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Everything with a battery should have an off switch

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Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#281

Post by jsjohnst »

seoaeu wrote: post #246
jsjohnst wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or with things where battery life is a much smaller issue than forgetting to turn the thing on (e.g. smoke detectors). What an odd example to pick.

Why? Turning off your smoke detectors to save battery seems like a profoundly bad idea

Having an off switch on a life saving device like that sounds like a profoundly bad idea to me, so not sure why it would be brought up in this context. I personally would’ve used an example of something you might actually want to turn off, but it would just be a bad idea, not a potentially fatal idea, if you failed to turn back on.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#282

Post by yawz »

zanellato19 wrote: post #257
Kalium wrote: post #243

> Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn off. I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers . They don't have to use th…

Oh man, do I believe this. I think every profession does this, tbh, I saw a lot of developers try to do stuff just to impress the rest of the team, but designers are one of the most impactful because they don't do stuff that is _so obvious_ like this one

I experienced this in programming when I got into Scala 13-14 years ago. For an outsider, it looked like the community was more interested in impressing each other than solving real problems.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#285

Post by SilasX »

newsclues wrote: post #101
nickff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ” How much extra cost does a hard on/off switch add to the bill of materials?” BoM cost is not the whole story; a physical switch can greatly complicate an assembly, and may require hand-soldered wires. In addition to those cost-related factors, external switches are usually quite ugly, and getting them right can be very challenging, so it’s much easier to just omit them.

And on off switches can result in a call to support ($) or negative reviews when idiots can’t turn it on.

In contrast to users who look for one but don't find it, who don't call support?

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#286

Post by Zak »

Steltek wrote: post #250
titzer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ikr? They have these things now, they call them "AAA" batteries...holy heck, you can take them out, and they even make rechargeable ones. Like, if your thing doesn't work, you can just swap the batteries instead of waiting N hours for it to charge itself....what a concept.

Rechargeable AAAs are crap though. Power density sucks. Voltage level sucks (and voltage regulators will suck the battery dry before your micro does). And the form factor sucks. I'd sooner have a 18650-family (e.g. 14240 or 14500) become standard than a bunch of AAAs.

> Rechargeable AAAs are crap though.

Not compared to alkalines, not since about 2005. Voltage regulation (i.e. a boost converter) plays well with NiMH rechargeables too, though not with alkalines.

That's assuming one of them is an appropriate size and voltage for the application. If more than one starts to seem like a good idea, consider a larger cell, higher voltage chemistry, or both.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#287

Post by Buttons840 »

mod wrote: post #82
Buttons840 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both bathroom and kitchens scales are large enough they can run on AA / AAA batteries and casually go a decade (or more) without replacement. Tangentially: I used to have a 3 button timer, it was a little LCD countdown display and 3 buttons. One button set hours, one minutes, and one starts / stops the countdown timer. I found this timer when I was a kid, used, and the 1 AAA battery it had lasted into adulthood, lite…

I buy a lot of those little timers for my business. They get pretty heavy use, maybe running timers for about 6 hours per day. They don't last anywhere near decades for us. Anyway, my insight is simply that some of them turn off the LCD after a while of non-use, and some of them keep it on indefinitely. Maybe that explains the difference between your two experiences.

The timer I had never turned off the LCD. I found it in early elementary school and the same battery was still going strong when I got married in my late 20s. So it lasted 15+ years on a single AAA battery.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#288

Post by anonymousab »

Kalium wrote: post #243

> Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn off. I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers . They don't have to use th…

This used to be how I assumed that awful UX keeps coming about, repeating the same mistakes and then making new ones by removing existing conveniences for no clear reason. But surely, I thought, I must be assuming the worst of an assuredly more rational situation.

I then heard more about the designers at Microsoft for Vista through Windows 11 which deeply confirmed most of my prior negative assumptions. It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on, in any given day.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#289

Post by Tempest1981 »

maxerickson wrote: post #122
nickff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ” How much extra cost does a hard on/off switch add to the bill of materials?” BoM cost is not the whole story; a physical switch can greatly complicate an assembly, and may require hand-soldered wires. In addition to those cost-related factors, external switches are usually quite ugly, and getting them right can be very challenging, so it’s much easier to just omit them.

The caliper and kitchen scale already have buttons. (they would both be shitty without a zero/tare button)

My $20 "Pittsburgh" calipers from Harbor Freight (don't judge) are still on their original batteries, after 6 years. They have a power button, and a separate zero button.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#290

Post by alistairSH »

kyaghmour wrote: post #249
kemayo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this is what we actually get, devices that SILENTLY fail, designed for people who are assumed not to know what they're doing and who likely do NOT have any technically-literate person around them that could assist them if they could in fact identify the problem. It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice from the book, but rather that Apple didn't follow it. They did hide away the error messages, but th…

I don't mean to nitpick, but please refer to my comment regarding the inability of being able to inventory everything that can possibly go wrong in a computerized system. That's especially true given that if you take any successful engineering project, you'll see that its useful lifetime usually spans several individual engineering careers. Take something like Windows, or even Android for example. The people who were…

For the example you gave, as a user, what would you do with "Error: 0xFHJAD1234"?

The best you could do is report it to Apple (or whoever). But, the error alone doesn't achieve anything. You would have been better off with "Something broke, click here to send log to Apple." (which is roughly what the book recommends - replace the error with something actionable).

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