In article ,
Jeff Liebermann writes:

The purpose of the warranty has changed over the years. It was
previous a method of dealing with occasional workmanship errors and
oversights. It's now the standard method of dealing with shoddy
construction, design defects, misuse, and clueless customers. Many
products have such a short lifetime, that there's no incentive to fix
production line problems, especially when the next THREE generations
of replacement products are already somewhere in the design cycle. By
the time the complaints come back from the field, the product is
already long obsolete.

It's still possible to learn from problems in the field and feed
that into design or purchasing. For example, brand-X caps don't
last as long as brand-Y, or all brands of caps die too early - maybe
we are running them too hot.


Yeah, I guess, whatever all that means. Reading between your lines,
I'll guess you're trying to rationalize the current trend in
intentional decreases in product life, durability, and usability. I
would be interested to hear how such things improve the quality of
life, the environment, and the reputation of the vendor.

If we assume that intentionally targeting the product life at slightly
over the warranty period is undesirable, that begs the question "What
can we do about it"? I have some answers, but they all reek of
government intervention and meddling. The best that I can offer is to
give the manufacturers and vendors a counter incentive to NOT make
throw away products. That will raise costs, but since the rate the
consumer buys new gizmos will be correspondingly reduced, the overall
cost to the consumers will be about the same. Creating a fashion
where used products are considered desirable might also be useful. At
this time, shinny new products are some kind of status symbol. If
that could be replace with "used is beautiful" or something similar,
there might be an incentive for manufacturers to extend the life of
their products.

It would be interesting to get lifetime data on consumer electronics.

Does anybody like Consumer Reports collect and publish it?


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These are my opinions. I hate spam.