there is no such thing as a digital tv antenna. there are antennas for VHF and UHF TV bands, old antennas still work. things sold as digital antennas are often poor performing UHF antennas.
you need to find if your stations real channel numbers (not necessarily their old analog channel number) to know if you want a UHF antenna of a UHF/VHF antenna. you also need to find the quality of antenna you need.
indoor antennas can be tricky, direction as well as placement in the room matters, even moving 12 inches to the right spot can make a difference.
often your local tv stations will have a person that can give advice.
I would think the economics would be as follows. Don’t bother with reliability as long as you don’t have competitors who make products that are significantly more reliable. But if you do face such competitors then pray, because improving such business processes will take years and your counterparts won’t just stand still.
I assume it’s more complicated than that of course. Perceiving product reliability is difficult in the absence of something like Consumer Reports which most don’t read. I’d be interested in your discussion of the trade-offs.
JK Galbraith mentioned planned obsolescence once in The Affluent Society,(2nd ed, 1968).
This is not correct. Tubes tolerate heat well. Other components in the circuit may suffer due to the heat generated by tubes. Real or virtual leaks are a common source of tube failure, as is reduced emission due to cathode depletion. Severe overloading could warp internal structure causing shorts, but this is typically due to problems other than hot environments.
Tubes were expensive, so you tried to get the most out of each one, with as few support components as possible. (“Muntzing”) The result was that the circuit would start to malfunction with even a small amount of age related degradation of the tubes. New tubes had much tighter specifications than transistors and circuits were designed with the expectation that the tubes would perform to these tight specs. When transistors first arrived on the scene, engineers would use a curve tracer to design a circuit for each individual transistor, that was the only way “tube think” designs could work. Eventually they learned to design circuits that would self compensate for the wide variations both unit to unit, and with temperature, and as a side effect, with aging. Curve tracers gathered dust. Transistors were cheap, so you had some budget left for the rest of the circuit, and you could use more stages. Point being that transistors are not just more reliable, but they require design techniques that tolerate wide performance variations of the transistors without impacting the performance of the complete circuit.
Detroit may have run into trouble with competition, but changing customer requirements is more the cause of the IC quality story. If one customer starts demanding higher quality, or point out low quality, then others must follow or risk being taken advantage of, and the whole industry will ramp up. This was the Bell System, and we had our own requirements, and were big enough to enforce them. We also paid for them, but since the rate of return was computed based on our capital base, building expensive equipment was not an issue. At some point though customers start to wonder why they are paying a premium for not being shipped crap.
I think this was partially the case for Detroit also. The Japanese had been better for a while, but after the oil crisis and the rise in gas prices people started buying Japanese cars for the MPG and discovering they were also of better quality. Market requirements changed, and Detroit got clobbered.
I’ve got one pretty minor product with designed defects that have driven me crazy from just a few months after I bought it… my vinyl, grommet-free shower curtain! I selected it because of its decorative pattern and colors (shower curtains are mostly chosen for their appearances and price considerations as opposed to expectations of functionality, I’m guessing), although I had some initial misgivings about its quality (no reinforcing grommets to protect the ring holes at the top).
Well, not only did it not have grommets, but the holes were scored with spoke-like perforations emanating from them (to accomodate unconventionally wide curtain rings, I suppose, but perhaps also an expression of planned structural failure), which promotes tearing. The first hole was torn within months of purchase, even though I’ve taken considerable care from the beginning to not yank hard on the damn thing. In the few years since, I’ve had to re-punch several holes, rig a metal binder clip to grab the degraded corner in an always-temporary fix, and even the holes in the center of the curtain are stressed and stretched – due primarily to the weight of the curtain, I think, rather than lateral & downward stresses due to use.
BTW, if anyone knows how to add grommets to a vinyl curtain, I’m all ears. The thing is, even though this curtain is a cheap piece of crap, it’s a cheap piece of crap with a mid-century-modern design I love, in colors that’s perfect for my bathroom. Finding a replacement of equal aesthetic appeal won’t be easy.
Yes, Apple does this shit all the time. That iPad people are buying, is fucking WIRED for a camera, it even has a cutout spot for a camera in the frame of the device ready to go, all it needs is the actual camera, the OS even has the function built in but just no hardware in it yet. So yeah Apple does this shit all the time.
Wasn’t shuffling a big deal when it got added to iPods? Wow, randomization. New to Apple as of 200X!
It’s like Dilbert and the “Gruntmaster 6000”. What is the Gruntmaster 6000? Well, it’s got less features than the Gruntmaster 9000 but is a big upgrade from the Gruntmaster 4000.
As was mentioned, vacuum tubes generate tremdous heat. This heat has bad effects on other components (it cooks resistors and causes the metal-resistor contacts to degrade). It also cooks capacitors (dries out the electrolyte and causes shorting).
That is why one would fix a tube radio (by replacing defective tubes), and a few days later, the whole circuit would fail catastrophically (shorted caps, open resistors).
Because transistors operate at such low temperatures, the reliability is fanstastic-I have a 40 year old Grundig radio that sounds like new.
Exactly. Marketers can manipulate consumers to some degree but what they are really doing rather than manipulation is exploitation. Human psychology responds to change better than it responds to sameness, so that’s why no woman will buy last year’s dress (except the bargain hunters who realize that the same dress at half price is a better deal, and even a year later *it’s still the same dress–*looks just as good.) People upgrade their OS to take advantage of new features, but if XP was good enough for me four years ago, why isn’t it good enough today? (Please don’t answer, it’s rhetorical.)
Printer manufacturers are constantly being beaten up over this sort of accusation and there is one simple thing that doesn’t add up. If they want us to replace the cartridges more often, why would they resort to tricks like falsely indicating they are out of ink, or incorporating features that deliberately waste ink? Wouldn’t it be easier to just put less ink in the cartridge to begin with? You’re not buying that stuff by the gram, after all. I don’t think all these accusations really hold water. People are just pissed off because ink is so expensive. It’s just like razor blades. We went from straight razor to safety razor to Trac II to five-bladed razors, some of which cost about $3 per cartridge.
True, but my iPod Mini electronics outlived its battery, which after four years won’t hold a charge anymore. But it would have been the simplest design change to allow the battery to be replaceable, like every mobile phone handset ever made. That’s what I call “planned obsolescence.”
The printer ink thing does make sense, though. They don’t want you refilling the cartridge, so they build in a feature that will make it seem like it’s out of ink even if you refill it. That it happens to people who don’t refill it is a bonus.
My printer has said it is extremely low on ink for at least a month.
Also, it can be cheaper to use more rather than less. If you have a backup, you don’t have to be as precise with your measurements.
Actually, every iPod since the original one has had the option to shuffle songs. The newest iPods offer the “Shake to Shuffle” option, which is new. I do agree that the iPad camera thing is just stupid, though, and was done to 1) save money now and 2) make people buy the new one when it comes out with a camera. And you know they will.