Decimator714 t1_ish6z3c wrote on October 15, 2022 at 11:27 PM

Reply to comment by BoilerButtSlut in Dishwasher keeps going by Atlantic76

Eeeh okay yes but I have a counter.

Apple recently has ensured their products can remain obselete when they fail, by ensuring chip manufacturers do not sell their chips to consumers for hardware level motherboard repair.

Now you might be thinking, "well apple made the chip they can do what they want with it". That's not the case. They literally take a consumer purchasable chip, tell the manufacturer to change the pinout, to make it proprietary so you can't replace the voltage regulator or whatever that is a known failure point of the computer.

If that is not planned obselecense, then we clearly are taking the definition of the words in a completely different way. No, they didn't plan on changing the pinout to directly cause their laptops to fail, but they clearly made an anti consumer decision to incentivise throwing your old computer away and getting a new one. Thus, planned obselecense. The executives know exactly what they're doing when they make this decision. They know it will result in more profit for the company.

In my opinion the trend of anti repair is equivalent to planned obselecense. The end goal is the same. Get the consumer to "just buy a new one".

BoilerButtSlut t1_ity878l wrote on October 27, 2022 at 4:25 AM

Apple does this because they want total control over their ecosystem and that includes control over the hardware. There's a variety of business reasons for this (some reasonable, some asinine), but that's what it is. One reason for this policy is because they are so highly desirable around the world and they are expensive. People will literally buy broken phones, shoddily repair them, and then sell them as new in some bumfuck country somewhere else, and when it stops working they want apple to fix it.

Apple is far from the only company doing this with their products, though most other companies are doing it for other reasons.

And no that is not planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence (at least in the textbook definition) is designing something to fail sooner or to not function after some period of time. Unless I'm missing something, Apple isn't doing that. They just aren't supporting repair outside of their ecosystem.

The whole concept of causing something to fail quicker in some vain hope that consumers will go back to you to get their next version never made sense to me: if I have an appliance or phone that breaks within a few months, the very last thing I'm going to do is go back to the same manufacturer for a new one. It's just a guaranteed way to drive people to your competitors. The only time it could even work is if you have a total monopoly on that product.

>but they clearly made an anti consumer decision to incentivise throwing your old computer away and getting a new one. Thus, planned obselecense.

Anti-consumer is not the same thing. Those are two totally different concepts. I completely agree that Apple is awful to its customers, but their customers keep coming back so they get away with it. Walmart isn't much different in that regard. But they aren't designing their stuff to fail quickly.

I mean, if they wanted to do planned obsolescence, why even bother with all of this? They could literally just make the phone self destruct at two years on the dot and people would still come around to buy more.