It's not even just batteries. Every laptop I've ever owned comes with a AC to DC converter. Every laptop I've ever owned has outlived that AC-to-DC converter. Every converter that has failed has failed in exactly the same way: the plug/cord connection at the laptop end becomes unreliable.
And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could have been a simple $5 replacement cord is now "replace the entire converter" and is now $30 if you try to find a third-party and pray they're not a fraud, or $50 from the manufacturer. Meanwhile at perfectly good converter (sans cord) is landfill.
But lo and behold: the brick-to-wall cord is detachable. And funny that, that one never breaks…
Personally I hate the trend of only charging over type-c. It's an order of magnitude less robust and far more prone to falling out than, say, a ThinkPad connector. Having the option is nice but I despise having to babysit my $100 Asus charger lest I stomp it flat by accident.
The USB-C connector is a lot easier to break than a normal power connector, it's also pretty fidgety to get right when you fix the connection on the laptop side. The fixability can be done better than normal charging ports, I've done a USB-C daughter board swap in about 2 hours of total time (research, ordering, mounting). The normal way though is doing soldering surface mounted USB-C connectors which is not something I like to do.
Other than Apple's old magsafe connectors, I remember every power connector I've ever had on a laptop to have been pretty easily breakable using angular force, and I know of both myself and a handful of other people who have broken the power connector on our laptops, and yet I haven't seen or experienced such with my USB-C laptops yet (quite possibly as they are lighter weight), so I am surprised you say the USB-C is more easily broken. I do miss magsafe, though: that's the one non-USB-C power connector I think would be worth supporting. (That said I have some memory of magsafe connectors destroying themselves due to the slapping of metal at power, though I never hadn't one die myself.)
For example my framework laptop USB C ports are replaceable (for the laptop side).
Also you can buy magsafe like connectors for USB C if you have a regular laptop.
Having one USB C charger for my phone, my laptop, my earbuds, my battery and my remarkable is such a life improvement on trip vs the old barrel connectors. It just doesn't even compare. And we just talk about charging here, one of the multiple uses of USB C.
I've done replacements of barrel plugs and also USBC ports and the barrel plugs are significantly easier to replace.
Now my USBC charging ports haven't failed me yet, i think that's probably because i have 4 of them on my laptop, and i charge from different ones depending on multiple factors. So I'm spreading the wear around.
That said. When one goes more than likely the others will go shortly there after.
Sure. But didn't we just agreed that the power adapter doesn't live that long? I better buy a new USB cable every year, that covers power, data and more than a power cable that covers power only for three times the price - if not more - every two years. Not to mention all the other advantages.
> I have two laptops. One with a old school barrel plug and the other with USBC, and the USBC charges faster as it has more wattage.
This is not a limitation of the barrel plug, it's a limitation of your laptop or charging brick not being able to use or provide a higher rate. I have a barrel plug laptop with a 170W adapter. USB-C chargers above 100W move into 'exotic' range and none go above 100W at 20V, the cables can't move that much current without heating up.
I didn't call it orders of magnitude worse. I called it orders of magnitude more delicate and prone to falling out than a bespoke laptop charger like a ThinkPad Slim Tip connector. Why bother misquoting me when my comment is right there?
Ports take up space on the outside and inside of the computer. If we're going to add an extra port for some proprietary charger, why not just make it an extra usb-c port instead?
I don't know what you mean. I plug my USB-C dock with dual monitors into my laptop, I don't even have the option to not charge my laptop while I'm using it at work.
I thought about and perhaps should have mentioned USB-C.
Overall, yeah, where USB-C can be applied, I like it, and it definitely helps turn the charger into a bit more of a commodity, and for whatever reason, USB-C chargers seem to not suffer the design flaw I mentioned above as much: the cables tend to detach at the converter. The two big issues I have is that a. chargers are terrible at listing the max wattage they can supply (and laptops their draw), so it's hard to impossible to know if a given charger will be able to supply enough power. My work desk had built in power & USB-C charging, for example, and I now comically charge my USB-C work laptop off the desk's AC plug (a MBP¹, so that's thankfully USB-C). USB-C never really charger, and eventually we figured out that the desk (and this was hard to find) was a USB PD of like 15 W. And MBPs need 87 W or so.
And b., my current laptop alleges to have a max draw of 135 W, which is above the max for USB-C. (Which is why I suspect it has a custom adapter… but who knows.)
¹I am glad Apple switched to USB-C, and they allievated the design flaw I mention in their chargers when they did so, for which they should be praised. But there is so much else wrong — completely unservicable design, the butterfly keyboard problems, cable-gate, battery recalls, ergo fails, heat dissipation issues, macOS, crap warranty — with their laptops that it isn't sufficient to tip the scales to me buying.
I'm seriously thinking about getting a Framework as my next laptop.
...if they would sell me one.
The tipping point was an LTT vid where he changed the motherboard on his laptop to a 12th gen one AND used the old motherboard with a 3D printed case to make a tiny desktop computer.
I have a food thermometer with a builtin rechargeable battery. It charges via usb-c, but so far I have not managed to charge it from a usb-c charger. It will only charge with the supplied usb-a to usb-c cable. I would love to understand why. But at least, they had the good sense to not supply their own charger.
USB-A ports output 5V as long as the device is on. But with most USB-C ports, to save power no power is supplied until the device requests what voltage it wants. Requesting 5V is very simple, just two resistors which cost fractions of a cent, but somehow a lot of cheap devices forget to include them.
Doesn't USB-C have a "basic mode"? As in, if it's unable to negotiate some kind of high-power PD mode, it will just deliver the basic USB2 5V/0.5A?
I can charge my Sony headphones with anything from an old USB2 only PC, old Samsung USB-A phone charger to my 65 W HP USB-C power adapter.
I don't think they have any kind of PD mode, I think they just expect regular 5V. The specs on the site say "USB charge" and the charging duration is 3 hours. They come with a USB-A to C cable.
usbc chargers are not supposed to even have 5V output until a device requests it. For 5V at various currents, “charge configuration” resistors can be used at the device. For higher voltages an active negotiation is required. Cheap devices based on old products often omit the 2 resistors (literally worth under $0.01 each) and this only charge when connected to a usb-a charger, which always has 5v output. Depending on the device, it can be anywhere from easy to impossible to hack in your own resistors.
> usbc chargers are not supposed to even have 5V output until a device requests it.
I did not know that, thanks. I was expecting USB-C chargers to work in "dumb 5V mode" by default. I guess that could be to avoid problems if you connect two chargers together?
I think that is why usb-a (male) to usb-c (female) adapters are not supposed to exist. They might let you connect two usb-a chargers together using a usb-c cable, and they are not designed to tolerate that.
Have you tried a different USB-A charger? Some smaller devices have problems with USB-C to USB-C. I don't know why this is the case, though. It's just something I have observed with different devices.
High power (~100W) charging with USB-C has been a game changer for me. I barely even remember the days when every electronic device came with its own grotty little power brick I had to keep track of and carry around with the device.
I guess time will tell how reliable USB-C connectors are, but my naive impression is that the female connectors (device side) are very simple with no springs or other moving parts. I imagine my nice USB-C chargers (mostly Apple) will be useful for as long as USB-C lasts as an active standard.
I’ve personally found usb-c ports aren’t great longevity wise. They have a similar issue as I had with micro-USB: they stop clamping onto the plug and then you don’t get a reliable connection. I’ve found Lightning ports more reliable (with periodic lint cleaning) but it’s a shame that it’s a proprietary standard.
I've been using this magnetic USB-C adapter on my laptop to reduce the wear and tear on the port: https://a.co/d/4JCadfi.
I've been using it since March with no complaints. It'd be great if manufacturers could standardize on something like this so that the port could be flush.
We bought a similar, “the last cable” and they all lost connection after the metal got worn down in a year. Yet they where supposedly the best of this type.
There’s also been reports of fire due to friction and dirt
Just because someone is doing something, doesn't mean anyone can do something without Apple filing a lawsuit. The small players are small enough to fly under the radar. A consortium standardizing would be a target.
First time hearing this, super interesting. Got any links to read more on how this prevents a dangerous accident? What does it do to stop the accident, from sparking the oil and ignoring it if the cord is accidentally sheered and exposed?
According to the standard, the USB Type-C connectors should have a much longer lifetime than the USB Type-A connectors or any other older USB connectors and also than most other kinds of connectors.
IIRC, the USB Type-C connectors should survive at least 12000 insertion cycles.
In practice, this does not seem to be true, so I assume that many USB Type-C connectors substitute the more expensive alloys and coatings that they should use for the metal contacts in order to achieve conformity with the standard with cheaper alloys, and this is not something that a normal user can check when buying a device.
For micro USB, I have found that this is almost always because some dirt is trapped and packed in the bottom of the socket - preventing the cable from being inserted deep enough. Cleaning with a toothpick or similar has fixed it each time.
My Tesla 2021 ModelY came with 4 USB-C ports (plus one in the glove compartment which is only for the camera memory stick). They support PD but they only go up to 9V at about 25W, which seems pretty dumb for a car that contains a 75kWh battery. They'll recharge a laptop but slowly. Still, I'm glad they exist.
That is actually not so new if I remember correctly this model begun with the 2016 USB-C models. Glad they kept it this way while reintroducing the magsafe connector for "brick-to-laptop".
My 2015 MacBook Pro and all the previous MacBook chargers I’ve seen have two-part chargers: the brick-to-laptop connection was hardwired into the brick and typically would fail and require buying a whole new charger. Starting around 2016, MacBooks fixed this issue.
Yeah, the chargers get expensive, but then again I can power my laptop, portable monitor, keyboard, mouse, phone, soldering iron, flashlight, power bank, and about a dozen other devices all off the same standardized wall wart. It's a pretty good value. With the new PD spec going to 48V 5A I could even power one of my 3D printers off it with power to spare.
Are those actually cheaper or easier to come by than manufacturer-branded options?
I actually found an HP charger on Amazon, and it even had a USB-A port, which I've found neat. But with all the horror stories about counterfeits and Amazon stock comingling, and what with my wish to not burn down my house, I didn't buy it.
I've never seen a three prong charger for USB C. They probably exist, somewhere, but consumer electronics like that being grounded doesn't seem common.
GaN 90/100W chargers from manufacturers like Anker and Monoprice can regularly be had for half of that. Right now there are a lot of 90W ones from unknown-to-me manufacturers for ~$32 on Amazon.
I'm not trying to correct you here; I'm just wondering if there's something I'm missing.
I value the absence of house fires too much to buy no-name power banks and chargers (chargers also come with the extra risk of yummy 230V on the output).
Exactly this. I tried buying cheaper chargers but they'd inevitably break and I worry that they're damaging my USB-C cables. (I even ran across knockoff fake apple chargers). I don't always buy this[0] $80 charger but I've got a few of them lying about.
The cheapest 100w Anker I see on Amazon is the $79.99 PowerPort III. The cheapest I see on their website is the $84.99 Anker 736 Nano II (with no listing for the PowerPort III).
There are cheaper Anker chargers on Amazon that say 100w in the title but that's only because they include a 100w capable cable, the charger is a lower wattage.
Below 100W, last time I checked, it is easier to find good laptop chargers. Since I need a 135 W one for my laptop, thnings get trickier. Well, the 65W Lenovo from my work laptop managed to hold a charge barely when gaming. So I don't complain too much.
Some years ago I had a "debate" about this on HN. And if you know anything about BOM cost and hardware margins, the cost saving of crappy PSU and decent PSU is quite attractive. To the point manufacturer knew the probability of the PSU failing within certain time frame, now more commonly known as planned obsolescence.
While I am not exactly an USB-C supporter. One of the side benefits is that they are much better quality and fixes this PSU issues.
I’ve read that LED light bulbs have the same problem. The LED will easily last 25 years, as written on the box, but the electronics that power the LED won’t.
I haven’t owned an LED bulb long enough to see this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.
> I haven’t owned an LED bulb long enough to see this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.
I’ve had lots of different kinds of LED lighting, including LED bulbs and this is honestly the only reason I’ve had to replace them.
The electronics powering the LED overheat and over time starts to fail.
Some brands are worse than others, particularly cheap Chinese ones. They will break faster than you can replace them. Avoid at all cost.
Other mid-range bulbs are better (like IKEA Trådfri) but still without what I’d call industrial reliability. Philips Hue are more reliable, but again at a higher price.
In short, you get what you pay for. That said you can still have bad luck. For instance in my house we have semi-expensive Junostar LEDs (from the pro-market) for ceiling lights, but we received a bad batch with lot of flickering and had to have them all replaced. It was on warranty though ;)
Most of my LED failures (moderately early adopter) have been power supply failures.
Some bulbs (estimated 20%, mostly higher output ones) have lost SMD LEDs, in some cases having reductions in brightness as a portion of the bulb is then INOP.
I’ve stopped taking them apart and looking into the failures once they got to be cheap enough to not care.
I've started retrofitting my table lamps with 12v "RV" LEDs that have standard Edison bases. That way I can use my own power supply -- either a 12v wall wart or USB-C with PD and a 12v trigger.
I have the exact same issue with my current laptop (2014 ASUS ZenBook) and I blame it on ASUS' poor design of the laptop-end plug. I have replaced the charger multiple times so far, about once a year I think. My SO has used a Lenovo for 4 years now and has never had this issue - however, their brick-to-wall cord broke recently, funnily enough.
I mostly like ZenBooks, but they really need to spend an extra $5-10 on more durable charging components. Mine had the charging receiver inside the laptop fail from wear, so I had to pop it open, remove the broken one, and solder in a new one I'd bought online (around $30, but it would have been a couple hundred bucks to send it off for repairs). Of course then the hinges failed a few months later... It's very frustrating for a "premium" laptop to cut corners on stuff like that.
You have horrible luck. I've never had an AC-to-DC converter die and I've owned 6 going back to 2006 timeframe. Two of them are still used daily and they're from 2011 and 2013 respectively.
Certainly not rare for Apple users. I've replaced many MagSafe connectors over the years. My wife managed to go through three in the span of two years.
Brick to wall cord depends on the country where your wall is located. Also, there's about two standards of power cord connection: trapeze like on desktop PC PSUs and three cylinders merged, so company can outsource power cords to a wholesale OEM.
But USB-C will solve your problem. I currently throwed away my laptop brick and just using a GAN power supply with two USB-C ports. It also charges my phone, and, eventually, other stuff like VR headset, joysticks and so on. I have two things micro-USB left: Kindle reader and JBL speaker. I hope next generation of those will be manufactured with USB-C charging ports.
On all phones I owned USB-C port weared out very quickly, so it couldn't be charged and data couldn't be transferred anymore. And it's pretty expensive to repair a USB-C port on a device. I now charge them exclusively wirelessly, and try to pace data connections, conserving the precious resource that is USB-C port longevity.
That is too bad. I thought (hoped) that they did a lot of work on the mechanical robustness of USB-C. I hope it isn't as bad as Apple's lightning connector.
It’s easier and simpler to supply the country specific brick-to-wall cable (either IEC 60320 or IEC C13 to local) than it is to manufacture county specific power bricks.
Plus, as a user, it's great to be able to only change the cable when traveling to a different country, instead of having to haul around adapters and stack them.
It's only two or three conductors, at a lower current, and they're significantly larger. It doesn't seem too crazy that the AC cables hold up better.
I got a Razer once, and the power brick's integrated cable came with pre-frayed insulation, no extra charge. That laptop had tons of hardware bugs, too.
Those cords usually are replaceable, but involves opening and soldering the brick, which usually means damaging the information sticker to get to the screws.
It would be great if consumer electronics products had expected lifetime ratings on the front. People would naturally take issue with products with significantly below median lifetime, and also if their own products didn't live up to the lifetime.
It would also make sense to phrase other quantities on product packaging in the way they're experienced by the consumer: instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if you showed the lumens/$, more efficient bulbs would naturally win out. Instead, LED bulbs have fake wattage numbers to show the equivalent wattage incandescent lighting that would be needed to match the LED.
Many LED lightbulbs make claims about their expected lifetime. Except these numbers are often a fantasy. The LED itself may last almost forever, but the capacitors commonly go bad in a year or so.
I suspect that would be the reality with a lot of the proposed mandatory labeling for electronics, too.
They also severely overdrive the LEDs to get more brightness, at the cost of both reduced efficiency and lifetime.
At least the Phoebus Cartel had an ostensible explanation (efficiency) for what they did. Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed.
Some of the indicator LEDs on some of my electronics are many decades old, yet they are still functioning like when they were new. Clearly LEDs can last a long time, but there wouldn't be any profit in that.
Here's some interesting discussion about the "Dubai Lamp", an attempt at going the opposite direction and actually making LEDs last significantly longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
So when I buy a 600 lumen LED bulb that burns 7 W, I'm not only getting hosed because they're overdriving the LEDs but I'm also using over twice as much electricity as I could be?
Not really. The "overdriving" (really just choosing a higher point on the current/output curve) is part of how they deliver that 600 lumen. If you put half as much electricity through those same LEDs they would in theory last longer. You could deliver 600 lumens for under 7w (but not as low as half) using a more expensive array of LEDs driven less hard and still get the longer lifetime, but it's not easy to be really sure whether the upfront cost and embedded energy would always be justified.
Wouldn't this sort of be a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation? The cartel hinges on every producer being complicit, if they are they get all long term small advantage, if they aren't, they and they alone get a huge short term advantage to the detriment of everyone else.
If a single one of them doesn't play ball and start selling "forever lamps" that last a hundred years (slap some patents on running LEDs at their rating, why not), they'll effectively salt the earth for the entire market.
No, it also works when non-optimal designs are very common in the market. (Not helped with the fact that especially in electronics many brands have decreased in (perceived) quality, so even if something performed well people don't necessarily trust that newer versions are too, which makes actually good brands also less sticky)
Bad brands aren't sticky in this situation, are there. (I don't know whether good brands are sticky here.) So there's no extra incentives for planned obsolescence, because the next purchase is more than likely to go to a competitor.
They’re saying all brands use planned obsolescence to force consumers to buy lightbulbs (from any brand) more often, increasing sales for the whole industry, not one specific brand.
This is how the Phoebus Cartel worked for incandescent bulbs. Every brand was in on it, it wasn’t about improving market share for specific brands.
I'm surprised so many people's experience of LED bulbs is short lifetime. Most of the LED bulbs I ever bought have lasted many, many years. I only had one type ever fail and those looked clearly inferior in build to all the other types. ("free" with some light fittings, not my choice). Took one of those apart, no capacitors in the design any more but dodgy wire connections that creep with the hot-cold on-off cycle in an under-ventilated fitting. So am I a statistical outlier, or are most people getting the very worst dreg-quality bulbs, or are there a lot of very enclosed fittings out there cooking the lamps?
I've got a lot of different brands of LED light bulbs and I think maybe one has "burned out" over the years. I have to wonder if maybe the power in their house is less "clean" than it should be, or if their area has a lot of power spikes or brownouts and they just don't realize it.
That's an interesting possibility I hadn't considered. I don't really have a handle on how robust these things innately are but I'm sure there is no room in the average bulb's bill of materials for any special handling for rough power.
Recessed lighting fixtures are a common cause of problems with LEDs due to poor heat dissipation. But a lot of newer homes have recessed lighting, and in at least some parts of California, the fixtures are now required to be sealed (I guess for overall house energy efficiency).
> instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if you showed the lumens/$, more efficient bulbs would naturally win out. Instead, LED bulbs have fake wattage numbers to show the equivalent wattage incandescent lighting that would be needed to match the LED.
I don't understand what the problem is supposed to be. The system we currently have is that all bulbs are labeled with their brightness ("equivalent wattage"), which is the outcome the customer cares about. You can then choose the cheapest bulb at the brightness level you want. That second step already causes more efficient bulbs to crowd less efficient bulbs out of the market.
In your hypothetical system, we stop indicating how bright bulbs are. Instead, we indicate how efficient they are, and customers are supposed to work out the brightness for themselves.
I think GP meant per $ of running cost. I have seen LEDs that are only 2/3 as efficient: "60W equivalent" using 11W at a reduced lumen level, instead of 8W at, iirc, 800 lumen.
But the packaging gives you both the brightness in the slightly weird unit of 'equivalent wattage' and the actual wattage. So you can make those choices.
People can assume any half decent branded item with a lithium ion battery in it will last like new for 500 charge cycles, and really start to show age around 1,000 charge cycles.
I would go one step further than ratings but add mandatory lifetime ratings from the date of purchase with manufacturer guarantee attached. This should cover at least battery/charger, software updates (in particular security updates) and operation of necessary could infrastructure.
I have burned too many times by manufacturers not taking security updates seriously (Motorola phones for instance). If a manufacturer wants not to fix an issue it should be an automatic reason to get a full refund.
I have been a long time enthusiast of high power flashlights. We typically use 18350, 18650, 21700, or 26650. But I have been in dismay as even in this community, companies are starting to move away from these standards and provide proprietary batteries (Olight) or sealed (some newer Fenix models).
It would be good if
* We could safely obtain reputable Li-ion batteries from reputable sources. I trust a handful of companies to vet their supply chain so I'm confident of authentic cells like Murata VT6, etc .. but its less than ideal. I don't think my mom would be able to just find a authentic 18650, and this has to pass the mom test
* Easy way to recycle these cells. This needs to expand past home improvement stores, which often seem clueless as to the specifics of what they can accept
Was wondering what these random numbers were, I expected a product number from a manufacturer. Instead:
> An 18650 Battery is a lithium-ion rechargeable battery. The first 4 digits of the designation “18650” indicate the physical dimensions while the 5 <sup>th</sup> digit indicates it is a cylinder cell. The standard 18650 battery is 18mm around by 65mm long.
(copied from curl because that page crashed the firefox tab, though I guess the superscript wouldn't have been preserved otherwise anyhow so might as well leave that bit of HTML in)
The voltage is determined by the chemistry, which unless you seriously deviate from the standard lithium stuff, it's going to be able 4.2 V max.
Aside: When people try to increase it to like 4.3 V with "strengthened electrode material," the lifetime still seriously suffers. I'm typing this comment on a Razer Blade 15 with a currently swollen battery pack, which has been replaced only 10 months ago due to the same swelling issue
Regarding sealed: Does the light really outlast the battery? I have some LED lights that have lasted "forever," but my aquarium lights don't seem as durable and I think only will last 5-7 years. (Fluorescent bulbs only lasted a year, and each bulb cost almost as much as an LED version.)
I don't have any good references to cite but from my understanding, well designed LED systems only get dimmer over time (quite reasonably slowly) due to various semiconductor physics. However, by far the most common failure mode for electronics including LEDs is shock and fatigue to the interconnect. This means if you let your LED thermal cycle repeatedly, even to well below datasheet maximums, the solder and bonding are quite likely to fail.
I'm not sure how your aquarium lights are configured (whether they cycled or were always on) but honestly 5-7 years is already quite impressive. There's not really any other lighting technology that can do that. 5-7 years of constant usage also far exceeds what consumer batteries can usually do, which are something on the order of hundreds of "actual cycles" before significant capacity degradation. That translates to maybe a couple years, but definitely less than five.
> I'm not sure how your aquarium lights are configured ... but honestly 5-7 years is already quite impressive.
I go through about 1 power brick a year. I got a wire wet in the original one, and I can't seem to find ones that last long. They always run hot.
I just changed a relay yesterday. My smart switch doesn't output clean voltage or do clean off; so I have it drive a 120VAC relay. Could have been my wiring, though. It's an industrial relay, so I don't see why it'd fail after ~1500 cycles.
I recently bought a Fenix and was disappointing the battery was not standard. In hindsight, I should have returned the model not to encourage these companies for these practices.
Perhaps, but some "known brands" like Vapcell just re-wrap something else (and they can change the underlying cell at any time, without you knowing where it actually came from). For example, the Vapcell G50 I purchased a year ago is actually ... a Sumsung SDI 50G. Whether that still holds today is unknown. Some people have had more recessed terminals, which would hint at Samsung 50E.
Why do they do this? Because many high quality manufacturers (Samsung, LG) don't approve their cells for usage in vaping devices. Some like Molicel are OK with it. I'm sure you have heard of Mooch :)
Although, I do have a pair of these in front of me right now, bought a few years ago, and I can't find any mention of Samsung, or any other manufacturer, on them.
I've found another vape shop advertising those [0]. I would have expected consumer protection to crack down on them for false advertising, since this is in France and these shops have been operating for at least two years. They also have physical locations, so it's not like they're some kind of "dark store" that moves every week...
> I have been a long time enthusiast of high power flashlights. We typically use 18350, 18650, 21700, or 26650. But I have been in dismay as even in this community, companies are starting to move away from these standards and provide proprietary batteries (Olight) or sealed (some newer Fenix models).
We went through this exact cycle with laptops and cellular phones. The hardcore internet users were furious when companies dared to remove the option for a user-replaceable battery.
But the market reacted positively. And honestly, it turned out fine. I could get replacement aftermarket batteries for my iPhone and MacBooks for a long time, and now I can even get genuine replacement parts when I need them.
I see a lot of parallels in the flashlight world: The hardcore collectors who value their ability to swap out batteries, experiment with different cells, and carry their batteries from one light to the next are furious. Yet the average buyer probably prefers the features afforded by the custom battery solutions.
The standardized-battery flashlights are still readily available. The market will avoid the proprietary solutions if that's really what the market feels, but I suspect these companies actually have a good idea about what their customers are looking for.
> The market will avoid the proprietary solutions if that's really what the market feels
I don't really buy into (no pun intended) any argument that relies on the efficient market hypothesis. As this article pointed out, there's a vast asymmetry of information, which prevents an efficient market, even in theory.
> but I suspect these companies actually have a good idea about what their customers are looking for.
I suspect these companies have a good idea about what will cause their customers to purchase more often, and which parts cannot be evaluated on a showroom. Replaceable batteries would add tremendous value for customers, and battery life is frequently the most desired feature in surveys.
> As this article pointed out, there's a vast asymmetry of information, which prevents an efficient market, even in theory.
What kind of theory are you using here?
There might be some theoretical reasons to expect that symmetric information (and a few other conditions) will lead to an efficient market.
But that doesn't mean that a pre-existing information symmetry is necessary for an efficient market.
The classic example is the 'market for lemons', a paper about the information asymmetry in the market for used cars: layman buyers typically can't judge a used car well via a short inspection.
That was supposed to prevent an efficient market where you can buy quality goods.
Of course, the business solution to this problem is fairly straightforward and profitable: reputation.
You run your company with strict standards, so over time you build up a reputation and charge a premium for that. In addition you can sell warranties, too.
A really simple example is white goods: it's really hard to judge a dishwasher when you just see them in the store. There's reviews I can look at, but I can also just go and buy a Miele dishwasher. They are pricey, but I also know that they are extremely high quality and will last.
For a while, Miele could ride that reputation and sell shoddy products until the market catches up. But it's more profitable for them in the long run to defend their reputation. (Also employees would probably rebel against a change in policy. Many people like to take pride in their work.)
This is all without regulation having a binding impact: shoddy dishwashers are just as legal as premium dishwashers.
You're about to talk about "market for lemons," so presumably you figured it out.
> the business solution to this problem
It's not solved, so I can't wait to hear about the solution.
> reputation
LOL. Reputation is laggy, easy to manipulate, and easy to bypass.
> warranties
Insurance contracts are even harder to analyze for quality than cars, so you have replaced a small problem with a big problem.
> Miele dishwasher.
I am glad you are happy, but I am not in a position to assess if there is wisdom in your happiness. In markets where I am in a position to analyze the wisdom in premium options... you have to pay a very high dollar premium for a very small edge in quality. Buying cheap and hoping for the best (70% 1x, 30% 2x) absolutely pummels buying premium in cost efficacy (90% 2x, 10% 4x), even though the cost premium to produce quality is small. In other words, "market for lemons" fits my observations of market price structure while "reputation and warranties are totally great" just doesn't fit the evidence.
"But that doesn't mean that a pre-existing information symmetry is necessary for an efficient market"
The literal textbook prerequisite for efficient market is not just informatuon symmetry, its perfect information. You shoupd know that if you are making 'free market can do no wrong' arguments.
Its like if all arguments about physics where made by 1st year university students that never moves beyond 'a hypothetical 100% efficient car on a frictionless surface hits another and has a perfectly elastic collision, what is the new velocity'
> The literal textbook prerequisite for efficient market is not just informatuon symmetry, its perfect information.
Please point me to that textbook.
Who says that free markets can do no wrong ever?
(I'm mostly saying that some markets might have some problems, sure. But most of the time most real world regulation dreamt up by real world politicians and implemented by real world civil servants etc is unlikely to improve them.)
> the business solution to this problem is fairly straightforward and profitable: reputation.
"Reputation" is yet more information that is both well known to and distorted by businesses. It's no kind of counterbalance to information asymmetry, it's just another example of it.
You seem to assume that businesses are some kind of mythical, omnipotent entities?
In contrast, for many of my needs, I find it relatively easy to buy high quality items even where there's a vast information asymmetry, as long as I am willing to shell out for products from companies with stellar reputations.
Granted that's neither foolproof nor applicable for every product or service. It can also get really expensive really fast.
But: given your comment, it sounds like that strategy shouldn't work at all, and even companies with ostensibly great reputations should sell me only trash?
> In contrast, for many of my needs, I find it relatively easy to buy high quality items even where there's a vast information asymmetry, as long as I am willing to shell out for products from companies with stellar reputations.
So it's not an efficient market because of the premium you have to pay for reputation.
"The efficient-market hypothesis is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information." from Wikipedia.
There is a huge price spread on nearly-identical products because people don't have enough information to determine which of the various supposedly equivalent products available are more reliable, efficient, safe, etc. and this is reflected in people spending more than necessary.
If, in fact, a particular brand was consistently more reliable than others but priced at a premium then with perfect information everyone would know this and a new manufacturer could introduce a similarly-reliable product at a price point within the spread and everyone would buy that instead.
> There is a huge price spread on nearly-identical products because people don't have enough information to determine which of the various supposedly equivalent products available are more reliable, efficient, safe, etc. and this is reflected in people spending more than necessary.
Information about a product is part of the whole package. It's ok that people pay extra for it.
You even get effects like what you describe in some of the most efficient markets. Eg aluminum that's traded on the exchanges often sells for a different price than over-the-counter deals. See https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2014-11-20/the-go...
That doesn't mean that the market for aluminum is not 'efficient'. It's just a bit weirder than a naive look at the physical properties of the ostensible good, aluminum, would let you to believe.
Basically your critique says 'there's this subset of physical properties that is the same for two products, but they sell for different prices; hence the market must be inefficient'. But products aren't always made up of their physical properties alone.
Eg suppose I have a business selling sheets of paper with the winning lottery numbers of five years in the future. This is a product with a lot of information asymmetry: you can only judge its quality five years after buying it. To make it more extreme, assume that my predictive powers aren't quite so awesome: I can't divine guaranteed winners, I merely manage to produce lottery numbers that are a thousand times more likely to win than your average number. Still a useful product, but even harder to judge by individual customers.
Now a competitor springs up who sells the same sheets of paper with numbers printed on them. It's just that my competitor's numbers are no better than chance.
The physical properties of the paper and ink are exactly the same. They even use the same font. A lab couldn't tell them apart.
Would you insist that both suppliers' products should sell for the same price?
Now assume that I don't even print my own sheets: I just buy them in bulk from the other supplier, but I only resell the sheets that have the increased chances.
Now the sheets really are identical, and the only difference is my reputation for quality.
I hold that an efficient market will have different prices for this ostensibly identical goods.
> If, in fact, a particular brand was consistently more reliable than others but priced at a premium then with perfect information everyone would know this and a new manufacturer could introduce a similarly-reliable product at a price point within the spread and everyone would buy that instead.
> Now the sheets really are identical, and the only difference is my reputation for quality.
The information I value isn't related to the product you are selling, however, unless you also run the lottery (which would lead me to be highly suspicious). I'd pay roughly the same price for the same information on any medium, and it would be directly related to your reliability and not your reputation. E.g. you may have a reputation as a soothsayer, wizard, Oracle, or be named Omega but I will not bid more than the value of the lottery times your predicted accuracy (assume you sell only one prediction per lottery at auction, and your accuracy is the ratio of correct predictions to total predictions sold, to ignore the effect of multiple buyers+winners). Your brand reputation is your accuracy, not pieces of paper.
The closest analog I can think of is paying for a subscription to Consumer Reports to determine which lightbulb lasts the longest, for example. The information is decoupled from both the products and the manufacturers; the MTTF of a particular run of lightbulbs is simply a property of the world to be discovered. Given that a Consumer Reports subscription is less costly than the price difference on a basket of goods from reputable brands vs. generic brands suggests that consumers are not reaping an accurately priced benefit from brand reputation.
My theory is that most customers/consumers don't have the time and energy to invest into microeconomics (or reading CR) and therefore can't achieve an efficient market in the same sense that you or I could, or that large organizations can. Microeconomics requires approximations of rational actors and most people are not, and therefore business strategies incorporate this information in their pricing and advertising.
Another example is Costco which has generous return policies, sells with lower margins than most retail stores, and still makes money. Clearly they must be incorporating more information than is available by brand reliability or they would lose money on returns or sales or both. Likewise, they are charging a nominal membership fee for the job of collecting and acting on information about product quality that is isolated from the actual pricing of the products they sell. In practice, they work with existing manufacturers to rebrand their products as Kirkland at a lower price than the brand name, directly exploiting the arbitrage. There's probably still a fairly moderate price spread but it becomes harder to exploit with the cost of additional research and risk of asking for prices that are too low from the Kirkland suppliers. To survive (and thrive) they only have to pick a price in the middle of the spread where their popularity still allows manufacturers to make a sufficient profit that they put up with the dilution.
Where the market fails is in the creation of new industries that are willing to invest in manufacturing and selling products in the spread between the lowest cost junk and Costco prices. There is still money to be made there but customers won't have enough information to know that it's the most efficient option for them. It's the difference between saving pennies or millipennies on production costs vs. additional months or years of reliability that people would pay an entire extra dollar for, but practically pay several more when trusting brand reliability.
Cellphones are devices that cost hundreds of dollars and gave a store on every other streetcorner that can repair them. Doing this to flashlights is just creating e-waste.
Your average company knows the average buyer is an idiot and will gladly burn the earth selling them junk. We had to heavily regulate the food industry to prevent bad actors from causing negative effects, looks like the same needs to happen with e-goods.
Are you suggesting that it might be just coincidental that companies stopped putting chalk dust in milk at about the same time that doing so became illegal?
What? Do you have some specific argument that you want to make against food industry regulations, or are you just trying to point out logical fallacies?
As people get richer, they can and will afford better food, including from suppliers with better reputation.
As people get richer, they also often tend to demand stricter regulation, but that doesn't necessarily mean the regulation is the driving factor.
The Chinese market for eg baby formula might be a good example. On average, baby formula consumed in China today is less dodgy than it was in the past.
A big part of that is because everyone in China who can afford to will use imported baby formula. Places like Australia haven't really changed their regulation much, but their products made up a larger share of the Chinese market over time, just because more Chinese became rich enough.
In parallel, driven by the same public sentiment that drives the import business, Chinese authorities have enacted stricter and stricter regulation for local baby formula.
In this case, consumer preference is driving a move towards higher quality. Competition from overseas suppliers is a key factor in helping consumers vote their preferences with their wallets. Regulation plays a trailing role at best.
Of course, when you look back in a few decades and compare the quality of baby formula in 1990 vs 2050 in China you will both notice an enormous increase in quality and increasingly strict regulation.
It will be very easy to spin the story that the regulation drove the increase in quality.
It might seem as if regulations did the change because the gov cares about its people, but it might be just the market working. There were alternatives, the economy suffered from people choosing Australian imports and losing trust in local products (and the gov, to a degree). Companies may have realized they shot themselves in the foot and already stopped putting asbestos in baby formula, but someone had to take the fall to restore optics.
Well yeah, laws are supposed to generally follow the will of the people as much as possible without seriously harming minority groups.
But without the regulation, the trust wouldn't be there, and people would use imported formula, and likely occasionally get contaminated stuff from fly by night vendors.
Grocery stores would probably refuse to stock the poison in some cases, but there might be more subtle contamination that went unnoticed.
Regulations are written in blood and there still seems to be cases of doing the legal minimum even when it's not enough to be safe. As far as I know there are plenty of coin cells with no bitter coating or childproof packaging.
> [...] there still seems to be cases of doing the legal minimum even when it's not enough to be safe.
But even more cases of companies going above and beyond the legal minimum, and customers who care will buy from those companies.
Eg it's perfectly legal to sell furniture with drawers that can catch and hurt the fingers of toddlers. But it's also perfectly possible to buy furniture that doesn't have this problem. (You can also buy kits to retrofit some of that protection.) Similarly for sharp corners on tables.
Are you suggesting that the wide availability of tables with sharp corners is a problem? That we need regulation to ban sharp corners on furniture?
Is the availability of tables that go beyond the legal minimum safety a problem for your world view?
The availability of tables that go beyond the minimum doesn't mean much to those who can't afford them.
I would imagine that at least kids furniture does have some fairly heavy regulations, and all furniture probably has some fire resistance laws or something.
Availability of tables with sharp corners becomes an issue when it starts affecting economies of scale. If some safety thing costs a few cents but for whatever reason is not available on the cheapest version, the market might or might not solve that, and the safer versions could be expensive for years to come.
Regulations aren't there to protect middle class people doing their research. They're to protect the weakest and most vulnerable who don't have time to research or money to buy anything better.
They're also to protect people who didn't choose furniture, like guests. It's about making an overall safer world.
Some level of balance is needed, but there are some things that most people are probably better off if they just don't exist, like a lamp that catches fire or baby formula that is made without strict controls, or cars without whatever the current modern safety assistance standard is based on the best evidence available.
A quick google shows that childrens products are in fact regulated by CSPC and can't have sharp stuff, among other requirements.
No, I'm saying if we ban seriously dangerous products, everything cheap and mediocre will become good enough and nobody(Or at least fewer people) will need the good products.
What does this mean? That people didn't swear off using smartphones entirely after every manufacturer decided that sealed-in batteries would sell more phones?
its simple - you are a decision maker, you need a higher power to approve of your decision, to show the people you were right. It used to be God, now its the market.
Before priests would help you veil your decisions in religious terms. Now economists help you veil them in economic terms.
When everything is going okay, tou can use that as divine approval for any random decision you made. When everything is going badly, you can blame it on any random decision you opponents made.
We look at a downturn after the pandenic as a sign of the divine entity, the market, being displeased. We attempt to applease the divine entity with human sacrifice, by throwing the poor to the wolves and cutting taxes.
Anyone that points out that we've been trying the same religious orthodoxy for 40 years with poor results gets labelled a heretic - a socialist.
Laptops are not an emergency item. when the power goes out I for one don't go immediately looking for my laptop. I look for my phone, and then immediately go looking for any flashlight, because I need to save as much power as possible until the power is back up.
Every year there's a hurricane, wherever it passes, a good amount of people will be out of power for maybe a week, If you cannot buy a battery in the corner store, you haven't bought a flashlight, you've bought a toy.
In my house, we hand candles and oil lamps instead of flashlights. To this day, I still have more candles than flashlights. A benefit of candles is most people are okay with them being part of the decor and visible where flashlights/torches tend to be in a drawer and maybe the batteries are still good when needed.
We would, since I'd argue most people (hence, "the market") find having sealed batteries "acceptable", or, at least, not reason enough to not buy the product.
Most of the people I know replace their phones often enough that it doesn't seem to be a problem, and usually the battery isn't the issue. They mostly break them / get stolen / they just want the new shiny.
Thep problem with Market Extremists, is they they are so high on their own supply, they do not notice when they make statements that outright contradict the real world we live in. They live in a separate fantasy land, just like communists do.
Fist falsifiable statement about e-waste policies - if it is so easy to read a company's e-waste policy, could you tell me which companies had policies that said "we will ship this waste to Indonesia and Africa, where it will de dumped without reprocessing and poison children'? If companies are so open about this information, and they want consumers to have a choice, then why do they send armed goods to beat up journalists investigating E-waste supply chain? If I buy a phone from a company that says 'we fully reprocess every single atom' and then it turns out they don't, why do they not go to jail for fraud?
Second falsifiable statement - 'people find having sealed batteries "acceptable" - this claim is not difficult to check - have you ever asked people on the street what they think about this? Have you looked at polls? Majorify of people prefer removable batteries.
Concerning the second, I would also tend to agree, but I'd argue that both can be true.
Most people don't solely buy a phone or other device based on the battery.
I would personally prefer a phone with a user-replaceable battery. But I don't prefer it enough as to be the most important thing when buying a phone.
I prefer an iPhone enough (for its other characteristics) compared to a cheap Android phone that I'll accept the non-replaceable battery. Hell, even if the latest Galaxy Sx had a replaceable battery, I'd still buy an iPhone with a non-user replaceable battery. However, if I had the choice between a regular iPhone and one with a user-replaceable battery (even if it were thicker), I'd buy the latter. But I won't go without an iPhone just because of the sealed battery.
Why? Because I prefer using iOS. And during the more than five years that I've had my iPhone 7, when the battery started being "degraded", I rode my bike to the closest Apple repair shop and had it replaced for the price of a Galaxy S5 battery. Again, I would have preferred to be able to do it myself, and be able to carry a spare battery when riding my motorbike in the middle of nowhere. But not enough that I'll buy an Android phone with a user-replaceable battery.
Flashlights with replaceable batteries are readily available (and almost surely dominate the flashlight market). If that’s true, anyone buying a flashlight with a non-replaceable battery has genuinely determined it’s acceptable (to include irrelevant) for their use case.
Every smartphone I’m aware of has had a replaceable battery and I’ve personally done replacements on about 2/3 of them. (I tend to buy 2 year old phones at a significant discount to original cost, meaning I replace more batteries than someone who buys new and upgrades every one to two years.)
This is basically a fantasy, chaims about how well you are paying your workers and how natural and recycleable are the products never resulted in fraud charges.
Sadly, I found many other devices are also designed to become trash. The battery in my Philips Sonicare toothbrush not only can’t be replaced — it’s fixed so firmly inside that the manual says you have to take a hammer to it just to throw it away (because batteries can cause trash fires). “The battery is firmly placed, in a water-resistant handle, to ensure safety, durability, longevity and robust performance,” says Philips.
It makes me sad to see them claiming waterproofing as the reason, when the art of sealing easily disassembled components has already been perfected over many centuries... the other comment here mentions flashlights, another object of a similar shape which does often come in a waterproof version with replaceable batteries. I have no doubt they could design an electric toothbrush which is both waterproof and has replaceable batteries; they just don't want to, because they'd rather you buy a whole new one.
Adding to the irony, water ingress and resulting damage often occurs to them anyway, but not at the bottom where they seal in the batteries; instead, water gets in around the shaft seal and then corrodes the insides from the top. Once again, it would probably be an easy task to make a better seal design, but that would cost just a tiny bit more than they'd like.
It's bizarre to me that P&G (Oral-B) seemed to have figured this out where Philips couldn't. Granted the batteries still aren't user-replaceable, but their manual at least doesn't tell you that you have to be a "qualified professional" to safely dispose of a toothbrush, and battery removal is a lot more straightforward than requiring a hammer.
If you have to be a qualified professional to ensure that a brush is disposed of the right way, well, that's a good way to ensure that they won't be disposed of the right way.
I have a disposable electric toothbrush. The bottom just screws off to reveal the bottom half of a AAA battery. (An O-ring keeps it dry) I'm pretty sure with a little finagling I could swap out the battery. Now if only someone could figure out how to make the top replaceable.
I've made AirPods last longer than any other pair of earbuds I've ever had.
It's the cord. For me, a max of six months of fiddling with the damn thing and it breaks.
I've had real headphones last quite a bit longer— but I buy the ones with replaceable cords. The pair I still have is on its fourth cord and second pair of muffs.
I don't view it as any sort of economic, human, or environmental catastrophe, that they stop holding a charge after... how long again? I've had a pair of Pros since before the pandemic which seem to hold up fine.
So I'm around what, twenty cents a day? It's a rare day I don't wear them for a solid hour.
It undermines the argument to pick the easy, lazy, and really rather bad example that everyone else flocks to for some bizarre reason. It's genuinely hard to come up with a better product category for glued-in batteries than in-ear wireless headphones.
Are you comparing these against Apple’s wired earphones? Because Apple’s cords are almost hilariously bad, and perhaps the best example of a product that’s designed to fail. (In fairness, they’ve improved somewhat over the years, but the bar was on the floor.)
Yeah I don’t get the environmental angle as well. It’s 10g, I’m sure there’s more lithium in a single AAA cell than 50 AirPods. Imagine how much more polluting a single dude in Texas rolling coal would do compared to everyone in Texas using AirPods.
There are services like this where you can exchange your Airpods for ones with replaced batteries! Note that I've never done it and can't vouch for the quality. I just read about it on HN once.
That's an interesting question, and I'd like an honest answer to that.
We've heard the same argument about phones, and my old Galaxy S5 with a user-replaceable battery was a whopping 0.5 mm thicker than an iPhone 13 mini. That's the width of a mechanical pencil lead. They're both water-resistant, too.
I said 0.5 millimeters. 0.5 inches is freaking huge, that's 1.25 cm. None of my smartphones have been that thick, let alone having that much of a difference.
Cable replaceability is why I love IEMs like Shure SE215. Earbuds hardly break, but the cable breaks eventually. Less waste, plus the ability to choose a different cable.
Yup. I have a pair of Shure earbuds bought in 2011. When the cable started acting out, I replaced it with a lightning cable, since I had just got an iPhone. When that one started acting out, I replaced it with a Shure BT cable. Now I get great sound from my crappy work laptop.
I think the smart thing to do now is to buy products with the fewest features as possible and has decoupled components like easily replaceable batteries. I've noticed that the dumber the device is, the longer it usually lasts. I'd rather buy an analog watch than a smartwatch. I'd rather have a dumb TV than a smart TV. I'd rather have a mouse with hot swappable batteries than one with a built-in charger.
Unfortunately, analog watches don’t allow me to leave my phone at home when I go for a run and let me listen to music, take phone calls, get directions, track my speed, etc.
Why not just go for a run? You don't need to "get directions" or "track speed"... you're running not driving. If someone calls you when you're out running, call them back when you get home!
I had a Garmin GPS watch for running a decade ago. Of course because of the technology at the time, it was a lot larger. Even back then I used it to track my pace when I was running.
Also heart rate based training isn’t a new concept. Neither is running to music. I’m running much shorter distances now - because age. But the only thing that made running half marathons tolerable was music.
Fair enough. So we have no choice but to buy all these products that deny right to repair, and/or make it difficult to keep for longer than the manufacturer's imposed artificial lifespan.
Let’s say I could easily replace the battery in my old iPhone 4s. What good would it do me when none of the cellular carriers support it?
My Apple Watch 3rd Gen also has a cell phone chip that one day will be obsolete. While the cellular version of the 3rd Gen Watch has 16GB of memory, the non cell version has 8GB and is already struggling with operating system updates.
As far as AirPods, if you have seen the tear down, it’s mostly a huge battery. Throwing away the battery and keeping the rest wouldn’t cut down on ewaste meaningfully even at scale.
Even if I could replace the battery of an x86 Mac easily, why would I want a laptop that sounds like a freight train when I open a few Chrome tabs, gets hot, has horrible battery life and is still slower than an M1 MacBook Air for $999 that beats it on all measures?
But let’s get back to the Garmin GPS watch example. Have you seen how big and bulky those things are compared to an Apple Watch. Do you think I would want to use that in 2022? I had to use a separate chest band to measure my heart rate. Now it’s built into the watch.
How can I measure my heart rate with it while I’m running? How can I do pace training? When I’m walking in a city I don’t want to take my $1200 iPhone out while I’m trying to find directions. I can just glance down at my watch.
I'm building a crowdsourced website that collects data about these "death dates" to fight planned obsolescence. http://ExitReviews.com is a database of broken or worn-out products to identify common stress points and how to fix them.
My favorite mouse is the logitech anywhere mx original. It runs for months in two AA batteries. They don't make these anymore and the newer ones all have built in lipo death clocks.
I try to buy all of my new electronics with this lesson in mind.
It looks approximately as difficult as changing the battery on a smartphone.
Knowing that the battery could be changed gave me the piece of mind to switch.
The battery management on the MXA 3 is really good - lasts a very long time and is quick to charge on USB-C. The Logi Bolt has been trouble-free. Changing to other devices via bluetooth is handy if you have multiple computers. The magnetic hyperscroll takes a little getting used to but uses a lot less force to switch modes.
I'll consider it, but I _really_ don't want to plug in a mouse to charge it, especially when I have to also use it. Wired mice drive me crazy (and did even before wireless was a thing). So I'd have to buy 2. And $80 a pop is hard to swallow, I bought all of mine for under $35 each.
And there's _still_ no USB-C unify receiver? Ugh.
There needs to be a DIY mouse-hacking community on par with the customized mechanical keyboard community.
I quite liked those as well, but I had to switch to something else after three failed due to the same problem. The thin plastic protrusions that press the microswitch plungers wear out, causing awful switch bounce and eventually an inability to hold the button down at all.
I've seen this one a couple of them, it's a known weakness. Some were made with poor quality microswitches. Interestingly, the very first one I bought is still my daily driver.
My Samsung TV has built-in apps for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Currently both of them fail with generic "oops, try again later" error messages despite things like YouTube working fine. My conspiracy theory is that they've just end-of-lifed the apps on that TV model and don't have the balls to tell me.
YouTube is famous for supporting really old stuff, Netflix doesn't both quite as much.
So, I have an original iPad Air from 2013. Apple is no longer providing updates, and Netflix has long stopped working. But Youtube keeps trucking on just fine. I assume thanks to heroic and soulsucking efforts by the developers.
(I remember when I did something as trivial as working on a few web frontends once, and how I loathed supporting anything but the most recent browsers. So supporting age old devices with Youtube is probably much, much more annoying for the devs.)
This is not simply an evil plot to squeeze money from consumers, there’s of course a tradeoff between price, product size and longevity.
A Macbook will easily last you 8 years, unless it has a butterfly keyboard, how many would be willing to pay extra for one that lasts 15 years? Or a phone that lasts 10?
When it comes to products with strong brands, people will quickly learn what the life expectancy is, so you can’t really fool them. If they break easily, people will atop buying them.
With generic gadgets like an electronic thermometer or something the incentives are different, it does make sense to have them break early.
Btw, I’ve used my AirPods pro for at least 2 hours every day since they were released and the battery is still pretty decent.
So a couple of months ago I bought a Yamaha Rex 50 digital effects unit from the 1980’s.
I opened it up for cleaning, to check the electrolytic capacitors (some need replacement) and to swap out lithium coin cell battery that backs up the user’s saved settings.
Since the battery was working, I assumed it had been replaced.
Nope, the working lithium coin battery has a date of November 1987 which is very early so far as I understand.
So it’s still there because if it’s still working after thirty five years, it will probably be working for the two or three years I can expect from a new battery.
It was refreshing to experience an engineering design driven by long reliability in a piece of digital electronics.
It's not the batteries that have changed, it's the circuitry. In older devices, batteries were required to power SRAM, which uses very little power (just leakage currents).
This has largely been replaced by flash memory, so if you see a battery in a modern device there's a good chance it's powering a real-time clock, which use a fair bit more power in comparison.
I'm sure there's a big difference between different implementations of this -- low power design is an art that's quite easy to get wrong.
I wonder if there is a market for higher end products that are truly built to last. Not so much things like cell phones (although I believe it should be mandatory that the batteries be easily replacable)... more like large appliances: refrigerators, washing machines, etc. Like, how hard would it be to separate all the little stupid useless features from the hardcore functional ones and make it so that things like control panels on washers are easy to replace when they malfunction?
Its an interesting idea as the biggest problem where I live is the cost of labour to repair.
By the time you get a serviceman out to take a look, order the part, come back and fix it the cost is approaching half that of a new machine.
I've fixed my espresso machine, washing machine and fridge with parts that are usually sub $50, but they wouldn't have been viable to fix if I had to get a serviceman in for it.
I'm not sure any of the repairs could have been made much easier, for example the front panel/MCU for my washing machine can be replaced in minutes, just remove about 6 phillips head screws to get the top and panel off, swap the connectors over, done.
I would happily buy a smartphone with replaceable battery, which will be surely available in 2-3 years, but those are just not made anymore. Europe mandated all the phones have USB-C charging capability in two years. Maybe it's time to standardize batteries too?
Consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 or Pinephone, which are designed to be repairable and have lifetime software updates. The batteries are replaceable and should be available for a long time, too.
I got myself Pinephone (not Pro) in December 2021. It was mostly unusable but very basic functions (make calls, send/receive SMS) out of the box at the time. Telegram client was very slow, Firefox had screen size problems, notifications were a mess. I think I should've tried to install another OS/env image, but alas I had no time for it. It was a nice try though, and I was impressed how far things got in mobile Linux ecosystem. Maybe something changed from the time, maybe Pro version is somehow better, but for now I think I'll abstain from experimenting for another year. Also, Serbia, where I am in right now, is notoriously bad with the procedure of receiving goods from abroad.
I'm using Pinephone with Mobian as a daily driver. Installing Mobian is as simple as writing iso to a microSD card and inserting it. Telegram and Firefox are somewhat slow but generally work reliably. Noscript helps a lot.
Car parts fail reliably enough that the manufacturer tells you when you should replace parts of the car at regular intervals. They don't tell you the car will last forever, it's clearly in a constant state of breaking down. Electronics manufacturers should be just as honest.
I think it's pretty funny when people pay more for an electronics gadget than for a used Honda Civic, and the Civic outlasts the gadget by 10 years (with maintenance). And the Civic's electronics, ironically, usually don't need maintenance.
Electronics don’t fail reliably though. The vast majority of electronic failures are due to excessive mechanical stress that varies from user to user.
The failures we can predict (like batteries) have gotten more attention, admittedly, but by and large it’s my experience that the actual electronic components don’t fail. The only wear part in most modern devices is the battery.
Pft, and capacitors leaking, and the lack of security patches and defects from coil whine and thermal expansion...
This is the tip of a very large iceberg. I'd love to see it fixed, but id rather we don't forget the other problems just because we're taking about the battery issue...
(And while we're on that one this covers electronic cars as well. But I guess some people believe that replacing a car every 10 years is somehow green efficient and makes up for a whole new car being ripped out of the ground somewhere in the 3rd world)
> But buying gear with batteries sealed inside is kind of like buying a car where you can’t change the tires. We just don’t realize we’re doing it, or how it’s contributing to our climate and sustainability crises.
Changing tires is better than throwing away a car whose tires are worn out, but it's not without impact. Tires don't recycle into anything useful; there are only so many bouncy playgrounds you can build from shredded tire rubber.
Pretty much anything engineered (buildings, bridges, electronics, houses, ...) have a death date. Any civil engineering projects I've been a part of have always had a quantified project lifetime. We _could_ build things that lasted hundreds of years, but the cost would be astronomically high and demand would change in that timeline.
Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. This confuses me greatly.
I played my SNES for maybe 25 years or whatever. I see no reason why such longevity should be an exception.
Anyway, I also complain about planned obsolescence in other areas: TVs, fridges, washers, etc. A friend of mine uses 50+ year old fridges and cars. They still run fine, though the cars are a death trap.
I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a gradient or pendulum, and we’ve swung too far towards the wasteful side of things in my opinion.
I'd be pretty unhappy if an engineer built a bridge that could have lasted 100 years if they hadn't cheaped out and saved $10 by using plastic instead of metal for some component, halving its life expectancy. Or if they put components next to each other which really shouldn't be, unnecessarily increasing failure rates. Or if they built a bridge where you couldn't replace any component without blowing part of it up.
It is.. Civil engineers have the opportunity to design for quality in their specs and drawings. If they don't it means the client is getting a raw deal or the client optioned for a cheaper engineering solution.
It's simply because the dates are not disclosed to the buyers. On the contrary, for a bridge, the lifetime is very clear to everyone involved in the construction.
I just rebuilt a lithium ion pack on my parents dustbuster (handheld cordless vacuum), they loved that thing but it was down to only a few minutes of battery life. Black & Decker refuses to sell replacement packs, and once you open one of the packs up it's easy to see why. All the brains of the vac are on the controller board on the battery pack. The rest is really just plastic, a switch, and a motor. My guess is the replacement cost of a pack would be about the same as a whole new unit, so they just don't make them for it.
I bought a cheap spot welder ago on Amazon some years ago for re-celling packs. I bought the highest rated high output Molicel 18650's and it took about 5 minutes to spot weld them in with some nickel. Vac is now better than new, runs for a half hour or more on a charge. Probably will be good for years unless something else breaks in it.
Planned obsolescence for electronics is a recent development in terms of human history. My parents remember times where hardware was incredibly reliable and could've bought electronics and products that lasted for decades.
Nowadays there are deliberate design decisions in every product that cause these things to break down before their time.
There has been planned obsolescence in human economic activity whenever it could be made advantageous to do so.
You also discount the increasing capability of electronics, which in many cases involve including more or more complex circuitry, which reduces the lifespan. You can certainly design for reliability, but this generally increases the cost, and consumers almost always opt for the cheaper product.
The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel).
>The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel).
Not true. Entire industries can move in lock step without formation of a cartel. Phones, cars and fashion is one example. All of the aforementioned products are designed with planned obsolescence in mind.
It's sort of a behavioral phenomenon, the same way a flock of birds stays synchronized in the sky. Additionally, competing Companies in industries can still deliberately design things that fail earlier without losing profit margins simply because humans are too myopic to judge the difference between a phone that fails in 8 years vs. one that fails in 3.
I am probably in the minority but I usually run my electronics into the ground and I have never had a battery fail or die permanently. I have always thought that the argument about planned obsolescence as it pertains to hardware was a bit blown out of proportion.
While not necessarily planned, electronics often fail too soon. Sometimes they just wear out.
Just this weekend my five year old NAS died because of a CPU flaw. AV receivers seem to last about 6 years before something fails (usually the HDMI board seems to fail). Wireless access points get worse after 4 or 5 years of use (I’ve been told the amplifiers wear out). It’s frustrating.
USB-C has solved about half the power adapter problem and could solve most of the rest with some more adoption.
Why do we not have universal batteries? In fact, we could probably just use USB-C directly. We are good enough at making small things that we could just choose a standard size, lile a Gopro battery, power bank form factor, with a male C connector sticking out one side.
Would it be slightly wasteful to throw out the whole pack with all the electronics? Yeah kinda, but better than throwing out a whole device. Plus, it would guarantee any battery powered device can be run without a battery at all plugged into the wall.
Failing that, they can just design a new futureproof chemistry-independant smart battery from complete scratch.
A slightly tangential question for those in the know: how do consumers destroy their data?
If I've got a busted HDD or a dead tablet — anything which is holding data that I can't electronically destroy — who do I give it to?
The office supply shops have paper shredding. The municipal recycling centers will take stuff, and so will the electronics stores, but they all carry disclaimers about data privacy.
I've considered visiting my local police station where they store confiscated property and just tip it into a public trash can.
I suppose that the City's service would be safe enough. Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data?
I've taken old HDDs to a commercial shredding service. They have a special shredder for electronics and will let you watch your drives/tablets/etc being destroyed. I think it is a pretty common service, there are quite a few places that do this in my city. Does get expensive if you have a bunch, though.
No one, you do it yourself. Here's what works for personal devices.
- Hard drives: Open them up with a screwdriver, then physically smash the platters with the pointy end of a hammer. The platters easily shatter into a thousand pieces, very little force required. Use a plastic bag to contain the pieces. For newer models, also smash the cache chips on the logic board.
- SSDs / flash storage: disassemble the case, then smash the memory chips with a hammer.
- CDs/DVDs: break them a few times, ideally use a shredder if you have one that's strong enough. Make sure the metal foil is sufficiently destroyed.
- Tapes: take out the tape itself, then carefully shredder lengthwise or just burn it.
- anything with batteries in it: remove the battery first.
- anything with device specific cloud service accounts: delete the data and close the account if you won't be using it anymore, so it can't leak data if it gets hacked in the future.
>Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data?
Physically no. Especially don't trust anybody telling you you can trust them. You have to do it yourself or at the very least watch it with your own eyes. There are commercial services that physically shredder hard drives and documents, these should let you watch so you can verify the destruction yourself.
My first smartphone was the Motorola Atrix 4G, which I bought around may 2012. Removable battery, first fingerprint scanner, great pixel density for that era. It was cool and I took care of it as much as I could.
But the 365th day after I bought it, WiFi and Bluetooth stopped working. All of a sudden. WiFi chip was built with a death date.
On the other hand, the next phone I bought lasted with me for more than 7 years - until I accidentally dropped it and crashed with an acute metal surface. Only the screen died but I used it as an excuse to got a new phone, but now I fear phones now aren't designed nor built to last that much.
"Dustbuster" type vacuums, internal unreplaceable batteries that will maybe last two years before they won't hold a charge. Just buy a mini shopvac with an extension cord.
As much as I dislike Dyson (the man), the batteries are nothing to complain about. I have two cordless vacuums from 6 and 10 years respectively, both working fine with their original batteries, and with replacements trivially available and replaceable.
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.
How about we mandate user replaceable batteries (with some kind of wording to make it easy enough for normal humans with no glue and connectors that don't snap easily). Once upon a time I had an HTC Evo 4G that I could do this with.
Mandating that they admit the death date seems to be baking in some level of stockholm syndrome.
How is producing tons and tons of e waste each year and having you spend an extra few hundreds every single year unnecessarily is something you’d prefer to keep on doing?
And it’s not like the alternative would prevent you from doing it. You could still throw your phone away every couple of year and buy the new incarnation of you really wanted to still set your money on fire. It would take nothing away from you but make everyone else’s life a little better. I don’t get it.
we haven't 'voted' we aren't given any options and companies have figured out that not enough of us will rebel that they can maximize their profits by planned obsolescence and externalizing the problem of their electronic waste.
Stop trying to make hardware last forever. Who here would like to use hardware from 2017? iPhone x anyone? The lifetime of these devices is defined by the reasonable update schedule of the consumer, which is based on moores law. 5 years is a reasonable update schedule. Then put one in a museum and live in the now. You get this much time forget the nostalgia https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/months.html
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.
Yes the lightbulb conspiracy and planned obsolescence. Here’s why that’s no longer a threat; it’s bad business. It’s a PR nightmare, and totally unnecessary. For instance my last (17 inch) MBP lasted a full decade including the battery without any service required. In fact it became a problem for me in that I was waiting for it to break so I could go by a new one. Apple learned that having products with planned obsolescence was bad for business and just stopped doing it. Other manufactures are still learning that, sure. But Apple simply ends updates to macOS for certain models and the user can decide if they want to keep running what they have, or update. Because what you’re really purchasing is software and updates, not the hardware. The hardware is just the packaging it is delivered in.
So what about those companies that still include planned obsolescence? You need to vote with your money. Simply don’t buy their product. If you do, if you’re fooled twice, that’s on you.
>Apple learned that having products with planned obsolescence was bad for business and just stopped doing it.
This is False.
Apple is one of the companies that completely buys into planned obsolescence. They never stopped doing it. They still do it and they practically invented it for iphones and ipads.
If other phone companies are doing planned obsolescence then they most likely learned it from apple. Apple is one of the leaders of this concept.
>So what about those companies that still include planned obsolescence? You need to vote with your money. Simply don’t buy their product.
This doesn't account for how humans are irrational. Tons of irrational people buy shit without knowing their part of an irrational obsolescence cycle (aka you). For example, back in the day, apple shortened the lifetime of their phones by not allowing the battery to be replaced. Yet people still buy apple phones EVEN when OTHER companies offered phones with replaceable batteries.
Now the entire industry glues their batteries inside the phone. Apple is paving the way for planned obsolescence and irrational consumers buy in without ever realizing it. Consumers vote with their money the same way they voted for Trump.
>If you do, if you’re fooled twice, that’s on you.
If you buy apple products and you think they don't do planned obsolescence. Jokes on you.
You cite no evidence. I have the opposite experience first hand. Phone manufactures have been copying Apple since the iPhone because they have no sense of innovation whatsoever. The batteries are cheaply replaceable, just not as easily. But your average Jo doesn't want to take a class in watchmaking to change a phone battery, he’ll work an extra shift and drop it at the Apple store.
No people aren’t irrational in groups, they simply don’t want to preserve their products more than 5 years. They want to upgrade. Don’t care about supporting the used market. There’s no incentive. They get their money’s worth and move on. These are transient objects for humans passing through their years. A useful novelty, a pleasant experience, that’s all they want.
And not accepting a democratically elected official; again they voted for what was perceived to be in their interests. Trump incentivized. There was no mistake.
>These are transient objects for humans passing through their years. A useful novelty, a pleasant experience, that’s all they want.
There is huge drive to position the products in this way. Consumers including you are manipulated to think this way for products that traditionally aren't thought of this way. It has become so ingrained that you can't tell the difference.
Also you know that video I sent you about the light bulbs? That was just the first part. The Video is about planned obsolescence in general and it talks about APPLE. Watch the whole thing.
So what if it is true? Let’s take Apple’s flagship product the MacBook Pro @ $2500 USD. Now assuming a five year service that’s $500 a year, perfectly reasonable for a daily driver. What is that $1.35 per day. You want to benefit from this technology you’re going to need to compensate the people who design build and maintain it. They could easily charge an order of magnitude more to professionals.
I mean where did this fantasy come from that you’d benefit from hundreds of years of work for a couple thousand bucks? And that it would last forever and be maintained and updated by the manufacturer forevermore? What is this utopian dream you’ve dreamt up? Why don’t you take a pile of sand and a pool of oil and a lump of aluminum and go make your very own laptop? Oh right, you can’t do it without other people.
I'm using and developing on a 2013 MBA, thank you. Phones become obsolete because the underlying tech has been going through large changes, but I can certainly get more than 5 years out of them. To top it off, I live in an affluent country. Imagine those countries where a $500 phone is a gigantic deal.
I am just about to leave my iPhone SE first generation. That was 2016 when it was released. I probably bought it around 2017. It's absolutely fine, when it works.
But now the display is getting weirdly jagged at random, odd reboot loops, and so forth. Time ... to die.
Five years, a little more than your average replicant. It's still delightful for my use. The replacement will be larger and will cost me money I would rather spend on other things. With the protective case and the Applecare and the ablative glass addition, my fondleslab will run me over a couple hundred a year, if I include my data plan. I would like just a little more life, father.
How about forcing companies to do being so wasteful with badly, badly oh so badly written software.
Sure advances happen but nearly nobody _needs_ the equivalent of avx2048 on a phone.
Windows XP lasted almost an entire generation in computing terms. Sure it probably wasn't the most fun thing to work on by the time it was retired but Microsoft kept that going as the 64bit era launched and pcie and x86 multicore became the norm. Saying it can't be done is just excusing not wanting to go back and fix things or maintain stuff.
At this point, I only buy Apple products because of inertia. Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago.
This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed, whether as a company or individual, you have to convince people to part with something called money they have been programmed to avoid parting with as much as humanly possible... in other words, you succeed not based on the value of what you produce (because wage work's actual cost is literally a rounding error) if you are better at transactions in a zero-sum game than others are. We probably need for money to exist, because trade wouldn't work without it, and because we're still a hundred years or more from true post-scarcity communism, but having a whole society run on an operating system of zero-sum transactions has some pretty clear negatives--neither the smallest nor the worst of which is tech waste--even if it's not always evident how best to fix this. Companies are going to keep producing short-lived crap because it's good for sales, because ultimately anything other than "good for sales" cannot be afforded under this particular economic system where something is either sold or it dies.
I was in the similar situation. I've used linux on workstation in 00s, but since around 2012 been using corporate Macbooks mostly.
My recent experiment with moving to the cheapest Thinkpad (E14 Gen 3, the one with AMD) was successful and using it for personal projects makes me very happy. I bought the cheapest configuration and added some RAM and the second (!) NVMe disk to install linux in addition to windows (nice to have, but downgraded it to win10 from 11). Linux is so much stable and overall better than macos and windows.
I think quite a lot of Windows laptop works fine with Linux nowadays? Perhaps not out-of-the-box, but they works fine after installing the OS manually (which doesn't really take much time TBH). I'm not sure what software you need for work, but if they are open source they are usually fine with Linux (iirc Mac exclusive projects usually have alternatives) . For cloud stuff, I don't know what you are using so can't really comment about it.
I'm using a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 with a Ryzen 7, which works fine, battery lasts for more than 6 hours if I am not doing computationally intensive work, not as good as a Mac but works for me. The heat is also fine, the fan is not too loud and it doesn't run usually.
6 hours of battery life is less than one third of the low end MacBook Air. Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of Electron apps like Teams and Slack. It doesn’t take much to tax an x86 based laptop. Chrome is also a notorious battery hog.
It’s nice to be able to treat my laptop like I’ve been treating iPads for a decade - a portable device that you don’t have to worry about running out of battery during a day of normal use.
You can tweak a laptop’s energy settings so that it has comparable battery life whether it’s running windows or Linux. But no, a laptop that has 8h of runtime in windows won’t magically get 20h in Linux.
I would be lucky if my Thinkpad X1C6 would get the same battery life in Linux as it did in Windows. It usually does well, if I don't open the web browser.
As such, despite running 5.18, Wayland, Firefox, "latest nonfree version of ffmpeg with actual 264 codecs," etc etc etc, GPU accelerated decoding of videos is still too much to ask for in FF or MPV. VLC sometimes does it. Sometimes - usually after making sure I have a version of ffmpeg that actually supports the codecs I want to decode.
I'm still following an ever deeper series of guides on how to enable ASIC decoding for videos.
This is across a few distros (Pop_OS, Fedora Silverblue [using both the bundled FF and the flatpak variant from flathub - not just the Fedora flatpak], Tumbleweed), and it has long been the same story.
On my desktop, I have simply regressed to letting FF/MPV/VLC take an extra 15W of power to render a video. On my laptop, I still am trying to find a solution, since it can hardly spare that extra power consumption.
What codec did you try? I'm using Firefox on Linux as well, but hardware decoding seems fine, power consumption reported by powertop is not too high (1.5W?).
On tumbleweed, I've tried the VLC repo's ffmpeg for h264, packman, and now opi codecs. The first and third seem to work for VLC.
On Silverblue, I don't recall the exact steps, only that I gave up and just used "enhanced h264ify" to disable h264, in favor of vp9. This still breaks many other websites that use h264, but at least youtube mostly works. Mpv flatpak works, so I just use mpv to render the h264-only videos that youtube still has. Of course, this is one area where snaps has the edge of flatpak, IMO - nice default aliases in the terminal, instead of 'flatpak run io.Mpv.mpv https://youtu.be/watch.......' or having to create my own, or having to use another program to do it.
What software do you need for you work? Assuming you're a software developer, and unless you're doing something Apple-specific, it's hard to think of software that works on Mac but doesn't work on Linux. As far as options go, I picked up a System76 earlier this year and I've been surprisingly happy with PopOS.
Even if you are a developer, you often have to interact with non-developers using either Microsoft or Apples Office suites. Some people really hate using web-based office tools, and for good reason.
(I develop on Linux, and use Office 365 without too much trouble but it's far from perfect)
>Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago
It seems to be a lottery with the earlier XPS laptops (hardware-wise), but I have a 2020 model and it's been very good. I'm definitely interested in my next laptop being an XPS. I bought one that came with Windows and installed Ubuntu on it and it's great. The only thing I haven't tried is the fingerprint reader.
I’d really like to switch from Windows to Linux, but the software situation seems like a real problem. According to ProtonDB, a third of the top 1000 games have issues on Linux, and popular creative software (Affinity, Ableton) is right out.
I use Linux 95% of the time. When a game doesn’t work in Linux, I simply reboot into windows. Same with my CAD package that will never run in Linux (or a VM for that matter).
I did the dualboot thing for a couple of years, but it's a hassle to have to close all your open windows, tabs, documents etc. These days I'd rather just run a single OS.
This, or have some kind of suspend mode on steroids where everything is back like you left it when rebooting. Kinda like being able to hibernate windows and Linux when rebooting into the other.
I would mostly consider that law to be a good idea. But suppose I want to leave a temperature sensor on a mountainside somewhere, or attach a depth sensor to a walrus. Those are cases where I tend to suspect that it might be better for the manufacturer to have a lot of freedom as to the form of the object, and an expected lifetime after which the nonreplaceable battery dies may be the best of all possible worlds.
Like with GDPR where people imagined all sorts of situations ad absurdum (the grocer on the corner not being allowed to ask for your birthday anymore to give you a yearly free product or some such), these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
> these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
As is usually the case with legislation, the text of the law will support whatever reading you'd like to assign to it. If you're a booster for the legislation, you are free to claim that it doesn't have any problems. If you're not, there are some readily observable problems.
> [definition] (23) ‘appliance’ means any electrical or electronic equipment, as defined by Directive 2012/19/EU, which is fully or partly powered by a battery or is capable of being so
> Article 11
> 1. Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at the end of the lifetime of the appliance.
> A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance of that appliance.
> 2. The obligations set out in paragraph 1 shall not apply where
> (a) continuity of power supply is necessary and a permanent connection between the appliance and the portable battery is required for safety, performance, medical or data integrity reasons; or
> (b) the functioning of the battery is only possible when the battery is integrated into the structure of the appliance.
> 3. The Commission shall adopt guidance to facilitate harmonised application of the derogations set out in paragraph 2.
So the law literally says "(1) all appliances must use removable, replaceable batteries, UNLESS (2) that would be bad, AND (3) we promise we will eventually set a standard for when it would or wouldn't be bad". But that hypothetical future standard is not part of the law. And we can't honestly say that "don't do something, unless you have a good reason" is a law that can actually be implemented. It will misidentify bad reasons as good reasons while punishing good reasons.
Yes because a 99 section 11 chapter law whose only affect is to make the web worse with cookie banners everywhere is a model of government effectiveness.
This is what I mean: apparently even tech people still don't know the basics of GDPR.
If it were common knowledge that cookie walls are not required for any normal website operation or statistics keeping, but only a thing required for invasive tracking, then any website introducing one would face questions and media attention rather than it being the norm. The law requires cookie walls exactly nowhere, it requires to ask for consent before doing something you have no valid reason for doing.
There are 5 defined valid reasons, including "it's in the subject's interest" and "it's in our legitimate interest" and stuff like that. O-n-l-y if you can't shove it under any of those, then you need to fall back to politely asking the subject you want to track. Every cookie wall is in this category. We really shouldn't be accepting this, but try educating half a billion people speaking thirty languages who have better things to do. It's not even well-known among the tech community, which continuously surprises me. Maybe we need to outlaw consent that is not part of a bigger contract (so a random website visit, not like research or so), maybe we need to have big website owners set better examples... I don't know.
But anyway I guess I was more interested in the new battery law rather than hosting my fourtieth hacker news gdpr misconceptions session, as I've not yet read the actual legal text of the former.
Maybe it’s the fault of the EU for making the GDPR so complicated?
All a private company - Apple - had to do was create a 5 line rule change and add a setting to iOS and it the entire ad tracking industry including Facebook announced billions in losses.
Well Apple could enforce a single settings to drive all apps. The equivalent would be EU mandating by law a centralised privacy setting on browsers to state we only allow necessary cookies. That might come but some companies would have been kicking and screaming even more.
And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could have been a simple $5 replacement cord is now "replace the entire converter" and is now $30 if you try to find a third-party and pray they're not a fraud, or $50 from the manufacturer. Meanwhile at perfectly good converter (sans cord) is landfill.
But lo and behold: the brick-to-wall cord is detachable. And funny that, that one never breaks…