Recent comments in /f/BuyItForLife

BoilerButtSlut t1_jds3m37 wrote

Reply to comment by Patient_Fox_6594 in My Aunt’s GE Spacemaker Coffeemaker from 1988, used nearly everyday since by ME5SENGER_24

Listen to this person, because this is exactly right.

Consumers *say* they want long-lasting and durable, but as soon as it's time to open their wallet, they want more features/gimmicks for the price or better aesthetics, or lower price, etc.

There's decades of sales/marketing data that shows this.

This is all consumer-driven. There are high quality versions of everything, and they are consistently low sales, because that market is only like 1% of the population.

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intermediatetransit t1_jds2zj6 wrote

Reply to comment by Doughymidget in My Aunt’s GE Spacemaker Coffeemaker from 1988, used nearly everyday since by ME5SENGER_24

I would say so, yes. I mean I hate MacBooks personally and the way they no longer support most pc standards, but I have no problems coming up with justifications for their choices beyond ”planned obsolence”.

For instance if the memory is all soldered on there is a lot less to test for, i.e. the device only has a small set of memory sizes and maintaining quality and consistency with those is easier. You also no longer have to provide support for your customers shoving shoddy memory into the device and contacting support when it doesn’t work properly.

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siler7 t1_jds26vj wrote

Reply to comment by Occhrome in My Aunt’s GE Spacemaker Coffeemaker from 1988, used nearly everyday since by ME5SENGER_24

This happens a lot with previously respected brands. By making high-quality products for a long time, they acquire a reputation for durability. Then the founder retires or sells the brand, and it's taken over by wolves. They start making things that look the same but use much lower-quality (read: cost) components. They make a lot of money off of people's habits, as the people who were loyal to the brand tend to take a long time to change their views and buying habits.

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BoilerButtSlut t1_jds1xle wrote

Reply to comment by Doughymidget in My Aunt’s GE Spacemaker Coffeemaker from 1988, used nearly everyday since by ME5SENGER_24

A few things:

  • The "lightbulb" cartel was to ensure uniformity over consumer bulbs. 1000 hours was chosen as the best compromise between lifetime and brightness. There were still 10k bulbs made and sold by members of the "cartel". You could still buy long-lasting stuff. Also and as an aside, it's always funny to me that the only proof anyone can offer of planned obsolescence is an industry cartel that hasn't existed since before WW2. Literally nothing else.

  • Apple solders the ram directly to the board because it's cheaper. Connectors are expensive. We do the same at my company. It probably saves several dollars per connector. And well, Apple customers just don't enough about it to buy something else that's upgradeable. I know that's not the satisfying answer but that's certainly it: consumers don't care enough to buy upgradeable models from elsewhere.

  • As also mentioned elsewhere, I doubt they can get the same thinness with the RAM slots put in. Thinness seems to be what their consumers want, so they are naturally going to focus on that.

>Also, companies that restrict your ability to repair a product is planned obsolescence.

The idea behind that isn't to make it fail faster or sell more. The purpose behind it is because counterfeiting is a huge problem, especially for Apple. There's literally an entire shadow industry that buys broken iphones, puts generic parts in them to make them work again, then resell them, and then when those break because they aren't repaired properly, the people who bought them take them to Apple for repair, which costs them money.

This isn't just for computers: tractors, industrial equipment, aircraft parts, etc are very easy to forge and have some factory somewhere in China make a substandard version for it for less than half the cost. Fake aircraft parts were implicated in some plane crashes in the 90s until regulators clamped down on it.

I'm sure there's a revenue component to the service subscription aspect as well, but again, people aren't willing to buy other stuff over it, so clearly it's not important enough to buyers to go elsewhere.

Again, not a satisfying answer, but that's a large component of it.

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