Talk:Planned obsolescence/Archives/2014

New study on planned obsolescence

It was published in March 2013 a deep study on planned obsolescence, its technique and its effects on economy in the context of German market. The study estimate in 100 billion € per year the cost of the phenomenon in Germany; the report was commissioned by the European Green Party. You can find the report here:

http://www.murks-nein-danke.de/blog/download/Studie-Obsoleszenz-BT-GRUENE-vorabversion.pdf

--ClarkClaudio (talk) 02:50, 10 June 2013 (UTC)ClarkClaudio--ClarkClaudio (talk) 02:50, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Seemingly abrupt mention of OSS in the Planned Obsolescence in Software Section

In the Planned Obsolescence in Software section, there is an odd sentence mentioning open source software. It reads as follows:

"As open source software can always be updated and maintained, the user is not at the sole mercy of a proprietary vendor."

That is the only mention of OSS in the section. It seems that the point of the sentence is to say that OSS does not suffer from planned obsolescence as proprietary software does, but the sentence doesn't mesh well with the rest of the section and almost looks like somebody inserted it simply as a plug for OSS. I'm not very good with words, but could someone correct this?

-- A concerned wiki reader from 128.62.69.185 (talk) 17:47, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

The original sentence added in 2009 (with "free software", until somebody who hasn't followed the link changed it) said "can always be updated and maintained by the end user," but in Jul 2013, somebody removed "by the end user", maybe to fit it to the citation added in Aug 2012. I added "by somebody else" and removed the citation. --AVRS (talk) 14:17, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Obsolescence in the Digital Age

I'd be interested in some reference to the issue of planned obsolescence in non-physical products (e.g. CDs replaced by Mp3s, streaming and downloaded video as opposed to DVDs, though there are plenty more examples where those came from). It seems that the next phase in engineering products with planned obsolescence will have to rely on Intellectual Property restrictions, rather than building shoddy merchandise, simply because of the nature of lossless replication.

Hmmm.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.118.58.160 (talk) 01:53, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

CDs weren't replaced by MP3s, they were replaced by hard drive-based players. This is because a personal CD player is by its nature larger, more power-intensive and more fragile than a hard drive enclosure (it must be at least the size of a CD), and as SSDs grew smaller the media players built around them grew smaller. Since the goal of a personal media player is to be as portable as possible, CD-based players became functionally obsolete since they simply weren't as good as the competing product. At no point in the process did anyone sit down and say 'hey, you know what, we're going to make CDs a certain size so that in the future hard drives will be smaller than them.' It's much the same as CDs replaced cassette tapes, floppy disks and vinyl, because they are superior to those media in their traditional applications (you can skip to individual tracks accurately on a CD, which is a huge advantage for music, and they store more data).

In much the same way, streaming is simply more convenient than going to a physical store and buying a physical disk, and it's also cheaper if you buy a single-watch download, with no chance of getting fined if you damage or fail to return the download as with a traditional rental copy. Again, this is simply a better solution to the set of criteria both products are designed to fulfill, not a deliberate conspiracy to reduce the lifespan of an existing product. You can still watch your old DVDs and almost any PC on the market today will still have a device allowing you to do so integral to it. Herr Gruber (talk) 08:14, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Neutrality

The definition needs quality 3rd party references. The tone of the article is conspiratorial. Planned obsolescence such as in Incandescent light bulbs (lifespan) is a trade-off with electricity costs. Such simple examples might be helpful to build a quality article. In the mean-time, I have tagged the article with this conspiratorial tone that is not backed by any quality references. Widefox (talk) 18:44, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

The subject itself is not neutral. The article sounds conspiratorial because that is, in essence, what "planned obsolescence" is, is it not? Though I do agree that the article needs better sources, I think the tone of it is generally alright. 174.95.251.34 (talk) 19:12, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

The article consists in large part of absurd, unreferenced, conspiratorial claims.

As others have pointed out earlier, the replacement of VHS players by DVD players and then Blu-ray players has nothing to do with planned obsolescence; it is simply technological progress. Blu-ray discs are quickly replacing DVDs because they offer superior quality for which there is significant demand and which was not achievable—at least not at a cost the mass market was willing to bear—before the invention of blue lasers (resulting in greatly increased storage density) in the late 1990s, and the development of smaller, faster and cheaper microprocessors and DSPs capable of processing a high-bandwidth, high-resolution video stream. Besides, the significant increase in image quality would have been wasted until the advent of affordable, high-resolution, high-quality digital displays and high-bandwidth interlinks. Consumer electronics manufacturers continue to develop, manufacture and sell DVD players because there is significant demand for them, not because they are trying to bait consumers into buying a DVD player which they will be forced to replace with a BD player in a few years' time. Affordable BD players are available now and can play DVDs just as well as the best DVD players; there is no reason for anyone to buy a DVD player today unless they do not need or want to play Blu-ray discs..

As for build quality, the consumer electronics market is extremely competitive, and there is a strong economic incentive for manufacturers to develop high-quality long-lived products. Consumers are more than willing to pay a higher price for a product bearing the label of a company with a good reputation for quality, performance and durability. Manufacturers also operate in markets in which they are legally obligated to either repair or replace, at no cost to the customer, any product that fails due to a design or manufacturing error within a certain time after the initial purchase (up to 5 years in Norway).

Of course, there are mediocre $50 DVD players, but they exist because there is a demand for cheap “good enough” DVD players, not because the manufacturers are trying to defraud their customers.

The Systemic obsolescence and Planned obsolescence in software sections are complete crocks. Windows XP is still supported with regular driver updates and monthly patch releases, ten years after its release, seven years after the release of its replacement, and two years after the release of its replacement's replacement. In that time, Microsoft has released three significant updates at no additional charge to existing customers.

Besides, software does not stop working simply because the developer stops issuing patches for it. Bugs do not magically and spontaneously appear, and there is no kill switch in Windows XP. When Microsoft stops supporting it three years from now, existing installations will continue to perform just as well as they do today, barring hardware failures, which cannot be blamed on Microsoft.

MMORPGs (mentioned on the talk page, not in the article) are not a good example either, because the product is the online game, not the client you use to access it, and I am not aware of any MMORPG that offers paid lifetime subscriptions. You pay on a monthly or yearly basis, and have access to the game as long as you pay; the day the developer decides to shut down the game, players will either be allowed to continue playing until the end of the period they've paid for, or reimbursed.

Car manufacturers design and build their cars to last significantly longer than the warranty period, and continue to stock and sell replacement parts long after a particular model has been discontinued and the warranty on the last vehicles sold has expired, because the market demands it and any manufacturer that didn't would soon be out of business. The reason why they don't often fifteen- or twenty-year warranties (although some offer up to seven years with unlimited mileage in some markets) is simply that as the car ages, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between wear and tear and manufacturing defects. Say a five-year old truck develops sloppy steering and the cause is identified as badly worn bushings in the front suspension: is it because deficient bushings were fitted at the factory, or because the truck has regularly been driven at high speed on unpaved roads? Don't laugh; I've heard of car manufacturers getting sued over worn brake disks (individual plaintiff, not class-action).

I'm not saying that planned obsolescence doesn't exist. It certainly does, and inkjet cartridges are a prime example. I'm just saying that most of the examples in the article are worthless.

DES (talk) 20:24, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree. This article has serious neutrality issues.

***patchiman*** ***talk to me!*** 17:02, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, a lot of the things being cited are like saying it's planned obsolescence to not have any way to hitch horses to a semi trailer. Herr Gruber (talk) 08:00, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Non-examples

Just done a pretty hefty trim of this, so I'm adding here a list of things people often mistake for planned obsolescence that aren't it:

• Anything that breaks. This is basic entropy, it's impossible to make anything in this universe that never breaks, and the more complex something is, the more prone to breakage it will tend to become.
• Non-durable goods. Nobody expects something like a cigarette or a roll of toilet paper to last more than one use.
• Anything that isn't made of the best possible components come what may. Market forces determine the accepted price of a good; if people want a microwave that costs $50 instead of $500, they're going to have to accept a shorter lifespan because the components will have to be of lower quality to make that price. This is why there has been almost no change in the lifespan of white goods over the years; people expect a washing machine or refrigerator to have a three-digit price and a lifespan in tens of years.
• Things made obsolete due to progress in technology. Not being able to install Windows 7 on the Antikythera Mechanism is not planned obsolescence, it's technical obsolescence. If a new product is actually measurably better than an old one at the same job (such as diesel locomotives versus steam, or solid-state media players versus personal CD players) that's not planned obsolescence either. Nobody decided to make the old system worse than the new one, and the new system is a measurable functional update. Examples like new games that don't run on old hardware are dubious because games companies don't make new hardware; Crytek didn't make any money out of people purchasing new graphics cards to play Crysis for example, nVidia and AMD did. You could bring up examples like DirectX 10 version lockouts for games later proven to not require them, though, those were far more transparent attempts to force people to upgrade needlessly.
• New things that don't do old things. The fact that you can't put an old Super 8 film in a digital camera and have to use a memory card instead is a product of the design, and since the majority of your customers don't want that ability, it would raise the price for very little functional improvement. It would be planned obsolescence if you had to use a new type of memory card for every new digital camera from a manufacturer, despite there being no adequate reason for such a lockout to be in place.
• DRM is dubious; most companies aren't planning to go out of business, so it's hard to argue that it constitutes an attempt to force the user to buy new products if their service goes down completely. Equally, revoking access to products isn't generally done to make the owner buy a newer product; in historical cases it's always been done either for legal reasons or due to disputes between content owners and digital distributors. It can force the issue with utility software, though; for example, if a company no longer offers a word processor for download and only its replacement, a reinstalling user would have to buy the replacement.

Using planned obsolescence to refer to any form of obsolescence is overly common, but it's also extremely foolish; when you buy a copy of a brand-new videogame you're probably not going to try to install it on a 1940s mechanical gunnery computer, and it's hardly a conspiracy by the manufacturers that it doesn't work if you try to. Things move on. Herr Gruber (talk) 11:33, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

On DRM, I think I or somebody else have originally added the mention not as an example of forcing to buy a new software/music from the same vendor directly, but to make the old computer useless, so that fewer people can keep using it with software/music from other vendors, leading to more usage of the new technology most people do not want enough otherwise (maybe with more pointless incompatibilities). --AVRS (talk) 12:59, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Videogame example

I removed the section on the videogames. I put them here below:

"Consider for example a consumer who bought a PC in order to enjoy video games. That PC could be manufactured, at the expense of higher cost and price, to last for centuries, but the consumer would replace it after 2–5 years for a better model anyway to enjoy newer games. It would be uneconomical, and in some cases not even ecological, to use more or better resources in order to manufacture products that would last many years longer than consumers are willing to use them (see: value engineering, overengineering). Otherwise, planned obsolescence occurs when consumers desire changes in design due to fashion or similar psychological desires. Thus the constant changes in the products are often demanded by consumers from producers. This is the reason why planned obsolescence can be observed mainly in highly innovative or fashion industries, where the pace of innovation or changes in fashion driven by consumer desires dictates short life cycles of products. That doesn't apply so well to data storage devices in a PC: even if the user is going to replace a hard disk drive after a few years of use for volume or speed reasons, it breaking even one day before a complete replacement is likely to lead to data loss with potentially serious consequences."

I think this shouldn't be mentioned at the page. This as the videogame industry too is guilty to psychological obsolescence: newer games are always made that can only be run on PC's with the latest/highest system requirements, but really if you want to spend/waste some time playing videogames, you could also choose a videogame that doesn't require the latest system requirements/PC (say Tetris, chess, some strategy games, ...). Some of these low-system requirement games may even be very new.

Another issue is the "you can build a PC to last for centuries"; that's completely false. PC's use electrical components that can't be made to last more than a few decades or so. Also, in this time span, people can still use the device to do useful work (say making excel spreadsheets to calculate the accounting of a shop; PC's that are 20 years old could -in 2034 then- still be used to do this). Newer operating systems (OS's) too are often made to use higher system requirements, but some OS's like TinyCore Linux, ... too exist which don't follow this doctrine, and just focus on doing the most with the lowest system requirements (so just the opposite). KVDP (talk) 08:13, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

The problem is such a system would still be regarded by most as functionally obsolete. You could still fit a modern guidance system and JDAMs to a WW2 Spitfire, and the result could still fulfil the basic function of dropping them on things, but the scenarios in which it could actually succeed would be so limited that it could not really be regarded as suitable for the role of a modern combat aircraft. That's why "functional" isn't a form of planned: functional obsolescence is driven by changes in the environment the product has to function in, and so can't possibly be part of the design of the product itself.

In much the same way, if a user desires to use their computer to play new games with high-fidelity graphics, it is functionally obsolete if it cannot do so. This is not due to any inherent, designed flaw in the computer or due to any decision made by the manufacturer (AMD, nVidia, Intel and so on are not videogame companies, after all) but because separate decisions by other companies impose demands the product is no longer capable of meeting.

One could certainly, with extreme over-engineering, make a PC last an incredibly long time by using aggressive burn-in on all components to minimise failure rates in the final product and the highest-reliability components possible: the point of the example is that the device's useful life for the desired application would be vastly shorter, so the added costs would provide no real benefit to the customer. The fact that it could continue being used in a different application is no more relevant than saying that after the internal components fail completely it could still be used as a footrest or doorstop.

True cases of style-based obsolescence in electronics are those where the added functions are irrelevant to the desired use: for example, when a user buys a new iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor than the old one because it's the latest model, even though they only intend to use it as a phone. Herr Gruber (talk) 04:21, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Cradle to cradle design

Can this be mentioned ? I think that for some products (non-electric products), all waste issues can be avoided with this, and thus the economic advantages will then outweigh the negative externalities. KVDP (talk) 08:31, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

A mostly-hypothetical system some have criticised as unworkable at large scales isn't really notable, regardless of how you personally feel about it. Herr Gruber (talk) 04:52, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

PS3 and Backwards Compatibility (and Neutrality)

The PS3 shipped with backwards compatibility in it's software, and then they removed it for commercial rather than functional reasons (so people would buy new games). Also, should certain aspects of DRM be discussed in this article? Any software that locks up after a certain amount of uses certainly sounds like planned obsolescence. I also think it is strange that the Phoebus Cartel and other historical accounts of planned obsolescence aren't even mentioned at all within the body of the article. This article went from being conspiratorial and non-neutral to being overly supportive of planned obsolescence and only presenting the good aspects, and therefore once again non-neutral. We have overcompensated. Let's make this article neutral and show both sides. Thoughts?

128.208.204.169 (talk) 16:01, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

No, they removed it because they wanted to shut down the production line producing PS2 GPUs and CPUs (backwards compatible PS3s have both PS2 chips inside them) to save them money and bring down costs for the average consumer who typically already owned a PS2 and didn't need the feature. Since Sony did not stop selling PS2 systems, one could still easily access equipment to use old PS2 games without having to buy copies on PS3 PSN. You might as well say it's planned obsolescence that CD drives can't play floppy disks, even though you can still buy floppy drives that can. Herr Gruber (talk) 06:59, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Hmm... you realize that Sony stopped the production of PS2s? Jeandeve (talk) 19:05, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

The PS2 is last I checked the best-selling games console in history, it will be possible to get boxed, new PS2s at retail price for at least a decade or so if you want hardware to play PS2 games. And they did not shut down production until a month before they announced the Playstation 4. Bottom line, though: most likely if you wanted to play PS2 games you would already have a PS2. Nothing about the PS3 stopped your existing console from working, so it's not an example, any more than the PS2's inability to use SNES cartridges or ZX Spectrum cassette tapes is an example. Herr Gruber (talk) 10:31, 4 December 2014 (UTC)