Logan, I respect your opinion but using a special case (DVD player) of
manufactured goods to prove your argument does not mean it applies to
other manufactured goods. The current DVD player situation is also an
example of market dumping.

Consumer electronics are considered to be "throw away"
electronics....and the continuing problems with their disposal is just
one of the symptoms of a larger problem with that industry segment.
Let's try saddling the manufacturers with the true cost to society and
see what the true price becomes.

You are right that "throw away" electronics are optimized for low cost
of manufacture...and those savings are not passed on to the consumer.
It is like the low cost of labor that goes into the product....it is
used to maximize profit margin....while placing the burden on society.
The savings that are passed on to the consumer are usually realized by
volume...the more you make the cheaper they get....when a number of
companies compete for your dollar.

One telling symptom is when you look at those who get in financial
trouble by overextending their credit, one of the common areas where
they have overspent is in consumer electronics.

TMT


Logan Shaw wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
In my opinon...no.

I intentionally try to have older appliances, vehicles, machines to
lower repair costs and keep overall ownership cost to a minimum.

Your thoughts?

I don't think planned obsolescence is a good thing or a bad thing,
because in most cases it's fictional. Appliances and other items
you buy aren't designed to fail. They are designed to be cheap to
manufacture.

The article you mentioned quoted a repairman saying that lots of
new devices are made with circuit boards (rather than discrete
components). There's a reason for that. Circuits built with
circuit boards and integrated circuits cost much, much less to
produce than ones made of discrete components. Probably half
as much, maybe even less than that.

I'm not sure people understand how streamlined and optimized modern
manufacturing techniques are. The reason we get all these appliances
and electronics items for so cheap is the way they are made. To me,
it is truly remarkable that you can go to the store and buy a DVD
player for $30. It might only last 2 or 3 years, but 10 years ago,
it would have cost $10,000 to build an equivalent machine (just
because of the processing power).

So the question, to me, is this: do you want to buy a new item
for $100 and have it last 5 or 10 years, or do you want to spend
$200 for it and have it last 10 or 20? My answer would be that
I'd rather have the item that costs half as much and lasts half
as long. Why? Because I can take the $100 I saved and put it
in the bank. In 5 or 10 years when the item breaks, I can take
the $100 out of the bank, and it will have grown with interest
that has outpaced inflation, so it will be worth more than $100
in inflation-adjusted dollars, and at that time, the price of the
device may have gone down to less than $100 in inflation-adjusted
dollars, and it will certainly be more up to date (more energy
efficient, better support for new media formats, smaller, whatever).

To put it a slightly different way, for that $30 DVD player, it
costs something like $10 labor and $10 materials to put that thing
together in the first place (because there are packaging and shipping
costs and profit). So how efficient is it to spend $30 labor fixing
it? It isn't efficient. Repairing mass-produced items isn't
efficient because one person working on one item and doing everything
by hand simply doesn't have the same economies of scale that a
highly-optimized manufacturing environment has.

- Logan