Ignoramus16071 wrote:

On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:04:59 GMT, James Sweet
wrote:
Ignoramus16071 wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:41:59 GMT, James Sweet
wrote:

Ignoramus16071 wrote:

TO the skeptics of the "planned obsolescence" and "designed to fail"
theory, I have a simple suggestion.

Take household machines from trash and take them apart. Look for
signs of above mentioned behaviours -- and you will find plenty. Such
as parts that are obviously designed to fail.


i


Designed to fail, or designed to be cheap? When you see these "designed
to fail" parts, does it often appear that they could be made to last
much better for the same cost?


Well, let me give you one example. We had a electric tea kettle. It
broke the hinge on the lid. Postmortem indicated that it broke because
it lacked material around the hinge. At the cost of extra 1-2 cents,
they could have a few mm more plastic around the hinges so that they
hold up better.

The extra cost is minuscule.

Another example, I received a KMart wallet as a gift and it is
unusable -- the credit card pockets are too tight and it is generally
too tight for money also(I like to carry a few hundred $$ in cash etc,
which does not affect credit card pockets). Again, at the cost of
perhaps 10 cents per wallet, it could have been made into a better
wallet.

If anyone has suggestions for a really good three section leather
wallet, I will appreciate.

i

There's the key, an extra few cents. 2 cents times 2 million kettles and
you're talking 40 grand, that's not minuscule, even for a big company.

10 cents is even more significant, when you're manufacturing millions of
things, pennies *do* matter. You can get something that cost an extra 10
cents to make, but it will cost you an extra 10 bucks to buy and the
average consumer not knowing the difference will buy the cheaper one.

It's all about offering the lowest price and making the most profit per
sale, they don't intentionally try to make it break, they just don't
care if it does so long as it lasts through the warranty.

If they know what happens with their product -- and they do -- then it
IS intentional.

If I set a fire on my kitchen floor, hoping to cook a pig that would
not fit in a stove, knowing that my house would burn down, and the
house burns down, the result is intentional -- even though the fire
was started to cook a pig. Same here -- if they try to save 2 cents
and make products that they KNOW do not perform their intended
purpose, then making substandard products is intentional on their
part.

That's why I do not patronize cutthroat retailers such as Walmart.
Because they are looking to screw ME by selling products that do not
perform their intended purpose (and by forcing manufacturers to make
such via abusive methods). I do not like such capitalists and to not
want to give them any of my business. I would rather pay 3x more to
businesses such as McMaster-Carr, or Bosch, etc, to get a product that
actually works.

My experience with Harbor Freight has been spotty, but most of the
products that I bought from them, do work as advertised.

i

I just recently bought a hand-held spothight with a 6V valve-regulated
lead-acid battery. (bought at Lidl in the UK.) It is Osram brand but who
knows who actually designed or made it. Out of curiosity I opened it up
and measured the voltage as it was charging the battery. The 6V (3 cell)
battery gets charged to about 8.5V with the supplied charger so that would
kill the battery pretty quickly. The proper charging voltage is even
marked clearly on the Chinese-made battery. The charger is basically just
a resistor and an unregulated power supply. I know that say a LM317 would
be too expensive for these guys but there would surely be a cheaper circuit
e.g. with a zener diode and a transistor that could clamp the charging
voltage to a sensible limit, for 10c or less. In my own case, I will
charge it with a regulated power supply instead, but it makes me sad to
think that the rest of these things will be destroyed quite soon by
overcharging, and since the battery is not easily removable from the casing
of the torch, I guess that approximately none of them will be recycled when
they stop working. Even if they were "recycled", I have heard some bad
things about the way lead-acid battery recycling is done these days, so it
would be much better if someone had at least been able to use it for a few
years first.

That is one good thing about lithium batteries, the appliance manufacturers
are so ****-scared of abusing the batteries, causing a fire and getting
sued that they usually do put a half-decent charger in the products, even
if that does cost them the extra 10c.

Chris