> This is written to mislead people who do not know the relevant background information.
How dare you put words in my mouth. I have no skin in this whatsoever. It was written as a statement of fact as I see it. The motive behind the scarcity is not something I was discussing, and is, as I said a commercial one. Legislating that a 3rd party parts market must be catered for is potentially a slippery slope.
As for anti-capitalist? This is right out of the capitalist playbook! False scarcity leads to control of the market place, which leads to capital, by way of higher repair parts or increased revenue in terms of new device sales instead of repairs.
>There should be a law forcing tech companies to sell spare parts at cost + 20% markup.
Why stop there? Maybe force tech companies to sell their products and services at cost + 20% markup. /sarcasm
1. What happens if the company has too many spare parts and wants to sell at 0% markup? Can they do that?
2. What happens if the spare parts factory burns down in an accident? Is the company legally obligated to rebuild the factory? What are the terms for how fast must the company rebuild the factory? Does the company need a backup factory to produce spare parts?
3. How long should the company be obligated to provide spare parts? Should this duration be applied to all electronics?
> Yes, one can cherry pick 8 sources. Most of your sources were unscientific media articles, and most of those from left-wing activist outlets.
That was like just the first 8 articles describing it, as I said, there are certainly many more if you were willing to entertain another perspective than your own dogma.
So do you deny that the entire concept of planned obsolescence exists at all, or that there is something other driving it than the free markets pursuit for more profits? If so, why wouldn't more profits as an incentive not be pursued using planned obsolescence?
> You and I both know that you weren't claiming
Haha, alrighty then. You know what I actually meant.
Why would I stop at a more narrow definition when criticizing the incentives of the free market, when all types all grounded in that same incentives?
The last self-congratulating paragraph is not a good look: "I'm good, honest and righteous. You, however, are purposefully lying and have no time for truth and decency."
You have posted a single link that show, allegedly, that specifically cars are more durable nowadays. That's blatant cherry-picking. How is that honest and in good faith? I expect someone that's honest to research the topic and try to find other examples contradicting ones idea, and that is not very hard as I shown with a few links. But instead you go on the defensive, dismiss the links as left-wing, and yet again try to hide behind telling me what I actually meant with planned obsolescence, even though it was in direct reference to the supposed "efficiency" of the free market.
> > I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.
> Why not?
Because,
1) I personally don't care about this.
2) More important than 1, I don't think the law/government has any business deciding this. The market can decide (spoiler: it already has).
> I think legally requiring the producer supply OEM parts is a bit of a stretch
I don't think it's a stretch at all. If they've already manufactured the parts, requiring them to sell replacement parts to customers really should be a thing. Holding them back because of shitty IP laws and strangling their ability to get things running is bad form and anti consumer
>>So do you deny that the entire concept of planned obsolescence exists at all
Moving the goalposts. I said that planned obsolescence is not, as you originally alleged, a general property of a market-driven economy.
>If so, why wouldn't more profits as an incentive not be pursued using planned obsolescence?
Because like I already explained, product and brand reputation are extremely important for market success. The example that I gave was how Apple's hard-earned excellent reputation for product quality played a massive role in the growth of its sales and it becoming the most valuable company in the world.
>>Why would I stop at a more narrow definition when criticizing the incentives of the free market, when all types all grounded in that same incentives?
Again with the bad faith disingenuity. The so-called narrow definition is the only one economically harmful or involving deceit and consumers being worse off. It's the one almost universally referred to when activists use the term.
If you're now going to try to claim you were talking about the looser definition all along, then I'll respond that the type of activity under this looser definition, like consumers consciously choosing more disposable products over longer-lasting ones because they judge the up-front cost-savings to be worth the more frequent replacement costs, is not economically harmful. It's what people want for themselves, and their judgment on what is in their own interests is more credible than yours.
>>You have posted a single link that show, allegedly, that specifically cars are more durable nowadays.
It demolishes this idea that the market has a general incentive to reduce product longevity. If that were the case, every major product class would see a trend toward shorter lifespans. There certainly wouldn't be a major product class not only maintaining product lifespans, but increasing them.
Any way, the burden of proof was always on you. I just provided that link to show that these angsty lift-wing comments about the world are often not corroborated by what you actually see in the world when you take a closer look.
>>hide behind telling me what I actually meant with planned obsolescence
Again with the blatant lies. When people are complaining about how capitalism allegedly produces planned obsolescence, they are not talking about a general consumer preference for disposable products.
Read any of your own links and you'll see what kind of behavior they are referring to when they use the term.
They are talking about the phenomenon where, unbeknownst to consumers, companies are reducing product lifespans to get more reorders.
You can pretend otherwise to try to avoid admitting you were wrong, but any reasonable person who read your original comment would agree that the latter was what you were originally referring to.
Of course we're dealing with natural language with a lot of the meaning of statements extrapolated from the wider context of where they appear, so there's no formal proof you are lying now. Only reasonable conjecture that you're free to dismiss as part of your culture war against the people you imagine to be your enemies.
>>But instead you go on the defensive, dismiss the links as left-wing
A lot of your links were from left-wing sources and were not scientific sources or even primary evidence showing declining product lifespans.
Googling to find a bunch of articles about planned obsolescence and then listing them without checking first to see if they are credible sources or even providing a summary of the evidence they contain to accompany them is completely inconducive to constructive discussion.
> but as long as counterfeit or stolen parts remain economically viable, this kind of market will exist.
The point of serialization is precisely to make stolen parts unviable economically, so you’ve painted yourself into a bit of a corner there.
> It is viable because manufacturers make access to spare parts artificially difficult or expensive.
After paying a shop to repair an iPhone with a generic screen, I believe genuine parts cost more because they are better, not due to artificial scarcity. Not only were the colors off, the battery life was less with the new screen.
> The whole "this is garbage and this company should make this in a way that we like" is really annoying when it is written in an authoritative tone and rallies a mob.
Don't your whole comment do the same? They are giving their opinion based on their preference. For sure it will be bias toward their goal, just like you want them to stop, so that your goal, keeping the statu quo, win.
I prefer repairability because I want to be able to repair my own things and not depends as much on others. I don't expect them to do it, but I will say it loudly so that people know that my market exist. I also consider that better for the society in general, thus I will also push the government to go toward that too, because I consider the government should work toward the society better. Does it means my position will win? No, but I still have the right to defends it, just like you have the right to defends yours.
I don't follow. I also don't see how it is different than any other industry be it bricks or CPUs. Buy a few and the per unit price is high. Buy millions and the per unit price is low.
> Of course you'll give me wholesale pricing on volume in any market.
Yes.
> But are product creators scared off when a big part of each unit's cost will go to license the screen technology?
> But these requirements still ignore one of the biggest problems: the price of spare parts.
No, that is short-sighted.
The price of spare parts is the symptom. The root cause is that the part are highly specific to whatever they are going into, and there is a single supplier for them.
For repairs to be easy, things have to be made with generic parts that are available from multiple suppliers.
Not all parts have to be that way, just the ones likely to break, or ones that are expected to require replacement by design.
You're not going to get decent prices for spare parts, if you're vendor-locked, and there is no competition.
Yes, you misunderstood. I stated that the fearsome weakness in the system is a market which is mostly made by careless buyers who will disregard low quality, absurd specifications and dystopian features in the products.
A product would not circulate in the market if people did not buy it, and people in general most unfortunately tend to buy what is available, without assessing it, without considering the effect of their purchases on the market.
You would not struggle to find e.g. telephones with replaceable batteries in the market if people generally refused to purchase otherwise. The same is valid for bluetooth-operated only washing machines (and other appliances), etc.
Bad products are around because people buy them.
> I fear very much my not being able to buy what I want
Exactly: that is already largely the situation, and it comes from a polluted market, spoiled by purchasers accepting bad products.
> What quantity of conflict minerals and questionable labour went into the disposable thing?
What quantity went into the more expensive version I'm forced to buy so some upper-class do-gooder can satisfy their sense of moral superiority?
If you think that "questionable labour" is a problem, fix that directly instead of making vaguely related warranty regulations.
I'd be perfectly happy with efforts to make the price of items more closely match their total cost including externalities, but piecemeal regulation of warranty policy is not the way to do that.
> you mean they used ocean freight on tiny light components (maybe hundred kg per 10K cars) to cut costs? :)
No… they used ocean freight because that’s how you ship assembled shit from China. This whole chip shortage thing is bullshit, it has nothing to do with the chips themselves, and everything to do with the cheap labor assembling hundreds of parts - many of them chips and electronics, but also not - into a single “part” to dodge import restrictions around how much of a car is made “foreign.” It’s insane how hard this is to communicate to people and how hard they’ve bought into the absolute bullshit.
> am, however, against the idea of companies being forced to design products around being easily repairable. If a company wants to make a super thin device with basically no easy way to take it apart, that's their prerogative. If a company wants to solder on components to the device like RAM or the storage or the cpu or gpu, that's their prerogative.
Totally agree. But they should be publicly labeled as extreme polluters whose devices aren't repairable and who design devices that way intentionally.
They should be free to do it, and then free to be denounced for it.
>The government doesn't need to be involved in this respect.
The environmental aspect of unrepairable devices should probably be regulated like any other industry who makes the decisions to pollute because they want to.
> It is not obvious at all. There is no evidence at all of a general trend toward planned obsolescence. This is another layman's talking point.
All incentives in capitalism encourages quick cyclic consumption, and corporations spend vast amounts of resources to various forms of obsolescence [0]. This can't just be ignored even if you would like it, because it blatantly shows how wasteful the current system is.
> You didn't even address what I provided about Pareto Efficiency
"I ignored your questioned and posted something else, now please answer what I posted meanwhile I'll keep ignoring the question".
> Yes it is alleging a conspiracy, and you're claiming Economics in general has been coopted by it. This is no different than anti-vaxxerism.
A field of study with so close connections to power and wealth must be seen with skepticism. It's like not questioning the upper-classes theories of society of old. There's a lot of examples of theories justifying their privileges.
There's also an important distinction to be made. It's true that capitalism/free-market produces alot of stuff. But it's certainly not true that it produces freedom, happiness, and justice for all. The problem is that you will take the former to justify the latter injustices. That's obvious bias.
"Yale University economics professor Judith Chevalier explained to the BBC that companies react to consumer tastes, and that planned obsolescence is not simply a deception by manufacturers, but in certain situations the fault lies with consumers, who do not value a more durable product, but one that possesses the latest technology." (admits to its existence, but just blames it on the consumer instead)
> That’s how the big players killed hardware startups in Europe.
That sounds like something the big players want you to believe because they're butthurt about being made to produce decent quality products instead of landfill.
And there's still a lot of landfill being sold in Europe; legally they're required to honor warranty requests, but in practice this shit is so cheap that the store front just gives people a replacement device or a refund (in store credit); the products get bundled up and either just discarded outright or returned to the supplier / importer, where I guess some money trades hands.
But there will be no attempts at repair, it's just not worth it.
> Why is iterating physical products so slow and expensive?
Because you are moving molecules, not electrons and the cost of mistakes can range from financially crippling to causing a company to go bankrupt to killing people.
Example: Takada Airbags.
Do you really think it matters one iota if they had better rapid prototyping or a better version of Proto Labs or a better CAM software package?
Or, how about manufacturing a VW car? How many billions are they losing because of software? How significant do you think eliminating the machinist (or whatever) might have been in this case?
The resistance you are seeing is from people who exist well outside the echo chamber you are in. I mean, listen to yourself, you are comparing Moore's Law to manufacturing? Again. Are you fucking kidding me? Please get that out of your head.
Funding? Funding means nothing. Funding doesn't mean an idea or a product is good or will be successful. It just means you were good at selling what you wanted to do to investors. And, in some cases, absolutely clueless investors (not saying that's the case here). That's it.
Again, you are in an echo chamber. Funding means nothing. Fan boys mean nothing. Here's a list for you:
Look, where you lose someone like me is when you start to spew this nonsense about Moore's Law and manufacturing or the software engineering process and manufacturing.
> It's like the cab drivers complaining about Uber.
Another nonsensical example.
And, yet again, this betrays your lack of understanding of the problems faced in real product manufacturing. And your other comments showcase your disdain towards those who, unlike you, have been busy making real progress in a range of industries, from consumer electronics, to brick manufacturing to medical, aerospace and everything in between.
Manufacturing is always progressing because it is often the largest portion of the cost of getting a product to market. And so, the motivation to optimize manufacturing for cost, speed, efficiency, reliability, throughput and quality has been there for centuries. One could not be competitive to day with the processes and tools used 20 years ago.
Yet you somehow reduce the totality of the manufacturing problem to "we need to CNC machine prototypes as fast as software teams iterate code". Who gives a fuck? Really? That problem is solved, to a large extent, by both technologies and companies.
I can 3D print complex parts in metal while I sleep. I can have a complex 5-axis parts machined perfectly and in my hands in three days and at a reasonable cost. You are creating a solution for a non-existing problem.
I just don't see it.
Want to solve a real problem? Solve all the nagging friggin problems in 3D printing plastics. From speed to quality to dimensional accuracy and repeatability and more. There are real problems that need solving in that industry. The other stuff, what you are talking about, is a waste of time and money.
Anyhow, we obviously disagree. I wish you the best.
How dare you put words in my mouth. I have no skin in this whatsoever. It was written as a statement of fact as I see it. The motive behind the scarcity is not something I was discussing, and is, as I said a commercial one. Legislating that a 3rd party parts market must be catered for is potentially a slippery slope.
As for anti-capitalist? This is right out of the capitalist playbook! False scarcity leads to control of the market place, which leads to capital, by way of higher repair parts or increased revenue in terms of new device sales instead of repairs.
reply