Didn’t this also happen on some Asus motherboards a couple years ago?
The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
141–150 of 269 posts
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intentional planned consumption/obsolescence by design. This class of problem is where under-regulation and lack of standards benefits only sellers and cheats buyers. PS: Also, Amazon should be required to test all of the electronic, safety, and food products on its site such that they can prove safety and standards conformance.
I am assuming you are an ee (like myself)...I have never designed a product with a built in expiration, nor have I ever seen any app notes or write ups on the engineering of it - something engineers love to do. What I have seen done is cheaping out on parts in order to get the price as low as possible, because customers shop primarily on price. Not to lash out, but it kind of hits a nerve for me, because people think…
I seriously doubt it's ever a deliberate conspiracy in engineering apart from shenanigans like what happened at VW, but it's net effect of product managers, accountants, and contract manufacturers who modify PCBs and BOMs after it's passed off to them to save money on retail products. And so it's likely unintentional with negligence, but it benefits the company. Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 which seemed to fail just after their warranties expired. I suspect highly-optimized designs for "consumables" like incandescent lightbulbs and parts for cars use data to tweak design life, more often than not, in their favor. And, with the pressures of multinational oligopolies and BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street.. there is little incentive to invest $100M into a moderately-superior incandescent lightbulb using yesterday's technology that lasts 100kh and 5k cycles and sells for $1 more than the next one. Maybe if we (perhaps a science/engineering nonprofit thinktank that spanned the world and gave away designs and manufacturing expertise) had quasi-communism for R&D, we could have very nice things.
It's not my fault if other people are too dumb to comprehend TCO because I would buy the $25 bulb if it had a 30 year warranty.
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other side, we had intern at our (very small) company and he used his own mac. One time he had to debug a mains-powered device. He decided that he will try connecting it to both mains AND programming dongle without separating transformer. He fried the dongle (it literally exploded, plastic lid banging on desk in sudddenly silent office is the most memorable thing), the company provided monitor and device, but…
That sounds fishy, even if the debugged device directly interfaced mains, the Mac doesn't. And even if it did, how high would the probability be that both machines were on different circuits with phases so much out of sync that it would matter? Unless I misunderstood your story
Totally believable if the debugging device was doing something with a serial port. I once hacked something together to interface a PC serial port to a Raspberry Pi. The PC serial is real-ish RS-232, with negative voltages. The Pi side was just 0/3.3V positive. I had a nice 18-volt power brick laying around, and just split it's output down the middle--what was 0 volt ground was used as -9 volts, the middle voltage was now 0 volt ground, and the 18-v line was now +9 V.
At first everything seemed OK. but when I plugged a monitor into the PI I Was Made To Realize a) the nice 18-volt PS really was high quality, and although it was transformer-isolated its output ground was tied to the wall socket earth, b) monitors also tie HDMI cable ground to earth, and so c) my lash-up now had dueling grounds that were 9V apart.
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also why so many LED bulbs are shit, lots of heat in a small space full of electrolytic caps.
Intentional planned consumption/obsolescence by design. This class of problem is where under-regulation and lack of standards benefits only sellers and cheats buyers. PS: Also, Amazon should be required to test all of the electronic, safety, and food products on its site such that they can prove safety and standards conformance.
> Intentional planned consumption/obsolescence
No it isn't. It is simply optimization of price and the features/form-factor that many buyers have demanded.
If anything, the lifespan of a ~$1.50 household LED bulb is quite incredible. I'm not sure exactly how anyone would be able to increase the lifespan at that price point and keep the traditional Edison form factor.
> Amazon should be required to test all [..] products on its site such that they can prove safety and standards conformance.
No, the manufacturers should be required to... the same way it works for literally every other product with safety regulations.
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many use cases for which a decade-old computer is still perfectly serviceable and even where they aren't, those computers can be repurposed for the ones that are. Moreover, we're talking about televisions and old Macs. TVs with higher resolutions might come out, but lower resolution ones continue to be sold new (implying demand exists at some price), and then why should anybody want to replace a functioning…
>There are many use cases for which a decade-old computer is still perfectly serviceable and even where they aren't, those computers can be repurposed for the ones that are. It depends. Older computers usually guzzle power, especially if you look at the absolutely awful Pentium4 systems. You're probably better off getting a RasPi or something, depending on what exactly you're trying to do. Newer systems have gotten m…
> Older computers usually guzzle power, especially if you look at the absolutely awful Pentium4 systems.
Even many Pentium 4-based systems would idle around 30 watts and peak at a little over 100, which is on par with a lot of modern desktops, and there were lower and higher power systems both then and now. The top end Pentium 4 had a TDP of 115W vs. 170W for the current top end Ryzen 9000 and even worse for current Intel. Midrange then and now was ~65W. Also, the Pentium 4 is twenty two years old.
And the Pentium 4 in particular was an atypically inefficient CPU. The contemporaneous Pentium M was so much better that Intel soon after dumped the P4 in favor of a desktop CPU based on that (Core 2 Duo).
Moreover, you're not going to be worried about electric bills for older phones or tablets with > For a while, this wasn't the case: people were upgrading from 480 to 720 to 1080 and now to 4k.
Some people. Plenty of others who don't even care about 4k, and then why would they want to needlessly replace their existing TV?
> They probably don't; if they're upgrading, they're getting a higher resolution (lots of 1080 screens still out there), or they're getting a bigger screen.
That's the point. 1080p TVs and even some 720p TVs are still sold new, so anyone buying one isn't upgrading and has no real reason to want to replace their existing device unless it e.g. has a design flaw that causes it to catch fire. In which case they should do a proper recall.
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am assuming you are an ee (like myself)...I have never designed a product with a built in expiration, nor have I ever seen any app notes or write ups on the engineering of it - something engineers love to do. What I have seen done is cheaping out on parts in order to get the price as low as possible, because customers shop primarily on price. Not to lash out, but it kind of hits a nerve for me, because people think…
I seriously doubt it's ever a deliberate conspiracy in engineering apart from shenanigans like what happened at VW, but it's net effect of product managers, accountants, and contract manufacturers who modify PCBs and BOMs after it's passed off to them to save money on retail products. And so it's likely unintentional with negligence, but it benefits the company. Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 whi…
> Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 which seemed to fail just after their warranties expired.
And? That just sounds like they have good engineers. If you are designing a machine, you have an target lifetime. You'd obviously want the product to last through the warranty period, because warranty claims are a cost to the company.
Every choice of a component affects lifetime. Designers of mass-market products can't just use premium components everywhere -- the mass market will not pay steep premiums for otherwise equivalent products.
Value engineering and planned obsolescence are not the same thing, but they are often confused.
That being said, Samsung appliances suck and I hate them. Mine failed within warranty several times.
> And, with the pressures of multinational oligopolies and BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street.. there is little incentive to invest $100M into a moderately-superior incandescent lightbulb using yesterday's technology that lasts 100kh and 5k cycles and sells for $1 more than the next one.
It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first.
If you release a light bulb that is identical to the best selling one on the shelf, but claims 10x lifespan, your competitor will do something like gluing a weight in theirs, putting some marketing BS on the box, and will put you out of business. Consumers just don't pick products based on actual quality.
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can I even know which capacitor is faulty?
If your model was popular, there's likely a recap kit for its power supply. It usually makes senss to swap all the capacitors in the kit, unless the kit instructions say otherwise. You can look for physical signs of degredation (bulgy, leaky, discolored), but to really test a capacitor for capacititance, you need to take it out of the circuit, at which point, you may as well put a new, high quality capacitor in. The…
> new one with a higher voltage rating (and same capacitance, compatible type) may last longer in cirucit as well.
That's not necessarily true, higher voltage rating equals higher ESR which means more heat.
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they do a recall, it will say they should be discarded. Sony has a recall on all its trinitron tvs made before the end of 1990 like this: https://www.sony.jp/products/overseas/contents/support/infor...
This shouldn't be allowed at all: if the product was bad all along, they should be required to fix it, and shouldn't be able to say "well, it's old, so you should just trash it", which means they don't suffer any penalty whatsoever.
My radial arm saw ended up getting a product recall for simply being too difficult for the average consumer to use safely. The "recall" amounted to them sending you instructions to cut off a critical power cord and mail it in to them, and they send you a $50 check.
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intentional planned consumption/obsolescence by design. This class of problem is where under-regulation and lack of standards benefits only sellers and cheats buyers. PS: Also, Amazon should be required to test all of the electronic, safety, and food products on its site such that they can prove safety and standards conformance.
Please think for a moment not only about whether it's feasible for AMZN to run a safety testing program for all possible consumer products of our modern technological civilization, but whether you really want them to be in charge of it. Maybe they should just require certifications of testing in the jurisdictions where those products are sold?
Isn't faking certs already a problem?
Re: The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seriously doubt it's ever a deliberate conspiracy in engineering apart from shenanigans like what happened at VW, but it's net effect of product managers, accountants, and contract manufacturers who modify PCBs and BOMs after it's passed off to them to save money on retail products. And so it's likely unintentional with negligence, but it benefits the company. Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 whi…
> Except for some Samsung appliances made ~ 2010-2014 which seemed to fail just after their warranties expired. And? That just sounds like they have good engineers. If you are designing a machine, you have an target lifetime. You'd obviously want the product to last through the warranty period, because warranty claims are a cost to the company. Every choice of a component affects lifetime. Designers of mass-market pr…
You're making a pretty awkward value judgement about what a "good" engineer is, but you're describing an unethical one with a bizword like "value engineering". I realize ethics are no longer understood by much of Western society because the culture teaches transactionality, worships trickle-down economics and greed, and hyperindividualism.
> It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first.
This is a failure of marketing and buzz of the sales channel(s) and manufacturers to educate properly, not the failure of the customer.