Posted on 06/19/2019 8:23:57 AM PDT by fireman15
Planned obsolescence, or built-in obsolescence, in industrial design and economics 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.
No company will admit they have this policy, but we can observe this from a products’ average failure rate and the company’s sincerity in fixing it by making available parts required to fix it. This is why I am a huge fan of Japanese products and also Apple. Products are not merely hardware, Apple on the other hand is known for updating their 4 or 5 years old iPhone with the latest OS. As for parts, it is easy to find spare parts for most Japanese brands.
(Excerpt) Read more at geckoandfly.com ...
My 18 month old HP Laptop's hinges failed a couple weeks ago. The little brass nuts that were implanted into the plastic lid and case pulled out of the plastic. They refused to fix them under the extended warranty, but Costco gave me a refund. I looked at my wife's very lightly used 6 month old HP laptop; it is starting to fail in the same way.
I suspect that it is planned obsolescence. Electronically there just is not the need to replace laptops as often as we used to. The advances have slowed down. The weird thing is that most of the super cheap devices that I have bought in the last few years have outlasted the more expensive ones. My $250 Apple TV box quit working about a week after the warranty expired, while my $40 Google Chromecast and Amazon Fire tv sticks keep going and going... So my experience would seem to contradict some of the premises of the article.
I destroyed my Dell after 2 years of maddening frustration with it’s crappy touchpad. It was the type that had the mouse buttons hidden underneath. They were so unresponsive that I would have to repeatedly tap to get them to work.
Eventually I started pounding the touchpad to the point I balled up my fist and beat the sh*t out of it.
Now I have an HP with discrete mouse buttons. Couldn’t be happier.
HA! Tell that to my still perfectly functional iPhone 5C that is stuck on iOS 10.3.3.
For surfing, I bought a HP chromebook and have not had one single problem with it.
On other devices, I always got those scams ads... such as that fake Microsoft ad about a computer virus, etc. I even got that a couple of times at the library.
I just love love love my chromebook. Cost me all of $199.00
Strange that the article ignores Apple being caught red-handed throttling older devices...
I’ve had good luck with HP laptops lately.
An employer sent me a Levato this week, it doesn’t seem as well built.
I picked up a Toshiba laptop in early 2013 and bumped up the RAM to the maximum 16GB. While it serves me well enough to this day, it’s buggy and boots slow. I’ve been meaning to do a wipe and reset to see if it works better. It runs Windows 10 these days.
I’ve been meaning to upgrade but I honestly don’t use it enough so it’s just a minor annoyance. For internet consumption, I almost exclusively use my Samsung Tab S 10.5 (picked up in early 2015 but I rooted it and it runs a custom ROM). It’s fast, reliable, and suits my needs perfectly. I did have to replace the battery about 2 years ago because it stopped holding a charge well but now it’s running great.
I should have looked at the details of the source of the article before posting... much of it is from old data. If you look further down in the article it shows HP and Apple having equal annualized failure rates. I have had terrible luck with recent HP purchases.
Even stranger is the comments on the site says this is 2009 data.
Apple touch pads are the bomb.
My experience has been just the opposite. I have a six year old Lenovo Windows 7 laptop that refuses to die even though it is literally falling apart. We have had to return 3 nearly new HP computers in the last year. And we are two oldsters that are careful with our things. Our 1955 Zenith Super R Chassis B/W television still works and looks like new.
>>>My $250 Apple TV box quit working about a week after the warranty expired<<<
Take it to the nearest Apple Store. I’ve read that they are very responsive to Customer issues and they might replace it even of the Warranty ended.
As my Father always used to say, you don’t know unless you ask.
Most of the Data is from the end of 2017 and some from 2016 which these days is ancient history. I am not sure which data that poster is referring to because I didn't see anything that old. Might be a little bit of exaggeration.
Its been sitting in a drawer for a year now, so it is probably too late.
I had good luck with an old Acer-Windows XP. My current Dell-Windows7 i7 is still going strong after about 7 years. I did replace the hard drive from a 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM after about a year, and I noted a significant improvement in loading and running programs.
Before the Dell, I bought a Samsung-Windows7 i7. It lasted one month after the warranty expired. I tried to get it fixed locally. The local computer shop tried to get a new motherboard, as that was were the problem was. They were told Samsung didn’t make replacement motherboards for that model. Thus, I have an $800 door-stop and I will never buy anything from Samsung again. [My Samsung DVR died after only 2 years of use.]
I also have Toshiba Linux Mint i3. It is okay, but somewhat sluggish.
I have an RCA android tablet that is nearly junk. It takes forever to reboot after it shuts itself off frequently.
I have a Win10 tablet that has similar problems. Sometimes, it reboots 2-3 times in a single day. I find Win10 frustrating anyway, so I usually stick with the Dell Win-7 laptop and Gateway Win-7 i5 desktop.
I had a Lenovo ThinkPad Laptop at work years ago. It had that little Red TrackPoint Mouse button in the middle of the Keypad.
I didn’t care for the feature at first, but after using it for a while I was hooked.
Overall it was a great Laptop.
I think they stopped making them with that feature.
This is dated but still valid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfrYOWlKJ_g
(Apple repair and business practices.)
Dell has recently started making good laptops again.
If you want reliable - buy Japanese.
If you can afford Apple - the controlled ecosystem is nice. I personally hate their user interfaces as they constantly try to protect me from myself (tie my hands). But I’m not your typical user.
On their new systems, I don’t like how big they are. It means your palms rest on it. That, and I cannot stand the feel of their new keyboards.
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