[zeroflow]

I'm offering you a different viewpoint:

They made the analysis, how long the flash will live and saw, that it will make it out of the warranty period. Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change.

I've seen this myself before. One process step before release of the control module was a write cycle analysis to make sure the unit will live for at least 10 years (i think) before the guaranteed write cycles of the flash memory were consumed.

[audunw]

You're both missing one of the more likely explanation.. that nobody gave much thought about how long the device would last. "It's solid state electronics, it'll probably outlast the warranty anyway".. I can imagine an aircon company puts a lot of effort into analyzing the air-conditioning unit itself to make sure it lasts at least as long as the warranty, with good margin. But I can totally see them winging it on an external control device, which was perhaps even a project they outsourced anyway.

I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe. A device breaking right after warranty is not a good strategy to get repeat customers. It's also a huge risk if you miscalculated and you suddenly get a lot of warranty cases. You want a lot of margin there.

I've been involved in the design of a thing myself, where something the manufacturer hadn't clearly communicated - and we just barely caught - could have made the device die just around a typical warranty period for such a device. When we found out, of course we worked on this problem to make sure it didn't die prematurely.

[yuye]

Advantage Air doesn't produce ACs. They produce smart home solutions, including AC controllers. They're not winging it on an external control device, they're cheaping out on their main product.

Also, their claim is that they're not outsourcing. If you check their website, it claims everything is designed and manufactured in Australia.

Nevertheless, I'd have given them the benefit of the doubt if it were not for:

1. The only option being a full system replacement.

2. Communication protocol being encrypted.

3. App being locked down to certain hard-coded models.

None of these give me any hope that this is a well-meaning company that just has some issues.

Also, I think a company that sells a product most customers would only buy once or twice in their lives is not a company that expects many repeat customers.

[jerf]

I generally treat my tablets and phones very well. I wouldn't trust a tablet, at scale, to last much beyond three years. By "at scale" that means, say, a replacement rate of less than 10%.

By contrast ACs are on the decadal scale.

Integrating a tablet can't work. It's a dumb idea from the outset.

Similar hardware can work. There are touchscreen UIs that do last for a long time, especially on an AC unit where they're not getting used all the time. But they aren't tablets. In particular I'd finger the lithium ion batteries optimized for tablet-style usage as something you don't put into a system you want to last about ten years. Most of my tablets "die" when the battery just becomes unusable.

And you probably want an LCD chosen for robustness rather than being the cheapest possible high resolution display... again, plenty of LCDs can last for a long time, but the trifecta of "high resolution", "cheap", and "lasts a long time" is asking an awful lot for a fleet of systems. ("Cheap" and "lasts a long time" is, by contrast, readily available; it just won't be pretty. But it'll work fine.) And by "high resolution" I don't mean "retina display", just anything suitable for a tablet. Ye Olde 640x480 is plenty for an AC display, even in monochrome.

You want something pretty, give it a way for a real app to access it on the network. Except don't bother, really, because there's no way you're going to maintain that for 10 years either.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe.

I've been saying this for a while.

Consumers are insanely price-sensitive while also short-sighted. They'll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime.

Manufacturers know this and there's a race to the bottom on pricing. To get pricing as low as possible, quality and durability take a hit.

[fmbb]

Never attribute to laziness or stupidity that which is adequately explained by the profit motive.

[Workaccount2]

>I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe.

Working in the electronics industry, I have never once heard anyone talk about this. Engineers love engineering, and if it was real their would be a whole field devoted to it. But there isn't.

Also, since this board is stacked with software guys...

Planned obsolescence is way easier to implement in software. How many of you have been asked to put a time bomb in a warrantied product?

Planned obsolescence is a term that lay people use to describe unfortunate breaking of things that are sufficiently complex to be considered "a magical black box". In reality it is just another apparition of Murphy's law.

[imtringued]

I'm pretty sure what happens in reality is that someone makes a crappy product and then the warranty claims keep coming and because warranty claims cost them money, they keep improving the quality until the warranty claims stop coming. It's not that they wouldn't improve the quality, it's that the bean counters don't see it in their spreadsheets and thus no time is allocated to engineers building the next revision.

[yuye]

>Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change.

Opting out of a more durable solution when you know the device will break right after warranty is still planned obsolescence.

[muppetman]

Isn't that kinda the definition of planned obselence? You plan so that past you point you have to care, it could well die/become useless?

[TeMPOraL]

Planned obsolescence is when you purposefully design it to fail as soon as possible (but past any warranty period), to force repeat purchase.

[WhyNotHugo]

In other words, _Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity._

This device should not need to write to storage. It has to save settings when the user manually changes them, which can't be more than a few kilobytes per year. Any other writes are likely an oversight on the developer's part.