Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
washingtonpost.com
Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
1–10 of 353 posts
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#2I thought the EU was trying to (or has?) passed a law that requires electronics to have replaceable batteries.
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#3It would be great if consumer electronics products had expected lifetime ratings on the front. People would naturally take issue with products with significantly below median lifetime, and also if their own products didn't live up to the lifetime.
It would also make sense to phrase other quantities on product packaging in the way they're experienced by the consumer: instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if you showed the lumens/$, more efficient bulbs would naturally win out. Instead, LED bulbs have fake wattage numbers to show the equivalent wattage incandescent lighting that would be needed to match the LED.
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#4I have been a long time enthusiast of high power flashlights. We typically use 18350, 18650, 21700, or 26650. But I have been in dismay as even in this community, companies are starting to move away from these standards and provide proprietary batteries (Olight) or sealed (some newer Fenix models).
It would be good if
* We could safely obtain reputable Li-ion batteries from reputable sources. I trust a handful of companies to vet their supply chain so I'm confident of authentic cells like Murata VT6, etc .. but its less than ideal. I don't think my mom would be able to just find a authentic 18650, and this has to pass the mom test
* Easy way to recycle these cells. This needs to expand past home improvement stores, which often seem clueless as to the specifics of what they can accept
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#5It would be great if consumer electronics products had expected lifetime ratings on the front. People would naturally take issue with products with significantly below median lifetime, and also if their own products didn't live up to the lifetime. It would also make sense to phrase other quantities on product packaging in the way they're experienced by the consumer: instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if yo…
Many LED lightbulbs make claims about their expected lifetime. Except these numbers are often a fantasy. The LED itself may last almost forever, but the capacitors commonly go bad in a year or so.
I suspect that would be the reality with a lot of the proposed mandatory labeling for electronics, too.
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#6It would be great if consumer electronics products had expected lifetime ratings on the front. People would naturally take issue with products with significantly below median lifetime, and also if their own products didn't live up to the lifetime. It would also make sense to phrase other quantities on product packaging in the way they're experienced by the consumer: instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if yo…
> instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if you showed the lumens/$, more efficient bulbs would naturally win out. Instead, LED bulbs have fake wattage numbers to show the equivalent wattage incandescent lighting that would be needed to match the LED.
I don't understand what the problem is supposed to be. The system we currently have is that all bulbs are labeled with their brightness ("equivalent wattage"), which is the outcome the customer cares about. You can then choose the cheapest bulb at the brightness level you want. That second step already causes more efficient bulbs to crowd less efficient bulbs out of the market.
In your hypothetical system, we stop indicating how bright bulbs are. Instead, we indicate how efficient they are, and customers are supposed to work out the brightness for themselves.
Why would anyone want that?
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#7My favorite mouse is the logitech anywhere mx original. It runs for months in two AA batteries. They don't make these anymore and the newer ones all have built in lipo death clocks.
I try to buy all of my new electronics with this lesson in mind.
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#8I thought the EU was trying to (or has?) passed a law that requires electronics to have replaceable batteries.
I would mostly consider that law to be a good idea. But suppose I want to leave a temperature sensor on a mountainside somewhere, or attach a depth sensor to a walrus. Those are cases where I tend to suspect that it might be better for the manufacturer to have a lot of freedom as to the form of the object, and an expected lifetime after which the nonreplaceable battery dies may be the best of all possible worlds.
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#9I've made AirPods last longer than any other pair of earbuds I've ever had.
It's the cord. For me, a max of six months of fiddling with the damn thing and it breaks.
I've had real headphones last quite a bit longer— but I buy the ones with replaceable cords. The pair I still have is on its fourth cord and second pair of muffs.
I don't view it as any sort of economic, human, or environmental catastrophe, that they stop holding a charge after... how long again? I've had a pair of Pros since before the pandemic which seem to hold up fine.
So I'm around what, twenty cents a day? It's a rare day I don't wear them for a solid hour.
It undermines the argument to pick the easy, lazy, and really rather bad example that everyone else flocks to for some bizarre reason. It's genuinely hard to come up with a better product category for glued-in batteries than in-ear wireless headphones.
Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
#10I have been a long time enthusiast of high power flashlights. We typically use 18350, 18650, 21700, or 26650. But I have been in dismay as even in this community, companies are starting to move away from these standards and provide proprietary batteries (Olight) or sealed (some newer Fenix models). It would be good if * We could safely obtain reputable Li-ion batteries from reputable sources. I trust a handful of com…
Was wondering what these random numbers were, I expected a product number from a manufacturer. Instead:
> An 18650 Battery is a lithium-ion rechargeable battery. The first 4 digits of the designation “18650” indicate the physical dimensions while the 5 th digit indicates it is a cylinder cell. The standard 18650 battery is 18mm around by 65mm long.
(copied from curl because that page crashed the firefox tab, though I guess the superscript wouldn't have been preserved otherwise anyhow so might as well leave that bit of HTML in)