsolete for no reason whatsoever.
Re: (Score:2)
... making your existing phone obsolete for no reason whatsoever.
Except for weight, poor battery life, and lack of memory and features needed for new apps. Also, no one with an old phone is going to be able to hang out with the cool kids. New phones are being pushed by "providers", they are being pulled by consumers.
won't work. (Score:2, Insightful)
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".
Re: (Score:3)
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".
There is a different, but related philosophy- to design a machine in such a way that with a simple action, the entire product falls completely to pieces, allowing for easy recycling of the materials. My engineering professor used the example of a car with a special bolt under the back seat. Unfasten the bolt and all the aluminum falls to one side, all the steel to the other side, and all the plastic falls straight down. Obviously that is a fantasy example and 100% disassembly will be impossible for produ
Re: (Score:2)
Even worse, making multiple quality levels of components could end up costing way more than just going with a higher quality component, due to economies of scale. And that's nothing compared to the insane levels of QA and engineering required to have the components fail at exactly the right time -- cheaper to make a component that will last 1 or two years, then to make one that will last exactly 365 and a quarter days.
If you want all your components to fail at the same time, just hit it with a sledgehammer
Re: (Score:2)
slash bucket / trash (Score:2)
planned obsolescence or inflation? (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, what about efficiencies of scale? The costs of other factors dropping (e.g. transportation viz. lower petroleum prices, currently)? Offshoring manufacturing (which is why a lot of stuff got so crazy cheap in the first place)?
Lots of factors besides the two you mentioned...
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I was talking about increasing prices vs quality for long standing products. If anything, we're more efficient today at producing mass quantities of just about everything, so if prices are still going up, then there's a problem elsewhere.
Re: (Score:3)
Which is why a lot of people buy the most reliable products, like Apple laptops and similar tough designs.
The reason to buy tough laptops and other similar equipment is the inevitable time loss when you are forced to upgrade before you are ready.
eBay offers the intelligent buyer a way to get less expensive replacements and sometimes repair parts.
The free marketplace economy works pretty well.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Can't really say I agree, most the problems with flimsy plastic crap came from poor assembly, tolerances and quality control. These days I get the impression that it's mostly made by robots inspected by robots, it might still be cheap but usually very consistently so and just solid enough to last for most people. So many things have fallen under the "repair event horizon" where if you have to repair it the expected cost of niche parts/tools/skills and remaining lifetime doesn't add up.
Re: (Score:3)
and why is there all this flimsy plastic crap, poor assembly, tolerances, and quality control? Cost cutting to keep a price point. Living with junk that's always breaking is its own cost, especially if most people can't afford to throw it away (say a home appliance or a car) and buy a new one whenever it breaks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
currency, and I'm not just talking about the technology industries.
Re: (Score:2)
We already have this (Score:2)
Usually when one part fails, the whole phone is useless. It's effectively the same thing.
Re: (Score:2)
We already have cars like this; one day past the warranty period, 30 things fail simultaneously. What you're saying is that, after walking the last mile home, we should walk into the house with a smile saying "Guess what, Honey! We need a new car! Isn't that great!"
Why I keep my smartphone (Score:5, Informative)
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 keep mine, too. Because it's small. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Blackberry still exists and has a hardware QERTY keyboard.
Ah, yes, That's the legendary Blackberry reliability for you.
Color me skeptical (Score:2)
Nah - not seeing that happen... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Which way do you want it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you want small, efficient devices that can't be serviced or big, inefficient devices that are modular?
These are not always mutually exclusive. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
"Do you want small, efficient devices that can't be serviced or big, inefficient devices that are modular?"
In the case of smartphones it seems we are getting "the best of both worlds": big inefficient devices that can't be serviced.
Do smartphones actually break? (Score:4, Insightful)
>> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
My phone is one of the few devices that actually have broken. Mainly because I carry it everywhere, and it eventually falls out of my pocket, and sooner or later, one of those falls does some damage.
OTOH, I don't think I've had a laptop break since the turn of the century, and I've NEVER had a desktop or tablet break. They might become "obsolete", but they don't break.
Re: (Score:2)
I've owned four tablets. Admittedly cheap Chinese versions, not name brands. The first one really did spontaneously malfunction; the touchscreen started acting strangely, acting as though it was touched in the wrong places at the wrong times until at some point it failed completely. The second I had dropped and badly cracked the screen; my fault since I hadn't secured it in its case. It actually still ran but I wanted to replace it. (The third was not malfunctioning; I just wanted to upgrade to a high
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect almost as many phones get lost as fail.
Electronic Engineer Here (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that it appears to users as such. Our computers do not get measurably slower over time but we get used to faster computers elsewhere in our life and thus our home computer appears less fast or our TV is more blurry. It's a matter of perception mostly, some things like security updates may make things a bit slower but that's just what security requires (you can't expect your 20-year old computer to compute a 2048-bit key as fast as it does it's contemporary 256-bit keys).
Re: (Score:2)
Chrome now hangs on startup on several of my older computers ever since the last major version thats not my imagination if I install an older verison of chrome or Firefox it won't do that.
Also has anyone figured out how to fix lonesome smartphone syndrome? You know where your droid gets lonely when left unattended and starts calling people at random by itself?
Re: (Score:2)
"You may as well be very honest developers, I have no reason to doubt that. But in some industries, things are simply very subtle."
And even those very honest developers demand the biggest/fastest computers available and automatically think everybody else do the same: you end up with "hello worlds" that require 4GB of RAM a two-core 2GHz CPUs just to boot up.
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what you, as the designing Engineer, plan for.
Ultimately, your plans get handed up and up until they reach a holder, and then down and down until they reach a buyer.
And that buyer, ultimately, decides how those plans are executed -- whether in full or in part, with or without modifications.
And when "in part" and "with modifications" means selling *more quickly* for a *good enough* price to any buyer whatsoever, then that course you took in Ethics In Engineering (I hope!) waves good-bye bec
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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 ent
Re: (Score:2)
Like making components known to have a limited lifespan (batteries) non-replaceable for all practical purposes?
Re: (Score:2)
You pick components close to the limits rather than allowing a margin. Perhaps you run them a touch beyond rating. Cheat the heatsink a little smaller than requirements.
Re: (Score:3)
No. When the IBM PC first came out, it made every CP/M machine in the world obsolete, but that wasn't planned when the various CP/M machines were designed and built. The term you want isn't obsolescence, it's "planned obsolescence," where the device is designed to wear out faster than it otherwise would. As an example, if a car manufacturer used parts known to be degraded by exposure to alcohol in cars that were expected to
Re: (Score:2)
"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)"
Maybe that's the reason.
"I'm not sure how you would do it for an electronic product short of firmware date methods."
Easier than it seems. On one hand, pay attention to the target audience for these devices: a lot of times a dying battery is enough reason to trash away a phone, or just adding more
Re: (Score:2)
Case in point: Have you ever designed any industrial/scientific equipment with a serial port on it? Where do you plug that into on a modern PC?
Depends on the Product (Score:3)
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.
Stupid (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
q: what's stupid?
a: wishing in one hand and shitting in the other. it's a joke -- don't actually do it!
fact of the matter is, you can look at the history of PC's and see *FOUR* prevailing and concurrent trends:
1. "this gets easier to sell as it gets smaller"
2. "this gets harder to break into and work on as it gets smaller"
3. "making things smaller takes more investment and research, it's more expensive and fewer companies can compete -- which means i can't just run out and get replacement parts for a smalle
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, stupid. While there is an interesting mental excercise about an optimum design being once that worked flawlessly until the day it falls apart into dust, it misses the point. Given the hundreds of electronic components and many millions of transistors in a phone it is amazing they work in the first place, let alone trying to shave tolerances so they fail predictably.
Cell phone companies torture their devices all along the design process to see what fails early. The suppliers get their skulls cracked
No (Score:3)
I prefer only one thing failing at a time. That way it's economical to repair it.
Apple products are fine and dandy... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll just chime in.... my iPhone 4 lasted 5 years with absolutely no problems other than the battery life gradually diminishing. When I finally decided to upgrade, I paid a college kid $35 to replace the battery and now it works like new again (I passed it on to a relative to use as an mp3/audiobook player). I could have replaced the battery myself for about half that price, but I was too lazy to bother.
Has this already been done? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You make that sound like a bad thing. Being essentially maintenance-free for 100,000 miles is far, far ahead of the industry average. There are two ways to have all components fail at the same time:
(a) measure the life span of the worst component. Cheapen every other part down to that standard.
(b) find the worst component, and make it better, so it lasts 100,000 miles. Repeat until the entire vehicle lasts that long.
Given the choice, I'll buy the (b), thanks.
Re: (Score:3)
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
Ridiculous... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
the japanese have been dreaming about this forever, no car in japan is older than like 5 years
The Japanese have been out of meaningful jobs for forever, they have to have as much make-work as possible and making people replace engines or cars at a pittance of kilometers produces some.
Of course, we're in the same boat now...
Racist (Score:5, Funny)
One Hoss Shay
His name is Juan-José, you racist!
I've seen this before (Score:2)
"hay" now (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.
Re:"hay" now (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.
The reason why you think that WWI era stuff is magnificent is simple: The crap that has broke has already been tossed. Anything that has lasted this long has obviously been either well built, well maintained, or not used.
Selection bias (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
While you're absolutely correct that this is a real factor, it is not the only factor. Older equipment is simply made of more material. It doesn't matter if you're talking about machine tools, or hand tools, or sewing machines or toasters or basically anything else, they used to make stuff with very little regard for weight. Materials science has advanced substantially, but sadly many things are built far more flimsily now than they used to be because shipping costs are a significant percentage of the cost
Everything fail at once? (Score:2)
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?
Mine is just slowing down (Score:2)
Apples push to be thin is driving this. (Score:2)
Apples push to be thin is driving this.
Even the mac pro has fallen to the looks over what is really needed
What (Score:2)
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".
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Software (Score:2)
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.
Phones fail? (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
See what's failing the least, make it cheaper. See what's failing the most, make it sturdier.
The end result, if you're looking at cars, is a vehicle like what I'm hearing German cars are like right now - darn near the whole thing will fall apart within a year once you have the first major repair.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I can't believe that this is part of a modern car engine! It looks like an abstract work of art, though...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not even that - even if all your parts have the same MTTF, they will not all fail at the same time. The only way you can cause all your parts to fail at the same time is if they all have dependencies on other parts such that if one part fails, the others are guaranteed to fail. Or, effectively, a self-destruct mechanism.
Re:Mean time to failure (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: Will you stop approving submissions by this gu (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:Will you stop approving submissions by this guy (Score:4, Insightful)
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... [holyjoe.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)