There's an ebb and flow to these things. If new technology is making my headset obsolete every year, designing a 10-year headset makes no sense. Once headset technology settles down and people realize they keep buying the same thing over and over, then the customer starts to value reliability more. Unfortunately customer behavior updating to the reality that underlying technology of a product has stopped evolving lags by a few years, but it happens.
> There's an ebb and flow to these things. If new technology is making my headset obsolete every year, designing a 10-year headset makes no sense. Once headset technology settles down and people realize they keep buying the same thing over and over, then the customer starts to value reliability more. Unfortunately customer behavior updating to the reality that underlying technology of a product has stopped evolving lags by a few years, but it happens.
However, business really like the income that comes from regular tech refreshes. Once technology stops making their products obsolete after N years, they'll often start designing them to reduce reliability (e.g. going for cheap parts that will fail faster) or incorporating planned obsolescence features.
IIRC, this is what's happened to consumer printers and many types of home appliances.
I don't think this is deliberate, but it seems that one of the big things that has changed as a result of the shortening of consumer product development cycles is that it sort of eliminates any feedback loop that might incentivize manufacturers to engineer for reliability. Why build a device that's designed to last for 10 years, when consumers are going to buy themselves a new one every year or two, regardless of whether the old one is still functional and meeting their needs?
There used to be an expectation of longevity in the electronics we purchase. Even while Moore's law was in full effect, you could find good uses for a 6 year old computer. Today's computer hardware can easily remain fully usable for a decade. The notion of buying a laptop or phone, let alone headphones, every year is ludicrous and actively harmful to the environment.
That is the point I was making. The devices last (as we both have experienced), but today it is "fashionable" to dispose of them and buy new ones on a schedule much shorter than their lifespans (because of some new gimmick that provides an inconsequential improvement in the usability of the newer model).
"All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years."
I think you have odd perspective here, because you're talking about tech lasting for a decade, but you're also explicitly omitting anything with a computer in it ("run an operating system").
"A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand."
The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. Durability wasn't the issue; the rapidly increasing capability of newer and more capable computing platforms was.
We're at a point now where Moore's Law & related phenomena seem to have slowed a bit. Ten or fifteen years ago I always upgraded my laptop every 3 years. Now I can go longer, and typically only upgrade when there's a compelling reason (higher RAM ceiling, e.g., or external factors like the economics of extended service plans). Phones are the same; in the earlier years of the cell phone era, I got a new phone nearly every year because that meant smaller and more powerful and therefore more useful. In the Smartphone era, two years became the norm, and nowadays it's routine to see folks with 3 or even 4 year old phones.
The tl;dr is that there's no conspiracy or malignant intent here; it's just that shit gets better, and so the upgrade makes sense for most people. I mean, maybe you can get a 35-year-old Commodore running as a novelty, but I sure wouldn't want to try to do my job with one.
I don't see this happening. Look at computers or the home CE market. We've moved away from buying something once and then upgrading it over a period of time. Instead consumers are attracted to new devices, with more features and most importantly a refreshed design.
When you have plastics that age, seats that wear and parts that fail people are always going to want to buy a new car instead of adding new features to an old one.
I think this more and more every year. The amount of technologic obsolescenced is growing with each passing day - and some of it, for no good reason. Getting rid of analog jacks that go directly before analog devices (like headphones) is just stupid. Putting DACs and amplifier circuitry inside of cables and headphones for the purpose of listening to high quality audio is just stupid.
You're young now. In 20 years you'll understand, after you witness a few "upgrade" cycles and see how technology consistently follows the lines of profits and planned obsolescence rather than higher quality or better price. Technology companies have to keep pushing new stuff on us, lest we actually collect enough devices to be satisfied and move on with what life is really about.
> But as tech improves it seems the life expectancy of the
> product are taken less into account.
On the contrary. The life expectancy has never been more important: it has never been more important to time the death of a device in such a manner that it hits some generational sweet spot to make the customer buy the same product over and over :-)
Ironically, I work for a manufacturer who tries to support their product for at least 20-30 years, but obsolescence is an incredible challenge due to use of a lot of commercial of the shelf electronics which themselves go obsolete at a ridiculous pace. What I'm saying is, even if you try to engineer a product to last, if the supply chain supporting you isn't to doing the same, the problem often compounds.
In my case, obsolescence is a problem to be addressed to attempt to support a long product lifecycle. In most companies, planned obsolescence is a tool to advance tech, decrease support and manufacturing costs over the long run, and increase profit.
Nearly sent milk out my nose with your quote, though it got me thinking.
Planned obsolescence, as highlighted by the article, is certainly nothing new but it seems to be an ever growing trend in parts of the CE space that once valued reliability. As customers have become more used to replacing expensive gadgets (smartphones/PCs come to mind) every few years because the new ones are faster and more capable, they've begun to value reliability less. The problem is that there are large and growing segments in the space that don't warrant replacement so frequently. My AVR is seven years old, does 9.1 audio, decodes every major format[0] and supports all of the HDMI features of the television I have plugged in to it. My 1080p plasma television is among the final generation, doesn't suffer from screen burn despite being used 90% of the time for gaming, produces a better picture (color and screen consistency) than the LCD it replaced and is nearly impossible to find a "new" replacement for. It was also among the least expensive 1080p televisions available at the time it was purchased since plasma was on its way out.
Arguments that "these things are much more complex to repair these days" are no longer true with the hundreds of YouTube videos, web sites and forums dedicated to repairing products so it really does appear to be manufacturers imposing artificial constraints on product lifetime in order to encourage high repair fees or premature replacement with newer models in categories of products that don't have a natural replacement cycle beyond the failure cycle.
The ability to repair a device and its reliability is quickly becoming a required feature in this home. Assuming it's a product I won't replace until it fails, this experience has caused me to research products over a certain price more thoroughly to identify those with a large community behind them, a long warranty, and a flexible repair policy.
[0] Nearly every new device I plug in causes the receiver to jump to PCM mode because the decoders are being built in to the devices. Considering the ability to decode every common audio format was a major feature I purchased it for, and a feature that would cause me to replace it, it's going to remain in my living room even longer if it doesn't fail. Unless I replace the television with something that requires an HDMI spec beyond what the device can handle (and I don't see getting a 4K TV for that room, so that's safe), grow ears that can discern a tenth channel (or the room changes in some unexpected way allowing a tenth or eleventh speaker to fit somewhere), or end up buying four more devices to plug in to it, it will be replaced only when it fails.
All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years. AFAICT, this didn't stop being the case until it became common for every single piece of electronics to run an operating system, at which point tech got caught up in large software companies' compulsion to constantly rearrange things.
I think it's really about the cloud. I kept my last iPhone way past a typical phone's lifespan, and got to experience watching it slowly revert back to being a dumbphone. In the same way that smart home devices have a nasty tendency to stop working as soon as the vendor decides to stop maintaining some critical server the product needs to be able to ping just to turn on properly, apps eventually stop working with the latest OS your phone can run, and pretty shortly after that some service running in the cloud will stop being able to talk to whatever version of the app you're stuck on.
In the case of Apple's or AT&T's apps, this happened almost immediately after the first version of iOS I couldn't upgrade to came down the pipe. In the case of others, it was 6 months or a year later. The web browser died in its own special way, choked to death by more JavaScript than it could handle.
I get the economics behind why companies do this, but it's sad, all the same. A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand.
In the case of technological products, make no mistake: the consumer does not want products to last 10 years.
You can surely run a 10 year old computer, but what are you going to do with it? Does anyone want a 5 year old cell phone?
So long as we continue to make advancements at the pace we're moving, there is no demand for consumer electronics that last that long. So long as each generation gets cheaper or better (which for the most part is true) and we figure out a decent recycling process (and I think we have) let's just keep moving.
I think it's a very fair point in other, slower-innovating industries.
Heirloom consumer electronics and computers. Moore's law is failing, and the only reason we keep having to replace electronics is planned obsolescence and the fact electronics are still just designed with replacement expected by momentum.
Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing for a long term and mature computer industry.
I don't think you understand the extent of what's going on.
It's not that people are trying to make hardware last forever. It's that these devices are being deliberately designed to break down in a couple years. There are actual design decisions to force consumer behavior into purchasing new things every couple of years.
This doesn't just apply to things that follow moores law. Almost every product in existence nowadays is literally designed to break earlier then they usually do. Companies in certain cases actually spend more money creating a design that ensures that a product will break early so that consumers will buy a new thing within some years.
This includes cars, computers, phones, microwaves, lightbulbs. Etc.
Your personal need to buy a new car, new phone and new clothes is the result of market manipulation over the last 10 decades or so... morphing our culture from one where we kept tools around for years into one where we need to buy new things all the time. It was not like this at least 1 or 2 generations ago.
The result of this endless buying behavior is good for business and the economy but it has devastating effects on the environment and our resources.
Design and advertising are used to make devices look obsolete when they're actually still perfectly good to use. Consumers choose to buy new devices instead of repairing/upgrading their old devices. Devices become harder to repair, making repairs more expensive. Consumers repair even less.
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