Planned Obsolescence is largely a myth, besides a few blatant examples. There are a few factors that drive consumer perception of planned obsolescence
-Demand for cheaper products: Consumers tend to prefer cheaper products. This means cheaper materials and a product that doesn't last as long. Common household appliances cost much less than they did in the earlier half of the 20th century, and people act surprised when they don't last as long as an appliance from the 1950s that cost more than twice as much
-Survivor bias: Only durable products from the past survived, broken and unrepairable products were sent to the landfill. Therefore people only see the most durable products of the past and assume everything made back then was just as durable.
-Technical obsolescence: Old products become less useful as technology progresses. Why use a 100 year old still functional device when it is inefficient and technologically obsolete?
The article even mentions some of these factors with regards to the so-called planned obsolescence of light bulbs. Longer lasting bulbs are dimmer and less efficient, so it makes sense to design them in such a way to maximize light output over a certain timespan.
Yes, nobody says "we'll make sure this product breaks in 5 years."
Instead, they say, "We're going to have to support this for 5 years. Design it so that almost all of them survive that long, and don't bother trying to make them last longer. It's too expensive."
In the end, it's the same thing, just without the tint of evil.
Also, the cost of repair has remained static or increased, while the cost of manufacturing has greatly decreased. Older consumer goods were usually much less reliable than modern equivalents, but it made economic sense to repair them.
In 1984, a 20-inch colour TV cost £329 versus an average weekly wage of £115. In 2017, a 40-inch HDTV costs £300 versus an average weekly wage of £530. TVs are now vastly cheaper relative to the cost of labour.
TV repair used to be very common. There were half a dozen TV repair shops in my town when I was a child. A lot of people preferred to rent, partly because the up-front cost was prohibitive and partly because the rental price included repairs.
Today, even simple repairs like a capacitor replacement are prohibitively expensive. Even if the parts cost pennies and it's a quick replacement, there's a minimum of two hours of labour just to get the back off the TV, find the fault and test the repair. Why pay £150 to fix your old set when you could get a new, better set for £300?
It's not great for the environment, but it's good for the consumer.
... aside from the American auto industry up through the 1980s or so. Planned obsolescence drove automotive design for years, prompting people to pursue new vehicles every few years. In contrast, European models could go a decade with little visible change, as long retention cycles were common.
MAD magazine had a great feature in the 1970s called "Planned Obsolescence in Everyday Products", parodying design fails in household appliances and such.
But at least you could buy devices that would last for decades and decades.
Try finding a washing machine these days, that will last for more than 5 years or so before something breaks and renders the machine useless.
You may be able to find an industrial machine, made for hotels or laundries. But it will be very expensive and likely be huge and it will need 3-phase power. It will also likely not have a spin cycle, so you'll have to either air dry your clothes for ages or buy a separate clothes spinner (most driers need the clothes to have been spin dried first).
Whether I buy a cheap Whirlpool or an expensive Miele/AEG/Bosch or whatever, the quality and longevity is universally shit.
The Whirlpool monopoly is a great example of planned obsolescences. They use cheap seals and plastic parts when they used to use steel. Most modern appliance seem to have a life span of 5-7 years because of electronics failure.
I had a Maytag ( owned by Whirlpool ) dishwasher, range and refrigerator all need repairs costing over $300 a device within the first 3 years. All of them failed within 2 -3 months of the warranty expiration.
In circumstances old analog tech can be better my dad (who is an EE) did some consultancy with London Underground and some of the 1930's equipment was going strong where as some of the 70's stuff was breaking down.
> Common household appliances cost much less than they did in the earlier half of the 20th century, and people act surprised when they don't last as long as an appliance from the 1950s that cost more than twice as much
>Planned Obsolescence is largely a myth, besides a few blatant examples.
I suspect you are decent person, likely you have never been lied to or about in public to shame you (in court, city council, etc...), or been mugged or attacked, or suffered any major crimes. Or least, had many year battle with people that try to destroy your life.
I have, and know many other people who have, and I am no longer in any doubt that large businesses collude for money, a far lesser crime than what I have experienced first hand.
What is your point? Are you arguing that the article is exaggerating the role of the international standards body by calling it a cartel? I think one of the main points of the article is that if companies were acting in consumers' interest you'd see the lifespan of bulbs increase while brightness remained relatively steady or also increased (due to advances in bulb tech). As far as light bulbs go, as a consumer, I'd much rather pay more (and do) for a longer lasting bulb in the 27-35k temp range than perpetually need to replace bulbs that burn up at 45k+. If you're arguing consumers prefer brighter shorter bulbs and that that drove the market, you're directly contradicting the article which has plenty of citations and makes a very compelling argument. Care to share yours?
Thomas Pynchon integrated this story into Gravity's Rainbow. There are some amazing passages imagining the fortunes of Byron, a sentient bulb who is determined to escape his own mortality --- the planned obsolescence of Phoebus:
"
Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Pheobus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Combination). Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace for a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.
But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlottenburg, almost within sight of the statue of Wernher Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs witness the more languorous forms of Republican decadence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an escape, Bernie down the hall in the toilet, who has all kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his mother Brenda in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum floors after days without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural state…
"
While most people forget to mention when discussing the Phoebus cartel is that with incandescent lightbulbs, lifespan and efficiency are inversely correlated.
It is actually quite simple: incandescent lightbulbs are blackbody radiators. Efficiency depends only on the temperature of the filament, the hotter the better, but lifespan decreases drastically as temperature increases.
There isn't much that can be done in an incandescent light bulb. The filament is tungsten, voltage is fixed by the grid, power is the rated power. So, the only choice is to make the filament longer/thinker or shorter/thinner. The former will be dimmer and longer lasting compared to the latter.
Requiring a set lifespan also ensures consistent brightness and color temperature (a real temperature in this case), it also requires reasonably precise manufacturing. These are generally good things.
Well obviously, a lot of it is motivated by profit, but there are also very good technical reasons behind it too.
The situation today with LED lighting is actually much worse. LEDs could last a lifetime, unlike with incandescent light bulbs, there is no reason for them to burn. However, a lot of them fail because they are under-engineered.
In 2007, Google gifted their employees one of the latest in LED light bulbs, "just because". I remember LED bulbs being very rare at the time, and we ended up with two of them somehow.
1 failed within 6 months, the other is still used daily as a bedside lamp 11 years later.
That's been my experience of LED bulbs -- either they die quick or last years. I bought a dozen of really cheap Chinese ones about 2011 or so. More than half died within 6 months, another crop in under a year, and I've got two of them that are still running fine 7 years later. They run probably 12 or 15 hours a day every day of the year.
Slightly OT: In winter, when you are heating the rooms anyway and so any heat produced is useful, not wasted, is an 'old' incandescent light-bulb still significantly less energy efficient then a 'modern' energy saver bulb?
Yes because you could heat the room with gas heating, which is about 3x cheaper. And if you are in an area that uses a lot of gas/coal in the electric generation, then you will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.
Or you could run a heat pump, that wins about a factor of 5.
If you can use the electricity that was saved to pump heat then that'll be more efficient.
If the only alternative usage is putting the energy into a different hot metal filament, then it might be more of a tossup, depending on how focused the light-bulb's emanations are onto the things you actually want warmed.
Even disregarding pump vs direct heating and thermostat regulation: Heating from your ceiling is pretty inefficient since hot air tends to ho upwards and straight out the air vents.
"Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate. There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached. "
Other than warmth, my home LEDs (all of them - Cree) have lasted 7 years and look to last about 10-15 more. They've already paid for themselves as before that I was replacing 4-5 bulbs a year and wasting 10x the wattage.
I suppose this is what happened with CF bulbs? We were promised longer bulb life, but in practice I find that I have to change CF bulbs far more often than traditional fluorescent tubes. It's going to take quite some engineering to develop LEDs that burn out fast enough.
> I suppose this is what happened with CF bulbs? We were promised longer bulb life, but in practice I find that I have to change CF bulbs far more often than traditional fluorescent tubes.
CF bulbs were sold as having long life compared to the incandescent bulbs they were drop-in replacements for, not compared to flourescent tubes.
I think a lot of CFL lifetime depends on the quality of your electricity. In my last place, I had some that lasted 8 years including some high-usage lights like in the livingroom that saw at least 3 - 5 hours of daily use.
Though I always purchased name-brand bulbs, never the cheap generic brands.
I left them all behind when I moved so those are the longest lived ones I have experience with, in my new house, I have mostly LED's with a few CFL's and they're up to around 5 years old... I like the light from LED's better or I'd have more CFL's around.
Failures have been rare, but I have pretty clean power, few power outages and practically no thunderstorms in the area.
This has to do with the starter mechanism. All florescent tubes need a starter, including CFLs. Industrial/commercial florescent lights take a few seconds to warm up, often with some flickering. For home use people want their light bulbs to start up fast, so manufacturers put quicker starters in CFLs at the expense of longevity.
There's a tradeoff between efficiency and life. My electric oven makes a decent light when turned on high. I bet it'd burn for a lot longer than 100 years.
I’m very amused by the fact that it took serious engineering effort to manufacture bulbs that were reliable during their lifetime but that would also burn out quickly.
Interesting thing I learned was before WWII you could buy cold cathode light fixtures and get the local neon shop to make a lamp for it. Cold cathode lamps will last 20 years.
The light bulb manufacturers got those outlawed via the national electrical code. It's illegal to have any wiring in a residence over 1000. Except for radio's televisions and microwaves. Which means cold cathode lighting is outlawed. Cold cathode is basically just neon, which is similar to fluorescent except unlike fluorescent you don't have a hot filament to burn out. Both requires higher voltage to operate and results somewhat lower efficiency, but with 100,000 hour life span.
Later in the 1970's they also made sure that fluorescent lamps efficiency standards mandated high color temperature (blue) phosphors. In low light residential use high color temp makes everything looks like ass.
There is a great movie by the same name: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Hlf6nLvV4. There is a part where they interview a journalist in Ghana (I think) who researches the electronic dumping in his country. It’s haunting.
Not providing software updates is also a kind of planned obsolescence of computers. Luckily, we have free software operating systems which can extend the lifetime of computers. The fact that software is getting more and more inefficient isn't exactly helping either.
I honestly do not think that any developer I know would be okay if they were told "write it in a way so it will stop working in a year". Maintaining old software is expensive and people do not want to pay. It is also way easier to just pull everybody with you to latest release (which is why there are so many subscriptions now).
edit: also, I do know a lot of developers that would not be happy to work on the maintenance of some old software.
The Phoebus Cartel controlled the life time of light bulbs. The cartel agreed that the life time of a light bulb would be 1000 hours. Famous companies such as Osram and Philips where part of the cartel.
One can learn from the light bulb conspiracy that planned obsolescence is real. It is profitable unless they are caught for companies to make products with a limited life thus they can sell replacement products and bad for the environment.
Poor economies (think underdeveloped economies) do incentivize repair over replacement. Cases in point, cars in Cuba, Former USSR republics, etc. You will also find repairshops for electronics in many developing economies as well. Labor to repair a unit makes a repair affordable whereas buying a new unit might be prohibitive.
In developed nations, labor is too expensive to make a repair worthwhile for things people can regularly afford. It's only as things become expensive that repairing something makes economic sense (a $100 replacement screen for a phone is economically viable vs buying a new $600 phone). Conversely very few people in the US for example would think of repairing an old Microwave when buying a new one is only marginally more expensive than getting a new one.
Unless you can find repairpeople willing to work for a great deal less than minimum wage it's going to be hard to make this work on most gear. Labor alone is enough to kill repair efforts. Even if corporations tried to make more repairable gear it wouldn't help if labor is still too expensive to make it worth it. (And if that's true, then making the gear less repairable and cheaper becomes a rational response to the market rather than a conspiracy.)
Sigh. I disposed of an otherwise perfectly good 49" television last week because something on the IR receiver board failed. What leads I could find for a replacement board (a) had them listed around 50% of what a comparable replacement television costs today and (b) didn't actually have any to sell me.
Upside, I now have a much bigger and nicer TV that was 40% of what the old one cost.
Too bad this ^^ was downvoted, because the big pharma has exactly the same incentives as the rest of the big corps at generating money. And they aren't 'nicer' than car or light bulbs companies.
You know, remember the tobacco industry, when they were claiming it made your teeth cleaner, your breath fresher and and that jazz? It's not that long ago.
[+] [-] klondike_|8 years ago|reply
-Demand for cheaper products: Consumers tend to prefer cheaper products. This means cheaper materials and a product that doesn't last as long. Common household appliances cost much less than they did in the earlier half of the 20th century, and people act surprised when they don't last as long as an appliance from the 1950s that cost more than twice as much
-Survivor bias: Only durable products from the past survived, broken and unrepairable products were sent to the landfill. Therefore people only see the most durable products of the past and assume everything made back then was just as durable.
-Technical obsolescence: Old products become less useful as technology progresses. Why use a 100 year old still functional device when it is inefficient and technologically obsolete?
The article even mentions some of these factors with regards to the so-called planned obsolescence of light bulbs. Longer lasting bulbs are dimmer and less efficient, so it makes sense to design them in such a way to maximize light output over a certain timespan.
[+] [-] wccrawford|8 years ago|reply
Yes, nobody says "we'll make sure this product breaks in 5 years."
Instead, they say, "We're going to have to support this for 5 years. Design it so that almost all of them survive that long, and don't bother trying to make them last longer. It's too expensive."
In the end, it's the same thing, just without the tint of evil.
[+] [-] jdietrich|8 years ago|reply
In 1984, a 20-inch colour TV cost £329 versus an average weekly wage of £115. In 2017, a 40-inch HDTV costs £300 versus an average weekly wage of £530. TVs are now vastly cheaper relative to the cost of labour.
TV repair used to be very common. There were half a dozen TV repair shops in my town when I was a child. A lot of people preferred to rent, partly because the up-front cost was prohibitive and partly because the rental price included repairs.
Today, even simple repairs like a capacitor replacement are prohibitively expensive. Even if the parts cost pennies and it's a quick replacement, there's a minimum of two hours of labour just to get the back off the TV, find the fault and test the repair. Why pay £150 to fix your old set when you could get a new, better set for £300?
It's not great for the environment, but it's good for the consumer.
[+] [-] DrScump|8 years ago|reply
MAD magazine had a great feature in the 1970s called "Planned Obsolescence in Everyday Products", parodying design fails in household appliances and such.
[+] [-] KozmoNau7|8 years ago|reply
Try finding a washing machine these days, that will last for more than 5 years or so before something breaks and renders the machine useless.
You may be able to find an industrial machine, made for hotels or laundries. But it will be very expensive and likely be huge and it will need 3-phase power. It will also likely not have a spin cycle, so you'll have to either air dry your clothes for ages or buy a separate clothes spinner (most driers need the clothes to have been spin dried first).
Whether I buy a cheap Whirlpool or an expensive Miele/AEG/Bosch or whatever, the quality and longevity is universally shit.
[+] [-] MrFantastic|8 years ago|reply
I had a Maytag ( owned by Whirlpool ) dishwasher, range and refrigerator all need repairs costing over $300 a device within the first 3 years. All of them failed within 2 -3 months of the warranty expiration.
[+] [-] walshemj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerkeslager|8 years ago|reply
Citation for this (accounting for inflation)?
[+] [-] metaphor|8 years ago|reply
On this note, I respectfully beg to differ. It's probably a lot more recognizable by its modern permutation: the manufacturer warranty.
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|8 years ago|reply
I suspect you are decent person, likely you have never been lied to or about in public to shame you (in court, city council, etc...), or been mugged or attacked, or suffered any major crimes. Or least, had many year battle with people that try to destroy your life.
I have, and know many other people who have, and I am no longer in any doubt that large businesses collude for money, a far lesser crime than what I have experienced first hand.
Edit: current reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16526749
[+] [-] dcow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ppod|8 years ago|reply
" Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Pheobus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Combination). Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace for a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.
But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlottenburg, almost within sight of the statue of Wernher Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs witness the more languorous forms of Republican decadence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an escape, Bernie down the hall in the toilet, who has all kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his mother Brenda in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum floors after days without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural state… "
full excerpts here:
http://lukedanger.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/story-of-byron-bulb...
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|8 years ago|reply
It is actually quite simple: incandescent lightbulbs are blackbody radiators. Efficiency depends only on the temperature of the filament, the hotter the better, but lifespan decreases drastically as temperature increases.
There isn't much that can be done in an incandescent light bulb. The filament is tungsten, voltage is fixed by the grid, power is the rated power. So, the only choice is to make the filament longer/thinker or shorter/thinner. The former will be dimmer and longer lasting compared to the latter.
Requiring a set lifespan also ensures consistent brightness and color temperature (a real temperature in this case), it also requires reasonably precise manufacturing. These are generally good things.
Well obviously, a lot of it is motivated by profit, but there are also very good technical reasons behind it too.
The situation today with LED lighting is actually much worse. LEDs could last a lifetime, unlike with incandescent light bulbs, there is no reason for them to burn. However, a lot of them fail because they are under-engineered.
[+] [-] timcederman|8 years ago|reply
1 failed within 6 months, the other is still used daily as a bedside lamp 11 years later.
[+] [-] tome|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
[+] [-] dingaling|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b5|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterStuer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abainbridge|8 years ago|reply
Or you could run a heat pump, that wins about a factor of 5.
I learned this from this excellent resource: https://www.withouthotair.com/
There's an argument that
[+] [-] Terr_|8 years ago|reply
If the only alternative usage is putting the energy into a different hot metal filament, then it might be more of a tossup, depending on how focused the light-bulb's emanations are onto the things you actually want warmed.
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4006
[+] [-] fulafel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|8 years ago|reply
"Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate. There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached. "
Other than warmth, my home LEDs (all of them - Cree) have lasted 7 years and look to last about 10-15 more. They've already paid for themselves as before that I was replacing 4-5 bulbs a year and wasting 10x the wattage.
[+] [-] sevensor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
CF bulbs were sold as having long life compared to the incandescent bulbs they were drop-in replacements for, not compared to flourescent tubes.
[+] [-] Johnny555|8 years ago|reply
Though I always purchased name-brand bulbs, never the cheap generic brands.
I left them all behind when I moved so those are the longest lived ones I have experience with, in my new house, I have mostly LED's with a few CFL's and they're up to around 5 years old... I like the light from LED's better or I'd have more CFL's around.
Failures have been rare, but I have pretty clean power, few power outages and practically no thunderstorms in the area.
[+] [-] klondike_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369136
[+] [-] fjfaase|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoisjuan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leggomylibro|8 years ago|reply
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...
[+] [-] realandreskytt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonet_mount
[+] [-] sgillen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|8 years ago|reply
The light bulb manufacturers got those outlawed via the national electrical code. It's illegal to have any wiring in a residence over 1000. Except for radio's televisions and microwaves. Which means cold cathode lighting is outlawed. Cold cathode is basically just neon, which is similar to fluorescent except unlike fluorescent you don't have a hot filament to burn out. Both requires higher voltage to operate and results somewhat lower efficiency, but with 100,000 hour life span.
Later in the 1970's they also made sure that fluorescent lamps efficiency standards mandated high color temperature (blue) phosphors. In low light residential use high color temp makes everything looks like ass.
[+] [-] linkmotif|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hindsightbias|8 years ago|reply
Haven't needed a ladder in 5 years.
[+] [-] copperx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] augustk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoz-y|8 years ago|reply
edit: also, I do know a lot of developers that would not be happy to work on the maintenance of some old software.
[+] [-] acd|8 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
One can learn from the light bulb conspiracy that planned obsolescence is real. It is profitable unless they are caught for companies to make products with a limited life thus they can sell replacement products and bad for the environment.
[+] [-] c8d3f7b49897918|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|8 years ago|reply
In developed nations, labor is too expensive to make a repair worthwhile for things people can regularly afford. It's only as things become expensive that repairing something makes economic sense (a $100 replacement screen for a phone is economically viable vs buying a new $600 phone). Conversely very few people in the US for example would think of repairing an old Microwave when buying a new one is only marginally more expensive than getting a new one.
[+] [-] jerf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbyehl|8 years ago|reply
Upside, I now have a much bigger and nicer TV that was 40% of what the old one cost.
[+] [-] dannyw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] citizenpaul|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buserror|8 years ago|reply
You know, remember the tobacco industry, when they were claiming it made your teeth cleaner, your breath fresher and and that jazz? It's not that long ago.