Comment by fwipsy
10 hours ago
> Planned obsolescence
How is this supposed to work exactly? The company builds a product that fails quickly, so that people will buy another one? I'm highly skeptical that this works on consumers. Almost nobody will buy the same brand after the first one craps out. And I'm certain that it doesn't work on companies who will track failure rates for the product across a large fleet.
Cheap products exist because of a race to the bottom. Some consumers care a lot about quality, but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students. These companies make both high- and low-end devices, cutting corners as necessary to meet that price point while still competing on quality and features. They're not building products worse on purpose, because that doesn't work in a competitive marketplace.
Framework benefits from the same halo effect as Apple: They only make high-end devices, and so they don't get judged for the cheap crap they make. It doesn't mean either company's products are actually better than mainstream offerings at the same price point.
Even if I'm wrong, and planned obsolescence is actually very lucrative: how long do you think Framework's "core values" will hold up against market incentives? Fortunately, we don't need to rely on that. Manufacturers make good products because consumers pay for them; that applies to Apple and Framework, but also high-end laptops from many other manufacturers. If they weren't more reliable and more repairable than the low-end laptops, then IT departments would just buy the consumer devices costing 5x less.
- Why our tech fails us: Learning from century-old light bulb that never goes out - https://interestingengineering.com/culture/planned-obsolesce...
> ... but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students.
Sure. Why do you think such a market exists? Compare it with the Automobile industry, where really cheap cars (comparable to the $150 laptop market segment) don't really exist. Instead we have a flourishing second-hand market - a whole new industry around selling used cars. Even if a cheaper, lower quality car were to exist, people would still buy a good-quality, used car over a cheaper, lower quality one. Why? Repairability. Why would I buy a cheaper low quality car, if I can buy a good quality car that I can repair as needed, for the same price or even lower. A market for cheaper, new laptops exist because today you fear buying an older computer that is no longer repairable or upgradeable. (And note that it isn't as if the old products wouldn't make money - people will still need to buy the parts for it. The profits would be lesser than selling whole devices though). It is because electronics have somehow escaped the purview of consumer rights and repairability that even the Automobile industry (and others) have started including more and more electronics in them to make their products less repairable.
Your link doesn't really work right, but note that light bulbs are not at all planned obsolescence. It's been known for a long time that making the filament temperature of an incandescent bulb hotter makes it brighter, more efficient, and whiter, but also burn out faster, due to the tungsten sublimating. Anybody can make a super-long-lasting bulb that is really dim, inefficient, and dull just by making the filament temperature lower. Nobody will ever buy one to actually light their home, because it sucks compared to the competition, but it can run for a crazy long time in a museum or something. And the useless museum bulb will cause a bazillion news and blog articles to be written in support of a mostly-false narrative that we don't make things to last.