I have a Swingline stapler that still works great that I bought in ~1988. It has a few rust pockmarks, but it’s mechanically fine. I’m looking around my house, and I don’t see any mechanical item nearly as old as that stapler that still works. I have a 10 year old Zippo lighter that is broken, but I never threw away. I have a cheap, battery-powered pencil sharpener that broke within a week. All my computer equipment is less than 2 years old, and my router broke yesterday. My TV is maybe 7 years old.
I’m getting really suspicious that manufacturers are purposely making products that break down quickly, rather than making products that last. Any truth to that?
Probably. But there can be many legitimate reasons for this. For one, people will often opt to buy the cheaper product that won’t last as long. I remember reading once that the technology exists to build cars that never wear out, but they’d cost over a million dollars to buy so almost no one would want one.
Then there’s the question of ever-changing styles. Why invest money manufacturing longevity into a product that will in all likelihood go out of style and be replaced in a few years anyway?
Then, in the case of electronics, capability grows exponentially. Most – or at least many – people replace their electronics long before they wear out simply because the newer stuff can do so much more.
Also, it should be kept in mind that to a certain extent, planned obsolescence is an important engine of the economy. Producing a constant supply of shiny, new objects to replace old ones that get worn out provides jobs and stimulates people to spend money, both of which are good for the economy.
So while on the surface planned obsolescence can seem like a bad thing, it’s net result is quite beneficial.
It’d be really hard to back up the claim that manufacturers are willfully building products to have a short life span. Is there really some upper manager out there that says “that design is too good, add something that will break”?
Now, IMO what’s happening is that products are designed to be absolutely as cheap as possible while maintaining some “good enough” level of reliability or durability. For a lot of cheap electronics, “good enough” may be equal “doesn’t trigger too many warranty claims during the 1 year warranty period”.
And for the most part, in the consumer marketplace, people choose the cheapest version of what they want to buy. For example, you can still buy an all-metal Swingline stapler for $20, or a heavy-duty version for $30, and I’d bet it’s just as good as the one you bought years ago. But they also sell a $6 plastic one, and I bet it sells a lot better among people buying a stapler for light use in their home office, even if it won’t last as long.
As another example, you mention your router that just died. I’m guessing you didn’t originally buy something that was top-of-the-line (in a consumer shop), and I’m positive it’s not the heavy-duty “enterprise” sort of router that’s built to be bombproof and easy to fix (but much more expensive.)
My Swingline dates from the year Niven published Ringworld, 1970.
That said, I’ve given up buying modern hand mixers, as the plastic gears invariably strip after a year or two, leaving me with an unrepairable piece of junk. My current handmixer is an early 50’s Sunbeam with metal gears.
Likewise Krupp coffee grinders have gone from being screwed together to being fastened with irreversible plastic clips. When the cord needs rewiring one must now either saw the unit in half to get at the wiring, or buy a new grinder. I saw the unit in half, but I expect most people simply toss the old unit in the trash, and buy a new one.
I suppose it’s possible that these problems are not strictly planned by the engineers who design the products, but if so, they need to go back to school for a few years.
“Planned obsolescence” is a misnomer in the way that you’re using it, though. Truly planned obsolescence would indicate that something is designed specifically to break at a certain time, whereas what really occurs is that products are designed so as (1) to be as cheap to manufacture as possible, (2) have a critical percentage meet their design lifetime, (3) accept that a percentage won’t meet that lifetime, and (4) know that most of the percentage will exceed its design lifetime.
The trick is for us, as a consumers, to know what the design lifetime is.
Most consumers are getting dumber. They only want to buy the cheapest thing on the shelf. Never mind that for a little more that will get something that will last tremendously longer. So they buy the $10 toaster that won’t last a year and not the $20 toaster that will last 4 years (or the $40 toaster that will outlive them).
Manufacturers have adjusted to meet this demand. Entire cities in China have sprouted up to take advantage of this mentality.
As far as electronics like TVs and computers, there is no need to make them so that they’ll last 10 years as by then they will be too outdated for many (but not all!) people.
But not all products are like this. Cars have gone up significantly in expected lifespan. Enough people have “done the math” on something so expensive that the idea of a 3 year disposable car doesn’t go over so well. (But no so bright that they can figure out the math on leases.)
I repair old electronics as a hobby and it’s sad to see the decline in durability of these products over the years. Old VCRs and such used to have metal inside and out! They are going to last. That Blu-Ray player you just bought started to fall apart on the assembly line.
I’ve had a couple of experiences lately that might add some insight, if not an answer.
A few weeks ago I was talking with my mechanic about what’s REALLY wrong with American cars. He insisted they were every bit as mechanically sound as Japanese models, and probably better than German cars, but that in his experience, American cars seem to loosen up after 50,000-60,000 miles. So you get squeaks, rattles and other harmless but annoying sounds while driving, while foreign models tend to keep their body integrity longer. While the parts of an American car last as long (or longer) than their foreign counterpart, you feel like you’re driving a clunker.
The other thing happened last week, when I accidentally picked up some blades meant for a Gillete Atra razor. Because they were cheaper than any of the 3 (or more) blade razors I had, I figured I’d just pick up a cheap Atra-type razor and use them up. After searching the local stores turned up nothing, I looked on the web. There are no razors currently being made that accept Atra-style blades. But since it’s still possible to find the blades almost anywhere, my guess is there are still millions of the old razors sitting in bathrooms all over America.
So I tend to agree with both **Starving Artist **and lazybratsche. Manufacturers aren’t so much making things that work poorly, as they are making things that work well enough the first time around, and then replacing them with newer and shinier versions.
When any product is designed and manufactured, there are a complex series of factors that must be considered. Many of these variables are mutually exclusive. For example, you can make a really really good stapler out of aircraft grade titanium, manufactured to Swiss watch standards and have it last a century. It would probably cost a thousand dollars and not drive staples really that much better than your basic $2. Although I do see that Swingline sells some for $150.
Mechanical products in particular are succeptable to “metal fatigue”. Simply put, you can bend a paperclip and it wont break. Bend it a hundred times and eventually it snaps. Cheaper material and thinner parts tend to break sooner than more expensive space-age alloys or thicker parts.
The point is that all products have a usable lifespan. Sometimes planned, sometimes not. A cheaply made product will typically be made with as few cheap materials as possible while I higher-end product will be designed for a specific number of uses. Typically based on how long a typical consumer would want to keep the product in question.
Not that I’m defending the intelligence of the average consumer, but one of the problems is that you can’t just look at price to determine quality. The $40 toaster might be the $20 model with Wolfgang Puck’s face slapped on it to double the price. Or it might be the model with a $10 toaster’s crappy heating coils, but a fancy feature that says “Your toast is done” in 27 languages.
I had the same experience with a Canon Inkjet printer I bought ~1990. It lasted over 10 years, and I finally threw it away when the paper feeder jammed. I still see ink cartridges for it on sale.
If you want me to believe that customers buying the cheapest thing on the shelf shows increaisng dumbness, you’ll need to provide additional evidence. Wouldn’t it be more dumb to buy a more expensive but lower-quality item, perhaps because it had been more aggressively marketed?
I see this idea in this thread:
Cheaper item = Shorter lifespan.
More expensive item = Longer lifespan.
2 thoughts:
Is this why poor people stay poor? Since they can’t afford the top of the line TV, for example, they buy one that is 20% cheaper but it only lasts half as long? So, they’re actually spending more, over time, than someone who bought the better TV?
Is it possible, using this knowledge, to profit in the long run? For example, I was buying a laptop recently. My coworker said, “Whatever your budget is, divide it by 3, and spend that. Then, expect to buy a new laptop every year for three years rather than a new laptop for 3X as much money that will be obsolete by next year.” I bought a $400 laptop. If I had purchased a $1200 laptop, I may not get the full three years of use out of it, and definitely, it won’t work as well next year compared to next year’s computers.
Consumer Reports is not a bad place to start. You can also look at manufacturer warranties. Sometimes you can look up reviews on the web, but have to take both the bad and good with a grain of salt.
Some products have specific ratings: hours for lightbulbs, pages for printers, etc.
This may be wandering into GD territory, but why do you think you can’t easily replace the battery on your iPod when Apple knows the battery is going to need replacing sooner or later? And what do most people do when the battery dies on their iPod? They go out and buy a new one! That’s definitely planned obsolescence right there.
It’s become much harder to use Consumer Reports in the past 10 years or so. Manufacturers of many products produce so many models of items so that the Costco model has a different model number from the Sam’s Club model and the Best Buy model that I find it much much harder any more to use the information in CR to really help me find a better specific product. What I do see in CR is that brand XYZ tends to be much better than brand ABC and the like, and that is somewhat helpful.
What they used to do much more regularly and what I wish they’d go back to is examining in depth what features make a good toaster, for example, so that you can look for those features when you go shopping.
There’s an old economics question: Henry Ford built the Model T and then sent his people out to the various junk yards to find out what parts were breaking. His people reported that all of the parts pretty much broke down after 10 years except for one part called the kingpin. The kinpin was in excellent shape and could last another 10 years.
What should Henry Ford do?
The answer is make the kingpin cheaper, so it would break along with the rest of the car. There’s no reason to have a working kingpin when the rest of the car is no longer working. Money saved on a cheaper kingpin can be used for profit or passed to the customer for savings. Building things that last is expensive, and if you don’t need it to last that long, why bother with the expense?
In the old Ma Bell days, phones were leased by Ma Bell, and they didn’t change very much. The same phone built in the 1940s was the same model used in the 1970s. In fact, many of the phones were the same phone. Ma Bell would refurbish them, maybe change the dial for a pushbutton set. Or change the outside to be a different color, but those old Ma Bell phones were built to last for 30 years.
When Ma Bell was broken up, and you no longer got phones from the phone company, the basic telephone started changing. New features were added, cordless phones became popular. Old phones quickly became obsolete.
At the same time, phones no longer lasted 30 years. Why pay $90 for a phone that lasts for 30 years when you could buy a phone that lasted about 5 years and cost maybe $20? You could do the math and say the cheaper phone has to be replaced six times, so the total would be $120 vs. $90, but what if I would end up replacing my phone after five years anyway?
For example, many people have phones where the extensions don’t plug into a wall phone outlet. They simply communicate with a base station and can be placed anywhere. You couldn’t buy phones like that five years ago. But, many people now have VOIP service, and with most VOIP service, you can only plug one phone into the VOIP modem. The newer cordless phones also use a different part of the spectrum that doesn’t interfere with WiFi. That’s something you probably didn’t care about five years ago, but it’s a feature you want now.
Same with computers. Why make a computer that lasts longer than 10 years when I probably replace it after five years because its obsolete?
The planned obsolescence isn’t because manufacturers are purposely building cheap crap, so you have to buy it in a few years. It’s because manufactures figure you want to buy a newer model in a few years, so there isn’t any reason to spend a fortune making the product last longer than you plan to keep it.
I’m usually impressed by how long lasting electronics devices are. I have had and seen TVs last a decade, computers last 5+ years, gaming systems that are over a decade old, etc.
I don’t know if planned obsolescence would be a good marketing strategy anyway, since then you lose your customers. It seems corporations are more interested in releasing a new model every 1-2 years with new bells and whistles so people sell the old one. Like with LCD or Plasma TVs, the new models can supposedly last 50,000 hours or longer (so decades of life). However every few years a new generation comes out with better resolution and new options, so people sell the old one for that one.
There are tons of people who have working Xboxs and PS2s who bought the PS3 and 360, just because it was better.
So I personally doubt planned obsolescence (outside of the iPod battery) happens much anymore. If anything, I’m usually impressed by how long my electronics have lasted. Except my TiVo, that broke in 3 years. Piece of crap.