Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.
Companies can’t stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.
The problem with LEDs isn’t the bit that emits lights. It’s the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.
Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It’s better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.
The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don’t last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.
If the bulb starts flickering, that’s usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.
The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.
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The newer designs that use very long, filament-attached LEDs in a large helium filled glass bulb also work quite well, even in a classical light fixture. The helium filling helps with cooling because helium has higher convective heat transfer than air.
Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.
And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there’s plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren’t necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they’re wearing.
I bought about 20 Cree bulbs 5 years ago, 15 are on about 15 hours a day. I’ve had 2 fail in that time.
Not a bad record in my book.
Even the off brands, IKEA, Amazon, etc, seem to last as long. They’re all in open fixtures, so no cooling issues.
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Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.
From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.
My SE that’s old as hell now. I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.
SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.
I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down. Admittedly, it was after my 12 year old Acer plastic clunker decided to not wake up one day.
I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.
If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.
All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.
this whole ass marketing script for apple as a response to a throwaway line about planned obsolescence strikes joy in me. it’s 100% like something i would do. thank you, i love you, you are fun and valued
Please elaborate on the iTrash slowdown thing. I have an idea of what you’re referring to but want to make sure I’m right.
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I mean yeah it’s not as optimized, but that’s not what the claim was. That’s also not exclusively an Apple behavior so I don’t get why we’re singling out one manufacturer here.
Apple doesn’t make anyone buy anything every year. They support older devices longer than most other manufacturers, so I still don’t understand your point.
iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn’t seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn’t installed on current hardware. It’s apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there’s at least something to it.
And don’t get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.
It happens because of two main reasons, firstly is just because of bloat - software/websites are less optimised or doing more because they expect newer and better hardware. The second thing is the intentional throttling of the hardware by the operating system in response to reduced battery life to maintain longevity. basically if the battery is at 50% original battery, to maintain 10+ hour battery life, the device has to use less power - and the way it does that is by lowering the performance of the hardware.
In my experience iPhones and iPads are remarkable for keeping the speed up as they age.
My iPhone 6S lasted me untill 2021, and it was the battery that was the main issue, the speed of the iOS was fine
Yeah that’s not my experience. Maybe it’s yours and I apologize for that, but my 11 is still running like it was brand new.
Got any proof that “Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch”? There was batterygate but that was a messaging problem.
Like I said, it’s apocryphal and probably has other reasons (like the one you mention), but it’s something you hear all the time about them to the point where it becomes major news and there has been some evidence presented, but as I said, it could just be newer versions of software requiring better hardware, which is still a bit iffy when you have an older phone and they want you to update to software that won’t run as optimally on it. In some ways, Android actually benefits from this by just creating security patches for the life of the phone for the older version, and not updating to newer versions of Android like iOS does for old phones.
I think people just like to pick on Apple. They support old phones for at least 5 years with software and security updates, and sometimes even longer. They’ve even been known to push out the occasional security update for devices nearing a decade old.
That’s not to say they’re a perfectly innocent company. I just think there’s an Apple hate bandwagon people like to jump on. Rather than doing that, I’d like to see people focusing on the specific shitty things they do, and giving them credit for the things they get right.
It’s not even almost, in 2019 there was a settlement where they were found to literally be making older devices artificially slower once a newer model or two was out. Settlement sign ups ended in 2020, search Apple slowdown lawsuit.
Yeah you’re talking about batterygate. That was blown way out of proportion by the media. I know this because I worked for Apple from as far back as 2012 and most iPhone repairs were from old batteries shutting off around 30% charge remaining because the battery was so consumed, it couldn’t keep up with the voltage the hardware was pulling. This led to frequent shutoffs, data corruption and a whole lot of angry customers.
In an iOS 10 update they tweaked iOS to throttle to a speed the battery could handle. So yeah, your old phone might run a little slower, but it wouldn’t shut off in the middle of use and corrupt your shit.
The problem was they didn’t elaborate in the release notes and didn’t give customers heads up as to why they did that. Then their press release was written by engineers. Tech blogs spun the story as “OMG APPLE IS SLOWING YOUR PHONE SO YOU BUY A NEW ONE”.
No.
Apple is telling your phone to dumb itself down to what your old-ass battery can handle. As a result, they also dramatically lowered the price of battery swaps for several years after this whole experience to like $29, and just this last week they officially affirmed their unwritten commitment of supporting devices with software updates for at least 5 years.
Be mad at Apple for shit they deserve please. They’re not a great company and do a lot of shitty things that deserve this kind of hatred. But I lived this. You just have a surface level understanding of what happened.
The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.
The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.
or how about easily replacable batteries. yes, they can be designed in a sleek, apple-y ergonomic way. but its much easier and more profitable to make battery replacements a phone killing endeavour. this applies to other manufacturers as well.
That’s a valid criticism too. But that’s also not exclusively an apple criticism, as you pointed out.
I’m not trying to defend Apple from people who hate them, I just want to make sure we’re not being solely reactionary here.
Again, they dropped the price of out of warranty battery replacements from $99+ to $29 for (don’t quote me on this) something like 2 years as a result of the bad PR they got from this change, which was inherently done to prolong the life of a phone with a consumed battery. That’s anything but a planned obsolescence move. They fucked up the messaging to users sure, but it wasn’t just done to slow your iPhone.
agreed on the batterygate thing. ars did a pretty decent writeup on the reasons behind the CPU throttling.
my issue with Apple has always been their… “its magic!” bullshit. that marketing leads to more and more e-waste as other manufacturers follow the sucessful Apple marketing trend, because, you know… its NOT actually magic and batteries are consumable items.
“Ford, how am I supposed to operate my [insanely expensive] digital watch now [that the battery is broken]?” guess i’ll just get another one!
I appreciate the look behind the curtain but since apple was found in a court to have deceived customers and was proven of wrong doing it certainly is a bit more than just the media blowing it out of proportion or Apple actually doing people a favor that was misinterpreted. For example 3 days a week I use a phone from 2018 that was my daily driver for 3 years and needed to use it as a backup MFA device that I also sometimes stream and watch media on for a few hours a day. Updated it to the latest LineageOS and haven’t had to worry about freezing or being slow or shutting off and corrupting my shit.
Hey man, I’m an Android dude for phones. Won’t even consider an iPhone as I dislike locked ecosystems for phones, but this is just not true.
Apple supports their devices way longer than any of the major Android producers do. I can’t remember the last time my phone was supported more than 3-4 years, but my iPad was just rock solid and updated for 6 years. Replaced it because I wanted more RAM for scrolling endlessly on Reddit, but it was brilliant for everything else. My daughter still uses it with no issues today, two tears later.
The missus’ Samsung tablet on the other hand…
What a piece of crap, and it was top of the line just three years ago.Yep. Apple supports their stuff a lot longer, but it does seem like it slows down more and more every single update.
I’m really soured on the whole portable device thing completely because I don’t like the interfaces, I don’t like touchscreen (imprecise garbage), I don’t like how locked down it is by default (Android over iOS here plus some Android devices are very hackable to the point of getting root, but still), and I hate the intense data collection and tracking these devices do to you. Even phones rooted with custom OSes still track you by its mobile radio triangulating your position.
The planned obsolescence is just another frustrating aspect to the damn things.
We agree on every point except Apple products slowing down significantly faster than Android. My personal experience has been the polar oposite.
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
I mean most things can, it just isn’t profitable…
Planned Obsolescence, baby!
That said, we might be able to make industrial scale recycling an economically efficient activity if we build more durable goods with a longer lifecycle and limit the availability of new territory to strip mine and abandon.
So much of our “cheap” access to minerals and fossil fuels boils down to valuing unimproved real estate as at zero dollars and ignoring the enormous waste produced during the extraction process. Properly accounting for the destruction of undeveloped real estate and the emissions/waste created during industrial processing could dramatically improve how much waste we produce and - consequently - how long our durable goods last.
or just end capitalism so that the only goal is to make a good product that satisfies the users needs completely
But ending capitalism to make good products that satisfy user need kills 100 zillion people.
But it’s also very gay, so it’s probably worth it.
no it doesn’t, it could be done mostly peacefully - i’m guessing that the state and wealthy elite would use violence on us after it became clear that our nonviolent methods were working, but the number of people who would “have to” die is very low, and it’s all the worst people
And few people want to work for free or want put aside too much of there personal wealth to help people for things that don’t seem critical (like healthcare for example which has a lot of nonprofit activities).
I hope OpenSource keeps takening off in the field. Communalize the engineering results so we advance together, and lower the cost of manufacturing with diy/small scale manufacturing and maybe we can get better things at costs more can afford without enslaving people.
My family bought an electric forklift for their factory in the early 90s. I think it is a Yale.
My sister has since taken over the forklift for her company and she has only replaced the batteries and the controller once.
These things are cheap to replace and not as much of a mystery as ICE engines.
I am seeing people replace old Prius hybrid batteries themselves with basic tools now.
I think the only thing I would be concern about is the crash safety for cars. Newer cars are safer. I think that would be the only draw to buy a newer vehicle.
I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of ‘used but tested’ cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.
Exactly. Plus the newer cells are more efficient and longer-lasting. You pretty much upgraded your vehicle.
Actually the low cost part of this was that they weren’t upgraded cells. Just tested-good cells from other battery packs. Most of the time it’s just a couple cells in the bigger battery that have issues, and they take those out of the pool and make a good amount of $$$ because we were required to send back all of our cells. Assuming that of the 26 (iirc) cells that 3 or 4 were bad that’s a big profit margin for sure. The car worked great after swapping them out.
I was going to scoff at the Prius…the battery is only 1500$.
I need a Prius frame in an El Camino body.
I’m sure someone has a kit for that.
Electric motors can last a really long time, assuming no defects, they should outlast the battery by a Longshot.
That leaves the battery, and an LFP battery should also last a hell of a long time, probably a decent way into a million km before you have degraded to about 80%.
If you got those key items lasting, then it just depends on how well the rest of the car holds up, but replacing small parts while the motors and battery works is probably always going to be more cost effective.
The problem is the battery is a wildcard still.
We know how long those LFP batteries should last in a car, but they’re also pretty are in cars and we don’t have that real world data yet.
I also fear that OEMs will still gouge us on replacement batteries 15 - 20 years from now when costs are even lower and replacing the battery shouldn’t be so expensive.
There’s an old expression: Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.
Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
Oof.
In the defense of engineers, they are usually trying to optimize around a few more variables than ability to stand. Cost is a big one.
If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.
…If it’s well engineered.
You don’t need to defend the engineers.
The expression is saying that engineers build bridges that are efficient and cost effective.
Although I do believe the full quote ends with “bridge that almost collapses”, which would make it more clear.
But battery cells don’t just fail after a specific time. Maybe a component in the battery will like a switch or gasket though.
Motors are highly resilient as well.
I’m not as sure about the motors, but I really am optimistic on the LFP batteries.
The battery doesn’t have to fail for the car to be useless. One of those circuit boards that holds it all together goes and it’s “whoops, we don’t make that any more”.
So just like a regular car.
Indeed just like a regular car.
If cars lasted forever, they’d all go out of business within 20 years.
Sounds like we might need some new regulations around parts availability & stocking up before subcomponents go obsolete.
At some point it becomes an environmental thing just as much as a consumer protection thing.
I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) so they only have to make one kind of pack. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.
Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.
Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you’d do well.
nice concept and i think framework might actually do a protoype of this kind of car when they get the investors and the funds currently they still are a small company so i really hope that they become larger in this decade
This already exists.
Look up Nio. They already have fully automatic battery swapping stations for cars leasing the pack. You literally swap the whole pack instead of charging when it’s empty.
Takes less than 10 minutes
That is very interesting and their cars look appealing.
I think in the US, a company may have a better time selling the whole car including battery and still offering quick replacement when it comes time to upgrade.
I’m about to search more but do you happen to know if Nio is selling in the US?
Edit: Dang… Not selling in the US yet. And with these new tariffs it’s not looking good.
Nio
Ugh, looks like they designed their door handles just like Tesla did. Are EVs in general adopting that design standard? Cuz thanks I hate it.
Luckily no, not all do.
We specifically chose a car with normal handles because ice/snow is a bitch with the motorized/flush ones
Last nearly forever? That needs to be broken down into details. Aren’t batteries for EV limited to about 10 years of use? And they’re a costly replacement?
A good solution would be to make EV batteries easily swappable instead of “charge stations”…
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Swappable batteries are a giant headache, charging is better.
Batteries are lasting longer and longer, LFP are already able to last 20 times as long as typical lithium ion, while using less cobalt.
Modern EV tech is still relatively new. It took combustion cars a long time to get to present day longevity and efficiency. EVs will catch up.
Not really. They’re quite popular in Asian countries.
There’s a couple thousand in China for Nio, but they haven’t really taken off anywhere else.
By contrast there’s over 1.8 million public EV chargers in China alone.
Batteries are heavy, which makes them hard to move and requires secure attachment to the vehicle. EV chargers have no moving parts and require much less maintenance.
The thing is you don’t need heavy batteries if you can swap them every 100-150km or so.
150km of range usually requires about 200kg of lithium ion batteries. More for larger vehicles.
What’s wrong with charging? At 350KW you can get 150km of range in 5 minutes.
Not if your car is a small one ala Fiat 500E. And bigger cars should not exist.
The Fiat 500e’s battery weighs 295kg.
I think we will stick with built-in batteries rather than any kind of swapping. I always thought the battery swapping idea was neat, but the real world cares about money more than anything.
To have ubiquitous battery swapping stations would be a huge amount of infrastructure. But to have ubiquitous vehicle charging you basically just have to run wires to existing parking spots.
That is combined with the fact that I think batteries, especially LFP batteries, have a lot more cycles in their lifetime than your 10 year estimate would suggest. I’ve read 4000 cycles for LFP in a few places. That’s more than a decade even if you fully charge and discharge the battery every single day. Drive a more realistic number of miles/kms per day and then the chronological age of the battery might be more important than how many cycles are on it.
If the government regulates them*
“Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen moving parts. That means lessdamage and maintenance, making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle. And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average American driver for 74 years. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever need to purchase.“
No way a car would last me and my family 74 years. First year I owned my car I put on almost 35k. Was driving 100 miles back and forth to work at that time. We typically take a road trip from colorado to near Vermont every year for a vacation.
A lot of midwesterns will drive 14 hours to get some where
At best case 60 miles an hour… Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That’s awful.
You weren’t clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?
Round trip was 100 miles every day. This was rural Ohio driving to Columbus so it was not to bad 2 and 4 lane roads till you hit the city most of them time. If we got a lot of snowfall it could super suck but I was from NE Ohio so most of the time it was not that much white knuckle driving. You just listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts or call some friends on your hour or so drive home
In the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s not uncommon for people that work here but can’t afford to live here to have commutes of over an hour with good traffic (2+ hours with heavy traffic) each way. That’s the case in a few major metro areas in countries like the USA and Australia.
Yeah Bay Area and LA traffic is next level. My condolences to those souls who make that drive every day
Sure, there’s always going to be outliers. Most people live and work in the same metropolitan area though - they’re not driving 50,000km+ a year. Besides, having a vehicle with 5 times the effective lifetime is going to be a big win regardless of how much you drive it.
Here a link to bypass the paywall:
Same goes for light bulbs
LED bulbs last pretty much forever.
Yeah I’ve only ever had one LED bulb die, and I think that was because it was faulty in some way. I’ve had a much better experience with them compared to CFLs.
Usually it’s a badly designed heat sink that’s meant to cause an eventual short so that it has to be replaced. Or just shoddy low material builds. LEDs really can last an obscene amount of time and they don’t die another part does.
I’ve had lots of led bulbs die. I think it’s because I bought them at the dollar store.
And finding quality ones that will last a long time is more difficult than you might think.
Many of them are made cheaply.
They get dimmer over time. And they do it gradually so you don’t notice it until you buy a new one and realize how dim the old one was
Most LEDs run on DC, and the built-in transformer is the most likely component to fail. If the LED is failing and getting dimmer, it’s most likely due to poor heat dissipation.
If we had little 12v adapters and separate LED modules, you could reduce waste by only replacing the part that fails, and manufacturers would have greater incentive to improve build quality. Instead, we get cheaply manufactured bulb-shaped disposable units that need to be thrown away when one part fails.
Honestly considering going to DC lighting after my solar conversion completes at my house for this reason
I have some dc lighting in my basement. It’s great, but there aren’t as many options out there and electricians don’t want to touch it.
I was looking at rv lighting as some options over wise just doing custom jobs (LEDs in whatever fixtures I think look nice). It helps like domes, reccesed, and ambiant lighting I think.
Oh yeah electricians are allergic to DC lol (I used to be one, and yeah that was big knowledge gap in codes, breakers, etc).
Electricians don’t want to touch DC circuits because it is illegal to mix low voltage DC and high voltage AC circuits. At least it’s illegal in Europe. You need to rebuild your walls to ensure separate and independent wiring channels. And that’s a very expensive nightmare.
It’s a lot cheaper to buy Philips bulbs instead.
Yeah, I definitely get it. It would be illegal to mix low and line voltage in the USA, too.
I ended up running the cabling myself, all class two circuits powering 12 24vdc spots. The nice bit is that they are all addressable RGBW spots, so I can control them all individually or as groups. And it’s all automated. The downside is that I’ll probably have to remove them if we ever sell this house, because nobody but me understands how it works.
Yeah. Its about 50/50 for the ones who failed me. Gets too hot and burn out or the power supply fails. More prevalent in the compact formats like spots and g8 or g4.
Well yes, but the light would be very dim, if we are talking about incandescent bulbs.
Technology connections had an episode about it.
I think people need to start being educated about how their climate influences how they can use the electric car. Many people know if they live by the sea or where roads are salted that corrosion is an issue. But people might not be aware that with some EVs, they should leave it plugged in if they’re in an extreme climate, so the car can air condition or heat the battery. I caused some battery degradation to my Volt because I wasn’t able to leave it plugged in living in Tucson.
That is too general of a statement. I have three EVs in my family, none of them do any temp condition of the battery just by being plugged in. However, EVCC turns off the wallbox when they reach 75% SoC and there is no appointment that day in our shared calendar. Sitting at high SoCs kills batteries, especially in warm climates.
You have a point; some EVs like the Leaf don’t even have conditioning. The Volt does have active conditioning, and being a PHEV instead of a BEV has battery charge and discharge limits which were limited by the factory to preserve longevity at the expense of being able to charge to a true 100%. If extra range is needed the ICE is activated instead of stressing the traction battery.
Sometimes I think people don’t understand how capitalism works…
Which was also true of ICE cars. The Model T Ford had a major design flaw: everyone could work on it easily, parts were plentiful, and there was no reason to buy a replacement once you had it. In fact, there’s enough of them still running, with an associated parts market, that you could still daily one if you wanted to.
So much so that TFLClassics on YouTube in Colorado bought a well maintained model T and drove it to the nearest dealership and had mechanics there change the oil and take it for a spin just the other week.
Spoiler: They won’t.
Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? … Right?!?
