Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Bigram03 t1_ja0hhg8 wrote

Reply to comment by imakenosensetopeople in A platform for products with no planned obsolescence by shanoshamanizum

Some printers are set to disable themselves after a certain number of pages, also ink cartridges will show no ink even though they still have plenty. Apple also got busted a few years back for slowing device performance of older units to get people to but new ones.

Manufacturers have also intentionally designed products with failure points in household items... there is a youtube channel that disassembles electronics and points these out. I'll have to go dig it up.

7

imakenosensetopeople t1_ja0x0ud wrote

Printers are actually the cartridges themselves having shitty timeouts. The printer itself isn’t prematurely “choosing” to not function, it’s the supplier of the consumable consciously choosing to restrict the life of the consumable. I’d give a half point for planned obsolescence of a consumable because it’s shitty behavior but it’s also a consumable.

Apple getting “busted” was actually an intentional move they were doing to protect the battery life of their devices in the field as they aged. It’s arguable they should have let the consumer decide whether to have their battery drain faster or phone perform worse, but it wasn’t a measure to drive sales of new devices. If anything it probably drove more people to Android (who has an even worse track record for maintaining software on their older devices).

4