I would argue that the current economic system does not plan for maximum longevity
of products. Rather it can be more profitable for an manufacturer for planned obsolescence
or simply make products which does not last that long. As long as they do not get caught that is.
The counter to this is that people, despite saying otherwise, are not actually interested in spending more money for a better product. Combine that with some markets that have relatively short life between product generations and it removes the need to create products that last a long time.
It's more fun and easier to blame corporate greed, but it's rarely the case. More often than not it's just that people want "cheaper" rather than "better".
I am sometimes interested, but I learnt the hard way that more expensive is not a good measure for better. In other words, it's often really hard to find out which product is better even when I'm perfectly OK with paying more for higher quality. That's the problem called "lack of perfect information", and that's something I totally see being abused to death by advertisers/businessmen.
> it removes the need to create products that last a long time.
I think the difference here is intent and effort.
If you're trying for "cheap" (as the manufacturer), you won't care how well it works and don't try for anything more than the minimum necessary in terms of lifespan or quality.
If you're trying for planned obsolesce, you will deliberately make it worse. That's the "planned" part. In this case, the cartel not only tested for lifespan, but FINED members that improved it.
There have always been manufacturers that shoot for "cheap", and while people will call them on it, it's a different story from those that deliberately sabotage the product in terms of functionality.
But I'm not capable of spending more for a better product. All I can do is spend more for a more expensive product and hope it's better. Products are contained (or bought online) and untestable; they're too expensive to experiment with. Having had both an original product and a warranty replacement a year or so later, I can attest that exactly the same product can vary in quality so a review is of no consequence.
When I try to purchase a widget, I can see two products: one in expensive looking packaging, and one where someone just put in some text on Word. One of them costs $25 and the other costs $2.50. It's entirely possible than the $25 will last twenty times as long as the $2.50 product and use a quarter of the energy, so that the resulting cost may even be in favor of the $25 widget.
But I can't make that judgement. It's impossible. To me, it looks the same as if the expensive one has just spent $2.50/product extra on marketing budget so they can pocket an extra $20.
I would spend a little extra for better quality that lasts longer and saves me on my energy bill. But the producers are not subject to me; they hide their information and spend on things (like CEO severance pay) that are not in my interest.
So when I go to the shop, I make the wrong decision every time, because I have no capacity to make the right decision. The product is kept from me; I can either purchase and discover if it perhaps sucks, or not purchase. Those are my choices. I don't have a real choice.
Lack of perfect information is a well-known failure mode of standard economic models. It may be true that people value their inherently scarce time more than they value the improved light bulb buying decision they could make by obtaining more information, but that doesn't mean consumers don't value better light bulbs. It just means there's an inefficiency due to the cost to the average consumer of learning about light bulbs (or whatever product).
Also, you can only compare different products, I haven't seen a company that produces the same model, one with short lived parts, one with long lasting ones. Then I could make a real choice.
> people, despite saying otherwise, are not actually interested in spending more money for a better product
Hmmm, cheapest Mac laptop $999. Cheapest Windows Laptop $199.
Sure PC sales are higher than Mac but isn't that at least one example of people want better over cheaper since plenty of people choose the more expensive (better?) product?
I don't think it's the only example it was just the first one that popped in my mind.
While homo economicus is mocked for being nonexistent there is a reason that perfectly rational actors are used in economic models -- in general people are extremely rational, it is just their priorities are not what you expect them to be.
I'm sure you can find plenty of HNers whose friend groups express strong preferences to buying better. There's just nothing to buy better.
So despite rational acting buyers, if the supply-side conspires (or monopolizes) to reduce options, buyers will continue to buy the overpriced item (and possibly increase prices due to the demand/price curve sweet spot).
Perhaps instead of mocking rational-actor theory we should also model conspiring-actor model where possible.
But then on the other hand philips led bulbs used to be $50 while similar quality IKEA bulbs were $12 at the time.
I really don't have an issue with paying for quality but there's just no reasonable way for me as a consumer to judge quality. I could go by reviews but those are often low quality or astroturfed so it's not really reliable either. Not to mention the cost of spending time to figure all this shit out.
I'm currently looking to buy a printer with no real budget limit, but I'd obviously rather not pay for features I won't use, but if $100 gets me $100 more worth of quality that's not a problem. It has been a horrible waste of time trying to figure out so far. I've already (pretty much) narrowed it down to a single brand. Partially to limit the scope of my quest and partially because I'm using the brand as a proxy for quality. My last printer was the same brand and it had, over a more than 5 year period I think two paper jams and no nozzle clogs or weird malfunctions.
Even given all that it's impossible to narrow it down further. Presumably the $300 printer is better than the $50 one, but there's no real way to figure that out from the information the manufacturer provides. A large factor is cartridge price since over the lifetime of a printer that can easily quadruple the total amount of money spent. Of course figuring out how much ink each type of cartridge holds is basically impossible. The manufacturer provides "pages per cartridge set" stats for each printer, but that info isn't on the page of the cartridges so that requires me to manually cross-reference cartridges to which printers they go with. All of this of course assuming that the page count they provide isn't just a straight up lie. And that's just for one attribute of the printer! what about paper capacity or number of feed trays or color quality for photo prints or wifi connectivity or or or or
I'm basically at the point where writing a web scraper is less effort than doing all this by hand. None of this is worth the time spent if you go by my hourly rate. How is my mother ever supposed to buy a nice printer if an IT professional like me can't even begin to figure it out?
Traditionally the solution to this problem was sales people, but these days it seems salespeople are more inclined to sell you something expensive that you don't need than they are to actually help you find what you DO need. Customer satisfaction doesn't show up on the balance sheet and isn't a key performance indicator either so why bother to optimize for it? If your first sales step is to figure out someones budget and the next step is to try and stretch it I'm distrusting enough to notice immediately. My mother isn't and would come home with a lighter wallet and a very expensive printer she doesn't need with no guarantee it won't be a maintenance nightmare either.
I should be the favorite kind of customer for any store. I don't mind spending more for quality. I make a point of being loyal to stores and brands that treat me well. If you can sell me something I'm happy to own you've got yourself a return customer. But I guess most stores just aren't looking for that.
In any case my next steps will be to contact the manufacturer and visit stores to ask them directly which printer I should get. I fully expect to get fleecing attempts for the most part but who knows, perhaps I'll find a new favorite store.
To some degree you can get products with longer lifespans, if you look at commercial/industrial models. Sometimes you have to sacrifice fancy features though.
I think the reason consumer products mostly suck is that manufacturers have been hiding inflation by cheapening construction. Occasionally it's for weight savings, but I think keeping prices lower is the main reason. People don't realize they're getting vastly inferior products to the one they or their parents had a generation ago, until it's too late.
So true. I've heard for years that the size of our cereal boxes/chip bags/candy bars are decreasing, ever so slightly, while the price remains the same.
Reminds me of that whole frog-in-a-pot thought experiment. If you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, it jumps back out immediately. But if you put it in a pot of room-temperature water, and slowly raise the temperature, the frog gets acclimated slowly and doesn't notice that sooner or later, he's being boiled alive.
To your point, I noticed that chocolate milk cartons have decreased from 1L to 750ML, yet they kept the same price. Further, the 750ML option was not offered before, and the 1L option is not offered now, which adds to the deception.
I find it most frustrating when you go to a shop and there's two things roughly equivalent you want to buy, one of them is $2 for 200 mL and the other is $1.80 for 180 g.
There's every other kind of trickery in the shops to prevent you from being able to assess the relative value of two products, to render those price comparisons redundant (like the fact that the two products are listed, one $/100 g and the other listed $/kg).
I've just moved to Germany, and here it's almost impossible to buy the thing you want — they always seem to subpackage it into segments so that you have to use more than you want and therefore come back. I thought the marketplace was hostile in Australia sheesh.
(But, 750 megalitres is significantly more than 750 litres.)
If there is such a thing as planned obsolescence of a product, why do we not require it to be listed on the packaging and/or specs? Why not also include hefty fines for products that do not have this information listed cleary (like nutritional info), listed incorrectly, or simply fail on avg before the "POdate"?
I just read an interview with Adam Minter who wrote a new book called, "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale" which addresses this.
He was talking about putting a "durability" tag on clothing and other items which point out how long they will last. For instance, for clothes, how many wash cycles can this shirt take? How long before the materials start to breakdown? This would be on all clothing and textile items and then you can let the consumer decide if they want the less expensive shirt that lasts 10 washing cycles, or the more expensive one that lasts 50 or 100 cycles.
He also talked about the paradox of the secondary smartphone market. Apple's products are a great example. The iPhone takes a bit of work to to even change the battery, so now the life of the phone is almost exclusively tied to the battery and how long it lasts. Most people just toss it when the battery goes bad and upgrade to the newest version.
For the people who can actually change the battery, it's created an entire secondhand market for their products. One that is incredibly useful to consumers and the techs who are able to keep the phone going once the battery dies. For Apple, it's almost an affront to their practice of voiding warranties if you open the phone up and actively discouraging the whole notion you should be able to repair your own phone instead of having to upgrade it once the battery is dead.
It was a really cool interview and Adam brought up a lot of other interesting things about our "disposable" culture.
The fixed battery increase the overall durability and reduces materials over a design where there was a compartment that could be opened.
Apple does battery replacements inexpensively relative to the cost of the device, and they supply batteries to 3rd party repair shops.
They have also explicitly declared their intent to increase useful life of their devices as much as possible.
The mantra that their devices are intended to be disposable itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it leads to the exact behavior of consumers prematurely replacing devices rather than simply having the batteries replaced.
> The fixed battery increase the overall durability and reduces materials over a design where there was a compartment that could be opened.
> Apple does battery replacements in expensively relative to the cost of the device, and they supply batteries to 3rd party repair shops.
How long does such a replacement take, and why would someone need to leave their phone in the hands of a third party in the first place?
Back when most phones had replaceable batteries, it was just a matter of ordering a battery online and plopping it in. The extra materials needed for a battery door or lid are negligible (and significantly less toxic to manufacture than PCBs and electronics) compared to throwing away the phone outright.
Last time I had it done with my current phone, it was done in less than 15 minutes.
Extra materials are not negligible - at the scale of the iPhone, even 1% of additional material is vast.
In any case, is not only the extra materials that are the problem, it is that phones with a battery compartment are much more fragile, harder to waterproof, etc, and so they fail sooner anyway regardless of whether the battery is changed.
Battery compartments are a red herring. It is already easy and economical to replace an iPhone battery.
People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.
> People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.
When you spend 100% of your time in a technical field, and deal with people who are technically savvy, you think everybody is capable of "easily" replacing a battery, or knowing that it can be done relatively easy.
There are millions of people who are completely unaware that getting your battery replaced is an easy thing for someone who knows how to do it. What do most non-technical people do when their iphone battery starts dying a lot faster? They don't google, "iphone battery repair" or look for a local repair shop to do this, they take it right back to the Apple store. What do you think the Apple store employee is going to tell them? "Hey this battery is dead, you should probably just upgrade the phone."
Some electronic components, switches, plugs, relays, lamps, usually have a listed number of cycles they can withstand before failure. Back when I worked in the industry, some of these values were surprisingly low.
Another possibility is that unplanned obsolescence is part and parcel of chasing bigger margins, and the companies with the biggest margin win out organically.
>I would argue that the current economic system does not plan for maximum longevity of products.
Of course not. And you don't want that. If you want quality, you can get quality but you'll have to pay for it. Are you willing to pay $500 for a quality drill, when a cheapo $40 drill is all you need? What's wrong with that?
I would argue that the current economic system does not plan for maximum longevity of products. Rather it can be more profitable for an manufacturer for planned obsolescence or simply make products which does not last that long. As long as they do not get caught that is.