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Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. This confuses me greatly.
This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed, whether as a company or individual, you have to convince people to part with something called money they have been programmed to avoid parting with as much as humanly possible... in other words, you succeed not based on the value of what you produce (because wage work's actual cost is literally a rounding error) if you are better at transactions in a zero-sum game than others are. We probably need for money to exist, because trade wouldn't work without it, and because we're still a hundred years or more from true post-scarcity communism, but having a whole society run on an operating system of zero-sum transactions has some pretty clear negatives--neither the smallest nor the worst of which is tech waste--even if it's not always evident how best to fix this. Companies are going to keep producing short-lived crap because it's good for sales, because ultimately anything other than "good for sales" cannot be afforded under this particular economic system where something is either sold or it dies.
Pretty much anything engineered (buildings, bridges, electronics, houses, ...) have a death date. Any civil engineering projects I've been a part of have always had a quantified project lifetime. We _could_ build things that lasted hundreds of years, but the cost would be astronomically high and demand would change in that timeline. Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. Th…
Anyway, I also complain about planned obsolescence in other areas: TVs, fridges, washers, etc. A friend of mine uses 50+ year old fridges and cars. They still run fine, though the cars are a death trap.
I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a gradient or pendulum, and we’ve swung too far towards the wasteful side of things in my opinion.
I 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.
Like with GDPR where people imagined all sorts of situations ad absurdum (the grocer on the corner not being allowed to ask for your birthday anymore to give you a yearly free product or some such), these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
It 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…
I 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…
18650 is so popular it’s used in some teslas, while newer ones use 21700
I'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 sto…
At this point, I only buy Apple products because of inertia. Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago. This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed,…
Buy a Dell XPS.
Pretty much anything engineered (buildings, bridges, electronics, houses, ...) have a death date. Any civil engineering projects I've been a part of have always had a quantified project lifetime. We _could_ build things that lasted hundreds of years, but the cost would be astronomically high and demand would change in that timeline. Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. Th…
At this point, I only buy Apple products because of inertia. Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago. This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed,…