LED light bulbs that die after six months?
yep it still exists
Ask HN: Do you think planned obsolescence still exists?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you think planned obsolescence still exists?
#12Sure, otherwise the battery would be easily replaceable like in some older phones. It hardly seems like a coincidence that a crucial component which significantly degrades roughly in time with the product cycle also happens to be glued into the chassis of many modern smart phones or otherwise rendered inaccessible. While they're not impossible to replace, doing so is clearly a high enough barrier to prevent most users from attempting it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think planned obsolescence still exists?
#13The obsolescence isn't planned, it's a feature of embedded growth obligations. You have to keep growing, even if everyone already has a smartphone, you have to sell them a new one, keep increasing your market share, and profits.
The push for more and more features, instead of reliability and stability, is driven by the desire for sales at all costs.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think planned obsolescence still exists?
#14With Android, definitely. Entire paradigms are deprecated as it updates. For example, it's easier to enforce privacy/security holes on all Android 10 phones and above as opposed to every Android device in existence. Or do things like file system policy changes.
I don't think it's designed to sell more phones, just an easier way of reducing scope.
Also my experience with programming TV set up boxes is that it's more pragmatic too. Some code was built for old set up boxes with no graphics cards and no versioning. The new ones support 4K, Android, lots of sexy stuff. But the code for the oldest boxes didn't support ES6 or, say, anything above Angular.JS and jQuery. So now you have code written for the minimum hardware even when run on expensive, cutting edge stuff. Planned obsolescence would have saved a lot of trouble and resulted in better experiences.
Smart TVs probably operate the same way, which is why the YouTube built into my TV freezes all the time, but Netflix runs fine on the same hardware.
I'd imagine some similar decision making goes into IoT too.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think planned obsolescence still exists?
#15The obsolescence isn't planned, it's a feature of embedded growth obligations. You have to keep growing, even if everyone already has a smartphone, you have to sell them a new one, keep increasing your market share, and profits. The push for more and more features, instead of reliability and stability, is driven by the desire for sales at all costs.
You don't grow until you explode so i don't see why other things shall always grow.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think planned obsolescence still exists?
#16Yes, as strong as before, if not more. IMO Gates' Law -- the inverse of Moore's law -- doesn't help either. I have plenty of examples, from those pieces of software and appliances I use everyday: - Power went on and off in our building for several minutes. That obviously turned off my always-on printer and all other devices. Now for some reason the printer won't turn on. All my other devices like my TV, Raspberry Pi…
Your 30 year old fridge is also very energy inefficient compared to newer ones.
Re: Ask HN: Do you think planned obsolescence still exists?
#17Definitely exists for TVs and it seems to me the timeframe is shrinking still :-)