711–720 of 732 posts
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I've never seen a microwave with a temperature anything.
They meant power obviously. (Although in practice I think it's actually duty cycle.)
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Case in point: AvE dissecting a Made in Japan Makita drill, made for the Japanese market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2EpdRN2h6A This thing is built like a fucking tank, it will never ever ever fail. Compare that to the same model sold outside of Japan, and it's most likely made in Indonesia and the quality is nowhere near.
Holy Shit! Thanks for introducing me to his Channel. Lots of exciting stuff. ( And somehow he is Canadian but speaks a little Cantonese )
He's a private dude, but I think his wife is french-canadian and he's at least bilingual. And from what I've gathered he has to have done some kind of mechanical engineering for a LONG time. Dude knows his stuff about anything mechanical.
His teardown of the Juicero is pure gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
It's an amazing insight into a startup with endless amounts of money, bunch of really smart people, but no real business model. =)
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> The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those?? I imagine two reasons: first, the market seems to have decided that simple microwaves must be small microwaves. If you want to heat anything larger than a bowl of soup you’re gonna forfeit the dials. Second, most of the time the dials also suck. Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds? Good luck with t…
> Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds? Good luck with that on a cheap microwave that shows minutes in 5mm increments with 2.5mm of play in the dial. No cooking really works like this. Set the microwave timer for 30 minutes and set a timer on your phone for 2 minutes. After two minutes, pull the microwave timer to zero to stop the microwave and check the food. Decide whether or not it needs more time and c…
Just open the door.
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I found this out the hard way. Picked up a cheap surplus ProLiant to mess around with, and quickly realized it would be far better for my use case to use a business-class desktop or laptop and avoid the unnecessary noise, space, and power draw of pro server hardware. It sure looked cool, though.
Then you miss ECC if you need reliability. Only workstations equip ECC RAM even for business.
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The human activities that enable someone to have access to healthy food, good education, healthcare and security make use of value-engineered products.
Really? It’s definitely not true for education, good education is essentially completely independent of technology, and it seems to me that healthy food at reasonable prices is more a question of mechanized agriculture and supply chains. Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes tha…
It can be, to a point, but most developed societies have schooling systems that use various types of supplies and equipment in the course of education. More affordable transportation, facilities, supplies, and equipment is generally good for students.
> Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Well, yes, those are very different things. But, cheap disposable medical supplies both lower barriers to access those things. Not only does this mean that someone who is low-income might be able to more easily access something like, say, an oral thermometer ... but it also means that things like equipment with a high infection risk can be disposed of instead of reused. Many hospitals, for instance, have started switching to disposable surgical tools, because that's now a possibility, and it decreases infection risk.
The bottom line is, cheap stuff enables more people to have more tools at hand to solve problems.
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Macs are not generally repairable, but some models are incredibly reliable. I’ve been using a 2012 MBPr that still works great/is pristine, other than losing some rubber feet. Having a user friendly OS with *nix-ish tooling in a high build quality package is (debatably) only available from Apple. I will happily upgrade to an M1 MBP once the next gen is released.
Emphasis on some though. My previous Macbook (2013 or 2014?) had a screen delamination issue. My current one (2016) had an issue with the speakers that required the whole top to be replaced - known issue, recall program, etc but still, and currently has another known issue with the ribbon cable to the screen being broken so the colors go all weird. It's impractical and too expensive to fix, but it's the kinda thing t…
Assuming Apple has figured out recent design issues, I'll be interested to see the longevity of the current generation. It seems like the thermals on the M1 are fantastic, which should minimize non-mechanical failures. Time will tell I guess.
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The human activities that enable someone to have access to healthy food, good education, healthcare and security make use of value-engineered products.
There's no doubt "value engineering" occurs. Your claim is that early obsolescence is not planned but rather a side effect of value engineering. There's nothing in the universe that stops a feature that meets a design goal of lowering value from also meeting the design goal of planned obsolescence. So it's 100 percent possible that a company still has two design goals: making a cheaper product and obsolescescing that…
The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
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I did watch it. (And I have watched it once before years ago.) Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent. The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed. Having the latest flashy accessories to…
>I did watch it. (And I have watched it once before years ago.) This is a total and deliberate lie. The video came out march 2021. There is no way you watched this years ago. You didn't watch it at all. I recommend you actually watch it.
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I did watch it. (And I have watched it once before years ago.) Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent. The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed. Having the latest flashy accessories to…
> Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent. Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency. Also when does "design" being an engineering constraint have to do with anything? Are you talking about aesthetic design choices made by an artist/product designer that an engineer has to take into account?…
I am referring to:
>> The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
>> You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon.
>What fashion argument?
14:25 in the video. :D
> The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product.
Yes, there are examples of this deliberately happening. However, there are reasons why it happens as a side-effect of the engineering process, and this is an exponentially more common scenario (because it is common engineering process!).
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My above point is was that cost is an example of an engineering tradeoff, not that it is the only engineering tradeoff. Phone batteries are designed to be replaceable. They’re internal because of design considerations, not cost. In fact, nearly all cell phone batteries are secured with removable adhesive because they’re specifically intended to be replaceable. Homes have circuit breakers (fuses haven’t been mainstrea…
Your logic doesn't make sense for why socketed fuses even exist. So why do cars have socketed fuses then? Do cars have unexpected loads? Not nearly as much as houses. Cars have socketed fuses same as houses because fuses are designed to fail and be replaced. This is the logical intention of fuses. Making something that is designed to fail and be replaced (fuses) inaccessible is a contradictory design philosophy... Un…
1. Cars cost 600x what a shop vac does, so more people attempt to fix them.
2. Some fuses in cars are, in fact, not socketed. Particularly for the higher-current and more dangerous circuits where unexpected overloads are of a greater safety concern and are less likely to be due to fluke events. For instance, fusible links[0]. It would certainly be possible for automotive designers to design a socketed fuse in place of a fusible link, but the cost to do it would be 'high' relative to the frequency of failure, the risk, and the likelihood of user-serviceability. Again, an engineering trade-off.
[0]: https://m.roadkillcustoms.com/understanding-fusible-links/
> Do cars have unexpected loads?
Yes, every car I've ever been in has accessory circuits that a user could easily overload. And I have done so myself many times. Also, there are a lot of electrical parts on a vehicle with limited lifetime that are prone to mechanical failure: relays, bulbs, accessory actuators, etc. When these items fail, they can stall/short and cause an overcurrent condition.
You wouldn't throw away a $30k car because a bent pin on a $1 tail light bulb shorted out. You'd replace the $0.10 fuse and get another $1 tail light bulb. But, you'd probably throw away a $25 blender when the $18 motor laminations short out, because the failure would cost more to fix than the entire product is worth, especially if you're paying labor to fix it.
Fuses exist to fail when some other failure condition happens. Many failures on a car are economical to fix. A blender is totaled if nearly anything happens to it.
> Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right?
Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly. They could simply leave this feature out if they didn't want it to be replaceable, but they didn't. Their intentional adding of this feature is evidence that they do intend for the battery to be replaced. Example: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/yAxAcOuZkVKD1xAY.hug...
> Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians.
It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature. It's hard to open simply because glue is a cheap way to make something thin, waterproof, and cheap to manufacture. If Apple really wanted to waterproof their device while intentionally make it unserviceable, the electronics industry has way better ways to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)
> Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation exists.