People often claim that consumer products have been declining in quality over the decades. Some people even claim that such a decline is inevitable under market forces. I’ve seen this discussed a lot especially for laptops, where supposedly desirable qualities like durability and repairability have declined. I’ll focus on these two qualities in particular below.[1]
In contrast to the observation above, I learned the following argument from one of David Friedman’s books: if people are willing to buy a crappy product for $x, then they should be willing to pay $10x on the same product that lasts 10 times longer (because in both cases, the amortized cost is the same). So as long as the more durable product does not cost 10 times more to manufacture, the company’s revenue is higher if they sell the more durable product.
From this, I conclude that one potential thing that could be going on is that the reason products are crappy is that consumers prefer the crappy product; they aren’t willing to pay 10 times more for a 10 times more durable product. This might happen because of information asymmetry reasons (it’s easier to tell which of two products are immediately better, than to tell which of two products will last much longer) or maybe because consumers prefer the small advancements they get if they keep buying new products, instead of staying with one product for a long time. Or maybe due to high temporal discounting and inability to save money, consumers prefer cheaper things.
I am still pretty confused about all of this, because I personally do prefer more durable/repairable products and would be willing to pay more for them. But perhaps my preferences are pretty unusual.
I’m focusing on durability and repairability because these seem more straightforward as they don’t require answering questions about how much more one would pay in a given instant for a higher quality. For example, maybe kitchen shears are declining in how well they cut things but maybe that’s okay because people just like cheaper shears that cut less well. Whereas if kitchen shears decline in durability, it doesn’t matter how much money people would pay for shears to cut better; for any given preference, I can check whether someone is willing to pay 10 times more for something that lasts 10 times longer.
The “pay 10x for something that lasts 10x as long” reasoning only works when the item is expected to have the same value year over year.
Some things are made of parts that last a long time, with technologies that aren’t changing rapidly, and stay roughly as effective 10 or even 50 years after they’re made. Consider a teapot, a dining room table, a simple electric heater, bicycles, many firearms. Antique store stuff. Higher-tech instances include good keyboards, good optical mice, probably good speakers, arguably good audio amps. Also some kitchen gadgets—most dishes and silverware, apple peelers, grain mills, grinders, simple food dehydrators, popcorn poppers, good knives.
Other things are made of parts that degrade over time, and/or with technologies that are still changing rapidly because we’re not there yet on their evolution toward a generally accepted standard of good-enough. Consider wall-to-wall carpeting, almost all upholstered furniture, bicycle and car tyres, car seats, smoke detectors, underwear, TVs, gaming PCs, phones.
Vintage fashion looks superficially like an exception to this principle, but I’m pretty sure there’s a huge survivorship bias component there. Some old clothes got lucky and happened to be comprised of time-friendly materials, but many weren’t—even as recently as my own childhood, polyesters and nylons and memory foams were by and large utterly horrible textures. Most “vintage” aged items with elastic are worse than useless, as the rubber perishes over time.
For phones and computers in particular, the problem with designing for indefinite repairability is twofold: First, building for modularity has its costs and tradeoffs. User-serviceable interfaces are heavier, bulkier, less efficient. Second, you can’t build modularity to specs that haven’t been written yet. You can’t future-proof a motherboard by testing it for compatibility with CPU and RAM form factors that haven’t even started development when you’re trying to build for them.
If you imagine trying to build a computer that can be easily adapted for compatibility with every component that might be introduced in the next 10 years, you also introduce a subtler form of waste by overbuilding. There are perhaps half a dozen different (and mostly mutually exclusive ish) ways that technology could go, each of which requires different support… and each of which doesn’t require support for certain features which others might. By designing electronics just-in-time, we avoid the costs of building for compatibility that we would never actually use.
I agree with your sentiment that wringing more life out of our devices is a noble goal, but in practice it’s a bit less obvious than I’m hearing you describe it as.
In at least one area, namely cars, durability relative to actual usage has improved a lot over the past 50 years or so. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity “According to the New York Times, in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km), but due to manufacturing improvements in the 2000s, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, the typical car lasts closer to 200,000 miles (320,000 km).”
The area where I’m most aware of claims of reduced durability is home appliances e.g. https://ryanfinlay.medium.com/they-used-to-last-50-years-c3383ff28a8e but I think there are a bunch of factors here that make it a little tricky given (a) low cost: there’s a much wider selection of home appliances, and the low end that are quite cheap still last several years, which is obviously less than the high end and the older great devices, but probably good enough and a great comparison to costs. Low-end refrigerators for instance cost only a bit more than phones, which is remarkable considering the size differences! (b) energy use as a major component of cost over the long term: for appliances like refrigerators, the electricity use becomes a major cost component if the appliance lasts too long, so that having a long-lasting refrigerator that doesn’t benefit from energy efficiency improvements may ultimately cost more.
In the realm of electronics, quality improvements in hardware even over the last 5-10 years have been very impressive; for instance, batteries have gotten better, design/form factors have gotten better. However, repairability in particular has gotten worse but this seems tied to the trend toward miniaturization and portability. If people anyway plan to replace their devices every few years, then portability probably wins over repairability.
(1/2) I doubt it’s entirely fair to blame Apple for this; they may not have even been the first manufacturer to use a non-removable battery pack. They were certainly the first biggest company to make that switch, but plenty of others did the same, and in some cases way too quickly for it to have been a case of them “copying” Apple. They simply came to the same conclusion: Removable batteries, like physical keyboards, hurt sales more than they helped. So, out they went.
Because, the frustration of it is that device manufacturers genuinely have really “good” reasons why batteries are no longer removable. Actually, at least two good reasons: Water-resistance and miniaturization.
Today’s phones are surprisingly watertight, to the point where many can survive a brief dunk with no immediate ill effects. (Though I personally suspect that water infiltration is a trigger for subsequent battery swelling.) My Galaxy Note8 once survived a complete submersion lasting 2-3 seconds. Don’t try that with your Nokia 3310!
FeRD—Sep 21, 2023
(2/2) All battery-powered devices are also continually getting smaller and smaller. (Or, failing that, they’re packing more and more stuff into roughly the same amount of space.) And the fact is, removable batteries require MUCH more space than non-removable.
If a battery is removable, it has to have an outer, protective case of its own due to the dangerous chemicals inside. The phone would then also have to have mechanisms to align and secure the battery, a latch and release mechanism, and electrical contacts between what are now (effectively) two completely separate devices. That all takes up space.
A removable battery makes a device significantly larger (in particular, thicker), or else it has half the capacity of the non-removable design. Either way, 999 out of 1000 consumers will choose the smaller, thinner, lighter fixed-battery device with twice the runtime between charges, over a bigger, thicker, doesn’t-last-as-long alternative with a removable battery.
FeRD—Sep 21, 2023
Actually, now that I think about it there’s a third reason that’s even more damning:
Removable batteries were never about extending device lifetime.
Manufacturers will tell you, and they can provide reams of consumer data to back it up: The percentage of consumers who keep a device long enough to wear out the first battery is TINY. Laughably tiny. The overwhelming majority of mobile-device owners want to replace their device with a newer, faster one every 2 years or less — long before the battery is even starting to degrade. (After all, until very recently the technology was advancing so quickly, a 2-year-old phone was nigh-unusable, given its limitations compared to newer models.)
Removable batteries were always intended for power-users who needed more runtime than they could get from a single battery. They’d own two+, and swap them out as needed (charging externally). In the end, rapid charging, larger capacities, and improved power-management software provided a better solution to that problem.
Perhaps there’s enough uncertainty in how durable products are that consumers’ purchase decisions don’t really depend on perceived durability, and so companies don’t focus on it? I like durable products but can’t be so confident in a product’s durability before trying it unless there’s a very strong brand or I know something verifiable about how the product is constructed.
Information asymmetry is a really big thing here. It’s not possible for companies to hide the price (although goodness knows, they try as hard as they can). It’s trivial for companies to hide the product quality.
It seems a constant (or perhaps accelerating) that people complain about everything going downhill, and being worse than the past. This feels like just another standard example of OBVIOUS improvements on lots of dimensions (cost, speed, usability, etc.) and picking one dimension to compare so there’s something to complain about.
Another consideration is how much money someone has to hand. If someone only make $1,000 a month, they may choice $25 shoes that will last a year over $100 shoes that will last 5 years. Essentially, it is the complimentary idea of economy of scale.
People often claim that consumer products have been declining in quality over the decades. Some people even claim that such a decline is inevitable under market forces. I’ve seen this discussed a lot especially for laptops, where supposedly desirable qualities like durability and repairability have declined. I’ll focus on these two qualities in particular below.[1]
In contrast to the observation above, I learned the following argument from one of David Friedman’s books: if people are willing to buy a crappy product for $x, then they should be willing to pay $10x on the same product that lasts 10 times longer (because in both cases, the amortized cost is the same). So as long as the more durable product does not cost 10 times more to manufacture, the company’s revenue is higher if they sell the more durable product.
From this, I conclude that one potential thing that could be going on is that the reason products are crappy is that consumers prefer the crappy product; they aren’t willing to pay 10 times more for a 10 times more durable product. This might happen because of information asymmetry reasons (it’s easier to tell which of two products are immediately better, than to tell which of two products will last much longer) or maybe because consumers prefer the small advancements they get if they keep buying new products, instead of staying with one product for a long time. Or maybe due to high temporal discounting and inability to save money, consumers prefer cheaper things.
I am still pretty confused about all of this, because I personally do prefer more durable/repairable products and would be willing to pay more for them. But perhaps my preferences are pretty unusual.
I’m focusing on durability and repairability because these seem more straightforward as they don’t require answering questions about how much more one would pay in a given instant for a higher quality. For example, maybe kitchen shears are declining in how well they cut things but maybe that’s okay because people just like cheaper shears that cut less well. Whereas if kitchen shears decline in durability, it doesn’t matter how much money people would pay for shears to cut better; for any given preference, I can check whether someone is willing to pay 10 times more for something that lasts 10 times longer.
The “pay 10x for something that lasts 10x as long” reasoning only works when the item is expected to have the same value year over year.
Some things are made of parts that last a long time, with technologies that aren’t changing rapidly, and stay roughly as effective 10 or even 50 years after they’re made. Consider a teapot, a dining room table, a simple electric heater, bicycles, many firearms. Antique store stuff. Higher-tech instances include good keyboards, good optical mice, probably good speakers, arguably good audio amps. Also some kitchen gadgets—most dishes and silverware, apple peelers, grain mills, grinders, simple food dehydrators, popcorn poppers, good knives.
Other things are made of parts that degrade over time, and/or with technologies that are still changing rapidly because we’re not there yet on their evolution toward a generally accepted standard of good-enough. Consider wall-to-wall carpeting, almost all upholstered furniture, bicycle and car tyres, car seats, smoke detectors, underwear, TVs, gaming PCs, phones.
Vintage fashion looks superficially like an exception to this principle, but I’m pretty sure there’s a huge survivorship bias component there. Some old clothes got lucky and happened to be comprised of time-friendly materials, but many weren’t—even as recently as my own childhood, polyesters and nylons and memory foams were by and large utterly horrible textures. Most “vintage” aged items with elastic are worse than useless, as the rubber perishes over time.
For phones and computers in particular, the problem with designing for indefinite repairability is twofold: First, building for modularity has its costs and tradeoffs. User-serviceable interfaces are heavier, bulkier, less efficient. Second, you can’t build modularity to specs that haven’t been written yet. You can’t future-proof a motherboard by testing it for compatibility with CPU and RAM form factors that haven’t even started development when you’re trying to build for them.
If you imagine trying to build a computer that can be easily adapted for compatibility with every component that might be introduced in the next 10 years, you also introduce a subtler form of waste by overbuilding. There are perhaps half a dozen different (and mostly mutually exclusive ish) ways that technology could go, each of which requires different support… and each of which doesn’t require support for certain features which others might. By designing electronics just-in-time, we avoid the costs of building for compatibility that we would never actually use.
I agree with your sentiment that wringing more life out of our devices is a noble goal, but in practice it’s a bit less obvious than I’m hearing you describe it as.
A few thoughts:
In at least one area, namely cars, durability relative to actual usage has improved a lot over the past 50 years or so. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity “According to the New York Times, in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km), but due to manufacturing improvements in the 2000s, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, the typical car lasts closer to 200,000 miles (320,000 km).”
The area where I’m most aware of claims of reduced durability is home appliances e.g. https://ryanfinlay.medium.com/they-used-to-last-50-years-c3383ff28a8e but I think there are a bunch of factors here that make it a little tricky given (a) low cost: there’s a much wider selection of home appliances, and the low end that are quite cheap still last several years, which is obviously less than the high end and the older great devices, but probably good enough and a great comparison to costs. Low-end refrigerators for instance cost only a bit more than phones, which is remarkable considering the size differences! (b) energy use as a major component of cost over the long term: for appliances like refrigerators, the electricity use becomes a major cost component if the appliance lasts too long, so that having a long-lasting refrigerator that doesn’t benefit from energy efficiency improvements may ultimately cost more.
In the realm of electronics, quality improvements in hardware even over the last 5-10 years have been very impressive; for instance, batteries have gotten better, design/form factors have gotten better. However, repairability in particular has gotten worse but this seems tied to the trend toward miniaturization and portability. If people anyway plan to replace their devices every few years, then portability probably wins over repairability.
Regarding the topic of batteries getting better while also being harder to remove/replace, I found these interesting comments by FeRD (https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_battery?permalink=comment-911590#comment-911590 + the next two comments) that I quote in full below:
Perhaps there’s enough uncertainty in how durable products are that consumers’ purchase decisions don’t really depend on perceived durability, and so companies don’t focus on it? I like durable products but can’t be so confident in a product’s durability before trying it unless there’s a very strong brand or I know something verifiable about how the product is constructed.
Information asymmetry is a really big thing here. It’s not possible for companies to hide the price (although goodness knows, they try as hard as they can). It’s trivial for companies to hide the product quality.
It seems a constant (or perhaps accelerating) that people complain about everything going downhill, and being worse than the past. This feels like just another standard example of OBVIOUS improvements on lots of dimensions (cost, speed, usability, etc.) and picking one dimension to compare so there’s something to complain about.
Another consideration is how much money someone has to hand. If someone only make $1,000 a month, they may choice $25 shoes that will last a year over $100 shoes that will last 5 years. Essentially, it is the complimentary idea of economy of scale.
It’s expensive to be poor.