Comment on There was a time when everyone had common sense
Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Taking away the instructions on how to service and repair a car was a result of capitalists wanting to make more money by forcing you to get your car repaired by them.
Adding instructions not to drink battery acid is likely for companies to avoid getting sued because people will always argue that there was no warning about drinking battery acid so the company owes you compensation.
This is a false comparison.
I mean I do agree with you. Planned obsolescence and whatnot is very real.
But also, fixing a car from 70’s is very different than trying to fix a car from this millenium.
As technology improves and becomes more detailed, it might also get harder to repair. This isn’t to be taken as a defense of companies which have used planned obsolescence. But even if there was a very user friendly car company, I think it would be more complex to adjust your valves today than it was 30-40 years ago.
I mean I do agree with you. Planned obsolescence and whatnot is very real.
it’s complicated, a good example, actually probably the ideal example, of planned obsolescence is airpods. Designed to not be repaired, thrown away, and then replaced.
It can also apply to things like “lifetime” designed products, you may design something to mechanically wear out, before it needs to be maintained, or perhaps, require no maintenance, until you need to replace it. It’s harder to say whether this is strictly planned obsolescence, or just cost cutting engineering, which in the long run, probably doesn’t change much.
i think the most semantically accurate version of this would be releasing a product that is 100% good, and then a year later releasing a product that is 200% good, surpassing and replacing the previous product entirely, removing the previous product from the product line up, and only supporting the most recent product. I.E. it’s planned to become obsolete, shortly into the future.
Vehicles are also a weird market segment, they’ve gotten considerably more reliable since the early days of the automotive industry, they’ve gotten significantly more comfortable, they’ve gotten significantly more safe. They’ve also gotten several orders of magnitude more complicated since than as well. To deal with the aforementioned advances. Though there have been a lot of issues in recent manufacturing leading to parts that are just, bad.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Also helps them get away with hiding shoddy/cheap parts.
~2018-2020 Hondas have defective air condensers. They aren’t rated for the refrigerant. They are basically guaranteed to fail. You also have to go to a dealership to get your AC serviced. There’s a warranty for the AC, but it’s that dealer that checks whether your AC meets the warranty or not (amazing how easy it is to find bits of debris and deny the warranty when no third party can double check.
You could crack open an original Xbox and do a lot of modifications with it. The Xbox 360 was designed to be as annoying to take apart as possible, possibly to hide the cheap components that lead to the red ring of death…
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
actually, this was probably to fit it into the very weird and particular form factor that microsoft wanted it to fit in.
The red ring of death issue was actually due to faulty chip manufacturing, rather than bad cooling, it was an inevitable flaw due to manufacturing defects, rather than design failures. The heating and cooling cycles just greatly exaggerated the effect of the problem, that’s why it’s so closely linked.
Also you could’ve mentioned the update fuses in the CPU, IIRC there are fuses that are blown when the system updates, to prevent you from going back, no matter what you do.