Veritasium
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2021–2024
17:30 · 26M views · Mar 26, 2021
Veritasium explores planned obsolescence, from the Phoebus lightbulb cartel to printers and phones. It explains how companies deliberately shortened product lifetimes and why products aren't better.
Commenters link it as the engaging go-to explainer on planned obsolescence and the lightbulb cartel.
15 comments from Hacker News
Veritasium has an awesome video on planned obsolescence here. [1] The problem in many cases isn't that it costs so much more to make products that last, but rather that making products that break is just way more profitable when you can effectively control the market to such a degree that you don't need to worry about some party pooper (1) coming in and making stuff that does genuinely last and (2) gaining significant marketshare. The example of the light bulb cartel that had unquality assurance, spot testing, and a formal structure of fines and penalties for any members who made too long of lasting lightbulbs is just hilariously dystopic. [1] - this video
In modern times planned obsolescence is a normal part of business. The comments for the linked video [1] are awesome because it has so many people from different areas of industry (and academia) sharing anecdotes. So cartel? Probably not. Built to fail? Almost certainly. If we view things only through the lens of profit, then MTTF (mean time to fail) is just another curve to maximize against profit. If it's too short then your reputation will suffer and you'll lose money. If it's too long, then you're just leaving money on the table. In our society the brilliant engineer is not the one who makes a thing that last for 50 years, but one that lasts for just long enough to avoid damaging your brand image, and also fails in a way that makes the consumer more incentivized to buy a new thing than try to repair their current one. The guy who came up with the idea of slowing old iPhones "to save battery life" is who the bonus+promotion is going to. One of the biggest problems that has to be understood is that there is every incentive for money-driven governments to actively support planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence drives factors that we believe are indicators of a strong economy, like GDP. If people were able to stop endlessly buying the same things over and over, the "economy" would take an absolutely massive hit. And with it there would also be declines in employment, tax revenue, and everything else. This is one of the many examples where the socially detrimental relation
I don't think you understand the extent of what's going on. It's not that people are trying to make hardware last forever. It's that these devices are being deliberately designed to break down in a couple years. There are actual design decisions to force consumer behavior into purchasing new things every couple of years. This doesn't just apply to things that follow moores law. Almost every product in existence nowadays is literally designed to break earlier then they usually do. Companies in certain cases actually spend more money creating a design that ensures that a product will break early so that consumers will buy a new thing within some years. This includes cars, computers, phones, microwaves, lightbulbs. Etc. Your personal need to buy a new car, new phone and new clothes is the result of market manipulation over the last 10 decades or so... morphing our culture from one where we kept tools around for years into one where we need to buy new things all the time. It was not like this at least 1 or 2 generations ago. The result of this endless buying behavior is good for business and the economy but it has devastating effects on the environment and our resources. Worth watching if you have 15 minutes: this video The actual story of how companies colluded to make lightbulbs not last as long.
This is a very good start. If they did the same for screens, I wouldn't be surprised if the phone sales dropped to half or even less. There is no way companies like Apple and Samsung will be OK with this. I expect big pushback from them. If these steps go through, it will be interesting to see what other planned obsolescence [1] methods will these companies go for. The one big tool Apple has is the full control of the software ecosystem. They can simply make newer apps unavailable for old phones for example. That will need to be tackled at some point. [1] Veritasium video on planned obsolescence which is interesting: this video
This is called planned obsolescence, and it's not just electronics. Practically every product nowadays are designed with a death date to perpetuate a repeating buying cycle from consumers. It's very real. To learn more here's an interesting short video about it: this video