You should look up the phrase “planned obsolescence”. It’s a concept taught in many engineering schools. Apple employs it in it’s products. The basic idea is similar to your thoughts under “Greater Global Wealth”: the machine is designed to have a lifetime that is significantly shorter than what is possible, specifically to get users to keep buying a machine. This is essentially subscription-izing products; subscriptions are, especially today in the start up world, generally a better business model than selling one product one time (or even a couple times).
With phones, this makes perfect sense, given the pace of advancements in the phones, generation after generation.
While you would think that a poor person would optimize for durability, often durability is more expensive, meaning that the poor person’s only real choice is a lower-quality product that does not last as long.
“Better materials science: Globally, materials science has improved. Hence, at the local level, manufacturers can get away with making worse materials.” This doesn’t really follow to me. There are many reasons a manufacturer would use worse materials than the global “best materials”, including lower costs. It seems to me that your idea of ‘greater global implies worse local’ can be equally explained as a phenomenon of capitalism, where the need to make an acceptable product as cheaply as possible does not often align with making the best product at whatever the cost.
Planned obsolescence alone doesn’t explain the change over time of this phenomenon. It’s a static explanation, one which applies equally well to every era, unless something more is said. So the question becomes, Why are manufacturers planning for sooner obsolescence now than they did in the past?
Likewise, “worse materials cost less” is always true. It’s a static fact, so it can’t explain the observed dynamic phenomenon by itself. Or, at least, you need to add some additional data, like, “materials are available now that are worse than what used to be available”. That might explain something. It would be another example of things being globally better in a perverse sense (more options = better).
Planned obsolescence is technically difficult: it’s relatively easy to design and use a material which lasts indefinitely, but harder to design a machine around materials that last a specified period and then fail. You need to tread the tight-rope between “too shitty to buy” and “too high quality to require frequent replacement.”
Some say that it failure comes with miniaturization too. Those SMD capacitors fail a lot easier in electronics, so while the microwave might still work, the display will fail pretty quickly.
the machine is designed to have a lifetime that is significantly shorter than what is possible, specifically to get users to keep buying a machine.
That’s not what “planned obsolescence” means. Planned obsolescence means “if this machine is going to fail in X years anyway (because of one or more critical parts, or because technical progress means that replacing it in that timeframe makes more sense anyway), it makes no sense to design it to be longer-lived than that. So let’s improve efficiency and cut costs by redesigning everything in it under the assumption that we’re allowed to fail in X years, and any resources spent in extra lifetime are just wasted”. What maximum lifetime is theoretically possible for any given component has very little to do with what’s most efficient.
One can certainly criticize this sort of ‘planned obsolescence’ too, for instance by countering that modularity, repairability and lack of any single point of failure should be stressed instead. But let’s at least get our facts straight here.
Arguing about definitions is, as we all know, always fruitful, so let’s consult some sources. We could try a dictionary. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary:
planned obsolescencen. the practice or policy of curtailing the life of manufactured products (as by using non-durable materials, frequently changing design, terminating the supply of spare parts, etc.), so as to induce consumers to replace them regularly.
which is exactly what denimalpaca said. Or, veering from the elite ivory towers of academe to The People as our source of authority, here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page on planned obsolescence:
Planned obsolescence [...] is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete (that is, unfashionable or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. The rationale behind the strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as “shortening the replacement cycle”).
(You are welcome to check that the ellipsis doesn’t hide anything that changes the meaning.) This, again, is exactly what denimalpaca said.
Or we could look at the first known use of the phrase, in a pamphlet from 1932 called “Ending the Depression through planned obsolescence”. This is a bit different from either denimalpaca’s usage or yours but seems distinctly nearer to his:
I would have the Government assign a lease of life [...] to all products of manufacture, mining and agriculture, when they are first created, and they would be sold and used within the term of their existence definitely known by the consumer. After the allotted time had expired, these things would be legally “dead” and would be controlled by the duly appointed governmental agency and destroyed if there is widespread unemployment.
If that Wikipedia article is to be believed, the phrase first became popular after a talk by Brooks Stevens, who defined it to mean
Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.
which is clearly much more denimalpaca’s sense than yours.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not denying that what you describe also happens and is important. But it looks to me as if denimalpaca’s account of what “planned obsolescence” denotes is more accurate than yours.
You should look up the phrase “planned obsolescence”. It’s a concept taught in many engineering schools. Apple employs it in it’s products. The basic idea is similar to your thoughts under “Greater Global Wealth”: the machine is designed to have a lifetime that is significantly shorter than what is possible, specifically to get users to keep buying a machine. This is essentially subscription-izing products; subscriptions are, especially today in the start up world, generally a better business model than selling one product one time (or even a couple times).
With phones, this makes perfect sense, given the pace of advancements in the phones, generation after generation.
While you would think that a poor person would optimize for durability, often durability is more expensive, meaning that the poor person’s only real choice is a lower-quality product that does not last as long.
“Better materials science: Globally, materials science has improved. Hence, at the local level, manufacturers can get away with making worse materials.” This doesn’t really follow to me. There are many reasons a manufacturer would use worse materials than the global “best materials”, including lower costs. It seems to me that your idea of ‘greater global implies worse local’ can be equally explained as a phenomenon of capitalism, where the need to make an acceptable product as cheaply as possible does not often align with making the best product at whatever the cost.
Planned obsolescence alone doesn’t explain the change over time of this phenomenon. It’s a static explanation, one which applies equally well to every era, unless something more is said. So the question becomes, Why are manufacturers planning for sooner obsolescence now than they did in the past?
Likewise, “worse materials cost less” is always true. It’s a static fact, so it can’t explain the observed dynamic phenomenon by itself. Or, at least, you need to add some additional data, like, “materials are available now that are worse than what used to be available”. That might explain something. It would be another example of things being globally better in a perverse sense (more options = better).
Planned obsolescence is technically difficult: it’s relatively easy to design and use a material which lasts indefinitely, but harder to design a machine around materials that last a specified period and then fail. You need to tread the tight-rope between “too shitty to buy” and “too high quality to require frequent replacement.”
Some say that it failure comes with miniaturization too. Those SMD capacitors fail a lot easier in electronics, so while the microwave might still work, the display will fail pretty quickly.
That’s not what “planned obsolescence” means. Planned obsolescence means “if this machine is going to fail in X years anyway (because of one or more critical parts, or because technical progress means that replacing it in that timeframe makes more sense anyway), it makes no sense to design it to be longer-lived than that. So let’s improve efficiency and cut costs by redesigning everything in it under the assumption that we’re allowed to fail in X years, and any resources spent in extra lifetime are just wasted”. What maximum lifetime is theoretically possible for any given component has very little to do with what’s most efficient.
One can certainly criticize this sort of ‘planned obsolescence’ too, for instance by countering that modularity, repairability and lack of any single point of failure should be stressed instead. But let’s at least get our facts straight here.
Arguing about definitions is, as we all know, always fruitful, so let’s consult some sources. We could try a dictionary. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary:
which is exactly what denimalpaca said. Or, veering from the elite ivory towers of academe to The People as our source of authority, here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page on planned obsolescence:
(You are welcome to check that the ellipsis doesn’t hide anything that changes the meaning.) This, again, is exactly what denimalpaca said.
Or we could look at the first known use of the phrase, in a pamphlet from 1932 called “Ending the Depression through planned obsolescence”. This is a bit different from either denimalpaca’s usage or yours but seems distinctly nearer to his:
If that Wikipedia article is to be believed, the phrase first became popular after a talk by Brooks Stevens, who defined it to mean
which is clearly much more denimalpaca’s sense than yours.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not denying that what you describe also happens and is important. But it looks to me as if denimalpaca’s account of what “planned obsolescence” denotes is more accurate than yours.