Talk:Planned obsolescence/Archives/2015

Joseph Stalin

Had the right idea about what to do with wreckers like this! Zaphraud (talk) 23:59, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

This is an interesting aspect in that it would be nice for the article to have a legal section, specify juristictions and laws which forbid this type of fraud, and notable class action cases which won in some such instances 76.10.128.192 (talk) 16:35, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

The "Future of…" section is about a law in France criminalizing designs that cause products to break quickly, but I don't think this is a good treatment of the issue. It appears to just paraphrase a somewhat sensationalist article. This is more space than the one event deserves, and not a very good report of it. I'm not sure if my tags describe my complaints exactly, but for now I'll just tighten up the writing. Gary the Icebreaker (talk) 20:23, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

DRM

This would need citations and some editing work (if it's documented enough), but some DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems are designed to support planned obsolescence and revocation. In the case where such systems don't explicitely support this, this also happens as a consequence when a device fails and it's impossible to recover purchases which could not be transfered to other devices in a usable state (although there has been some effort by some media distributors (after customer pressure) to permit unencrypted purchases and/or permit synchronization with a desktop, with support to restore the content to a future device of the same brand)... 76.10.128.192 (talk) 16:32, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Some mention of how Circuit City's no-return DivX (Digital video eXpress) DVD rental system had a system whereby if the company decided to pull the plug it could command all the special players to permanently unlock for all DivX discs - but when they did shut it down they elected NOT to use the "un-kill switch", thus making permanently un-useable all the DivX discs that had not been unlocked to "Silver" status - which permanently unlocked them on *one* player. DivX also had a never used "Gold" unlock which would make all the players able to play a specific disc. Likely that wasn't used due to a limited memory for unlocked discs serial numbers. Bizzybody (talk) 07:47, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Non-support

Does failure to make available software or other complementary products that make a device useful constitute 'planned obsolescence'?

By 2014 classical music (and classical music is a huge market in music) available on compact discs has practically vanished from the market. If the music is to be disseminated one must rely upon dealings in used compact discs or in copies... or on some new technology (like pay-per-use) that is more expensive. Such is apparently not done with pop or country music.

Devotees of classical music tend to be older and more economically upscale, which may make the process tempting.Pbrower2a (talk) 01:21, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

A search on Amazon.com for CDs in the classical music section, format CD, gets me 302,641 results. Unless by 'the market' you mean your local music store (which obviously stocks chart music primarily, because it sells), I don't see how that equates to vanishing.

The other problem would be that a manufacturer of CD players does not decide if anyone actually prints CDs, so unless it were influencing music companies to abandon old formats prematurely, what they choose to do has nothing to do with that manufacturer. Herr Gruber (talk) 09:36, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Not making necessary software available so that a computer or device can be used is a form of not just planned but forced obsolescence. Some years ago I wanted to setup a small internet cafe using some old thin clients I'd picked up for free. They had to network boot off a server. I contacted the manufacturer, which would not sell me the operating software, nor could I have or buy any manuals or other information. They had one page on the model in a "legacy" section but the list of formerly available upgrades and add-ons (with part numbers) was in an image they'd deleted - and the company had the Web Archive delete that image from their site. Other than somehow obtaining software and information from someone with functioning systems, the company had ensured their old products were completely useless. In short "Piss off. Buy our latest product." So I didn't, not when they would just repeat this forced obsolescence in another year or two. In over 30 years of working on and with computers I've met this many times, often where manufacturers would destroy/delete all copies of manuals and software and remove all website mention of a discontinued product on the very day they called it End Of Life. A few would go so far as to disavow ever making a product despite it having their name, address and phone number printed/engraved/molded on it. Exceptionally irritating were a few times I obtained a thing *the day after* it went EOL to find that the day before was 'doomsday' for all the software etc. "Oh, *that* thing. We no longer support *that*. You should buy this new thing..." Bizzybody (talk) 07:41, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

You can't expect manufacturers to keep everything around forever just in case someone wants to use it. Ford won't sell you parts for a Model T, either. Herr Gruber (talk) 08:05, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Intel's consumer grade solid state drives

Intel's consumer grade solid state drives are designed to brick themselves after a set number of writes or after a certain amount of "hard" (non-recoverable) errors. How many errors? Intel doesn't say. The number of writes is very high, in the petabyte+ range. For most users that amounts to several years of use. When a self-brick condition is met, the drive makes all data on it unreadable. Intel's commercial grade SSDs, for servers, datacenters etc, do not turn themselves into expensive bricks. They just slow write speed to a crawl as a prompt to get the data backed up before the number of write errors will exponentially increase. Intel recently released a middle range of SSDs, reviving the old hard drive on a card form factor. They're priced between their commercial and consumer versions and use the super slowdown instead of of bricking. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead Bizzybody (talk) 07:25, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Um...As your own article says, this behaviour is a fundamental fact of solid-state storage, and it is impossible to prevent it. The article notes that the Intel drive threw up a SMART warning long before it actually failed, that a Kingston drive had the same self-disabling behaviour (probably to prevent a more damaging failure while the system is in use) and that the drive is fully accessible until the next reboot, meaning data from it can be recovered. I would imagine slowing down writes would potentially be riskier since it would mean the drive continued operating past its limits and might fail entirely while still on, but it would be necessary in some commercial applications. So this is just designing things with specific markets in mind, I can't really see how this is self-limiting since the drive is failing at that point and as they noted it did so well after the manufacturer's stated limit for disk writes. Herr Gruber (talk) 08:03, 17 August 2015 (UTC)