It would be wonder if they last forever and easly could be repaired. Making it better to keep the car then buy a new one. It just need to be upgradedable to the latest standards that might be more safe, efficient and agree with current law.
But I am pretty that would never exist - too hard.
There’s not much room for improvement in terms of efficiency for EVs, except maybe lower rolling resistance tyres and better aero. You generally have to replace the whole car for better aero though unless you don’t mind having some bolt on mods 😂
Ok, but it might be in other areas. Example lets see someone invent very high efficiently on solar panels with no weight at all. Or lets get rid of rubber wheels and do sifi so the car can hover over the road.
Batteries capacity per m^3 and/or per KG is improving over time though, so that’s where the main reason to upgrade an EV would come from.
What about it’s batteries?
They are still chemical so they wouldn’t last forever.
Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.
Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.
So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.
I don’t think the wider population would accept the compromises necessary for a million miles vehicle. There is always a balance between component longevity, cost, performance, features, and safety.
They can exist but I don’t forsee wide adoption due to it being wildly expensive and/or bare bones in terms of contemporary features.
I think the big part with cars is people want the new shiny thing.
The only people I’ve ever met who didn’t trade in a for shiny and new were my fellow cheap bastardin’ mechanin’ types who just don’t care.
Plus, too many people think cars must be serviced at “stealerships”, and I’ve seen what those lying bastards tell people their cars need. Like a 2 year old Toyota with 25,000 miles needing $4000 of engine leak repairs. On an engine that Toyota has manufactured since the 80’s…they don’t leak, they don’t even die. Hell, they still use a timing chain rather than a belt, so that’s maintenance it’ll never need.
Csrs don’t need replacing anywhere near as often as most people replace them. As I said elsewhere - my current daily driver is 18 years old, everything still works. It’s required very little regular maintenance over its life. Transmission was replaced at 200,000 only because a cooling line leaked into the transmission, which destroys the clutches eventually (it went 50,000 miles after the line failure, even towed stuff at max load).
Yes, the batteries would need to be replaced but that means designing them to be replaced.
Unlike the Tesla model Y which built the battery into the frame and filled it with foam so that it absolutely cannot get replaced. Musk said the way to replace the battery is to send the entire car to the scrap yard and recover the lithium from the shredder.
Another reason on my list why to never buy a Tesla.
That’s patently false, according to https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-battery-replacement-cost-explained/#:~:text=Absolutely.,will likely also be similar.
My 2013 Model S has 235,000 miles on it and still l drives like it’s brand new. I haven’t yet had to replace the battery pack but when that day comes, it will almost certainly be worth the cost.
Here is the link where Sandy Munroe determined the Model Y pack is non repairable and it includes Elon Musk’s reply tweet saying the pack should be seen as “high grade ore”.
That says you cannot replace individual broken cells in a Tesla pack. That doesn’t say you can’t replace the pack
Aren’t all the cells worn in a ten year old battery?
That…can’t be true.
Friend of mine bought an EV. Didn’t even last a month. He landed in a tree.
Goddamn planned obsolescence.
*planted obsolescence
Lemmy: Capitalism caused this.
In a socialist system cars would be tree proof.
“landed”?
Then the wheels just fell off. Stupid woke EVs are built to fail.
Usually they build them so the wheels don’t fall off.
Then explain that pic 😤
Pretty sure they’re being facetious
Yeah, got launched when drifting off the road
I’m sure if we spend enough time working on it, we can figure out how this is all OPEC’s fault. /s (jeeze tho I hope your friend was okay!)
He luckily only has 4 broken ribs.
What was the issue? Do you know?
Handing out driving licences like they were sweets instead of actually testing people’s ability to drive, maybe?
This is often the issue. Not in this case though. He had his license for 24 years, while driving from the south of Germany to the Netherlands back and forth twice a month. He never had an accident before.
It can’t possibly be that. We have to abolish trees - that’s the real answer!
We’re working on it.
Lost consciousness for a bit. Unknown why.
Probably the electromagnetic fields of EV! EMF is very bad with those! (/s)
Not really the fault of the EV then tho :D
No, but it’s still a factor why they may not last forever XD never underestimate human error.
My car wouldn’t have done that. Had I fallen unconscious it would either follow the road or stop
But that’s also not because it’s electric.
Probably turned off traction control and floored it. EVs have some pretty solid acceleration and weight a bit more than their ICE counterparts.
Nope, he drove 80km/h with traction control, but lost consciousness somehow. No lines on the road (out in the German countryside) so no line assist. Car went straight when there was a very mild turn, so he drove off the road, into some uphill ridge whi h launched him, woke up when flying through the air after which he landed in a bunch of trees. This is where he landed. He luckily only had 4 broken ribs.
That sucks I hope he’s good.
Jeez, he’s lucky to be alive at all.
Daaaamn crazy story. Scary you can just tap out like that. Good on him he didn’t get injured too much
I think the tree didn’t give way when it should have and damaged it a bit, hard to tell though
Car manufacturers:
This is basically like saying combustion vehicles could last nearly forever if you replaced the engine every now and then
A rebuild every x00,000 miles on a Toyota sounds nicer than paying the price of a new pilot every 100,000 miles tbh. Computers don’t last though and emissions have made it a huge pain to fix on older cars. Nothing against emissions it’s a necessary evil.
New pilot? I dunno what any of this means
I mean…they can, you just refresh the motor. Tons of ICE vehicles out there with 400-500k miles on them. Hell most semi trucks have millions of miles on them.
I am thinking of doing that when my civic should be legally declared dead. With the insanity that is new car prices and insurance for new cars plus the vanished used car market it just isn’t worth it. I want an EV but things have to go back to normal before that happens
It’s easy to do, and engines don’t cost much on ebay.
Fortunately Honda makes vehicles that are very durable, so it’s not like everything dies at the same age of the engine.
Can confirm. Use a fridge from 1974. 2 years ago thermostat failed. Replaced with digital one for $15. Now have a nice digital readout of the temps. Thing uses
180W100W when running, less than bigger newer ones.
It’s even more ecological to keep it running since it still has the nasty ozone layer killing coolant that would partly evaporate when trashing it.EDIT: 100W just checked the type plate.
Luckily I’m pretty sure we are at least on an up trend when it comes to the ozone layer so even when eventually it kicks the can you don’t need to worry too much about that anymore. Now we just gotta fix carbon emissions.
I haven’t looked at the statistical data on this myself, but there’s something to be said for survivorship bias.
Not to mention those old fridges are Horribly inefficient on energy
Will use 4x as much electricity though, ugh.
https://www.cleanenergyresourceteams.org/your-old-refrigerator-energy-hog
Anyone know of any refrigerators today that are as durable as older ones and have today’s efficiencies, but without the smart features and other junk?
Average refrigerator today still lasts 13 years though, and while they’re made cheaply they also are cheaper (at least as a portion percentage of the average paycheck).
https://reviewed.usatoday.com/dishwashers/features/ask-the-experts-why-dont-new-home-appliances-last
Sub Zero, Thermador… High end refrigerators, just look at the price, we decided to forget the idea because of that.
well yeah, we generally make less money now, and manufacturers make more, relatively speaking.
We have a refrigerator from the '80s that runs like a champ.
Solved the energy problem by putting solar panels on the roof.
I’ve heard that in the US fridges are generally different, with stuff like active fans and nonsense like that. Is that true?
Because every fridge I’ve seen in Europe is mechanically extremely basic and I’ve literally never seen or even heard of one breaking. In my experience fridges are one of the only things that have remained phenomenally simple in design and extremely unlikely to break.
Well there are evaporator fans in modern refrigerators in the US. They serve an important role though helping with defrosting, improving cooling efficiency, and evenness of cooling throughout the fridge.
https://refrigeratorguide.net/maximize-cooling-efficiency-best-refrigerator-evaporator/
Usually only very small refrigerators are without them now.
It is another point of failure though, but should be pretty easily repairable. I mean it’ll still be able to cool without the fan, but it’ll be running much more to try and compensate and keep things cool though.
If you know the YouTube channel technology connections, here’s a fun video of him messing around with a fanless style refrigerator:
Every LG and Samsung major appliance I’ve had has broken within 5 years.
Refrigerators, washing machines, and dryers.
Prior, I only ever had 80s era American tank energy hogs. Switched back to American brands in the last few years, so too soon to tell if they’ll work out better…
Here’s to hoping.
Oh, and having dealt with LG warranty for both electronics and major appliances, I’ll never buy another LG product that isn’t a monitor.
I bought an expensive Samsung microwave thinking it would outlast the cheaper ones. The thing actually started to rust in the first few months something not even the cheapest microwaves have done on me.
Last Samsung appliance I’ll ever buy luckily I’m in the UK and got my money back.
I think Samsung is generally considered trash now. I certainly will never buy any of their “smart” objects either, especially not an ad-ridden TV.
I can confirm Samsung appliances are complete trash. Every single one I’ve owned has either died or had a non-replaceable part fail within a couple years. We had a Samsung fridge at one point and one of the door switches failed. No big deal right, easy to replace? No, apparently Samsung used some kind of custom switch instead of the bog standard cherry contact switch that basically everything and everyone has used for decades, and it’s no longer being manufactured.
My dad bought me a ridiculously expensive (like $400) Samsung vacuum that I loved. It was strong, it came apart in really cool ways to make it versatile, etc.
It failed in less than a year.
The $60 Walmart special Bissell that I went and bought to replace it lasted for 8.5 years before the motor burned out (I screwed up and it got too much pet hair in it). I bought the same one again and it’s going on 5+ years with no issues.
Samsung certainly seem very aware of return window timing. 8.5 years is much better!
I wish some of this stuff was more standardized. In an ideal world one should be able to just replace a motor and keep on going. (Like without needing to learn any wiring and so on.)
I’m gonna offer some contrary evidence: I have a Samsung from 2013 that’s still working perfectly. It did have an issue with the icemaker seizing up, but they have a program where they send a tech out to repair it for free, which I took advantage of. The newer appliances can last a long time in some cases.
There’s also many old fridges that did die, including multiple of mine growing up in the 80s. You just see the ones that happened to survive.
Samsungs don’t just fail; they are incredibly precisely engineered to fail on purpose not too long after the warranty ends.
I had a Samsung front-load washing machine that failed after maybe six years or so: the drum quit turning and it started making a terrible banging noise instead. I decided to take it apart to see what went wrong. Every single part in it was pristine and in perfect working order – electronic parts, mechanical parts, rubber parts, plastic parts, even the stainless-steel parts exposed to the water and detergent all that time – everything looked brand-new.
That is, except for the “spider arm,” which is the large bracket that connects the axle to the drum. That one single part was made out of a completely different kind of metal and had corroded completely through. It was blatantly designed not to stand up to water and detergent. The excellent condition of the metal in the rest of the machine showed that they were perfectly capable of choosing the right material for the job, but deliberately chose not to. It was the most brazen, shameless instance of planned obsolescence I’ve ever heard of before or since.
(Not my pic, but it looked pretty much like this – except mine was in three wholly separate pieces! And, as I mentioned, the axle and drum were shiny and brushed, respectively, with zero rust or residue of any kind at all.)
Wtf?
Think I’d be making an aluminum or stainless plate to put on there and use through-bolts to mount it with some silicone to seal them.
It’s true. I fixed a Samsung LED TV that wouldn’t turn on. They used a tiny resistor that I thought was a fuse.
That resistor was chosen so that it always ran hot and failed after about 3 years of normal use. I put in a bigger one with the same resistance that stays cold and now have the TV for 5 years.
For washing machines, buy used Speed Queen commercial units.
They cost as much as new consumer high end units, but they’re designed to be repaired, plenty of parts available, and they don’t break in the first place.
The Speed Queen small washers at my local laundromat are about $2500 on the used market (in good running condition, with known hours on them). They’re quiet, and don’t shake for any reason.
Even those can have duds. My very first ultrawide was an LG, paid more money for it than any other monitor in my life because I’ve never had a montitor fail.
Died after 1.5 years and the warranty was only a year. I was so pissed.
That is extremely unlucky but also sucks that the us won’t enforce bigger warranty windows for products meant to last much longer than a year.
The only durable ones are industrial refrigerators like they have at restaurants. Other than that, at least in the US, avoid Samsung and LG (have compressor issues) and buy American made (better build quality). But you’re looking at 10-15 years regardless. Some other notes:
- ice machines should be in the freezer, if you have one
- the fewer the features, the more reliable it is
- Maytag and Whirlpool are pretty reliable
My grandparents had one of those old locking fridges from the 50s or so. It weighed like a metric ton, but that fucker NEVER broke.
Bad drivers like me can fix that by applying wear to bodywork. Normal driving wears the tires and all the gears, gaskets, and bearings in the system. But it can probably last 20 years.
Here a link to bypass the paywall:
I bet smartphones could last 3 or 4 years even if companies let them 😏
I just got a new phone despite my previous one being totally fine because it’s no longer getting security updates. I’ve had it for ~4 years with no issues, so I got a Pixel for longer security updates.
So yeah, they totally could last longer if they kept supporting them.
iPhones tend to last 5 or so years for me…
Wait, are you saying my phone should last less time than it does?
My current phone is from 2017.
Imagine being able to opt into an long term support branch when you feel your phone starting to lag, unlocked bootloader’s, and have user replaceable batteries.
Still mad about accidentally installing the newer version of iOS on my iPad pro. Such a meaningful feature to have security patches without slowdown from newer versions.
Imagine being able to opt into an long term support branch when you feel your phone starting to lag
That’s kind of what LineageOS does.
I wish more bootloader’s came unlocked these days. I got a Google pixel for that, the seven years of promised updates, and parts.
Though I think it would be cheaper to buy a used pixel 8 from eBay and the adhesive from ifixit if I end up braking the screen in a few years I’m more interested in being able to get a fresh battery without guessing if it was salvaged from a heavily used phone.
Edit: phones should be more like the laptops from the early 2000s damnit. I don’t care if my phone is a little thicker than a pencil at least it’ll hide the camera bump.
I am very anxious even with normal maintenance - heating adhesive up is not something I am capable of now. So was looking at new last-gen Pixels instead, and 7a is $300 :( People I know who have it say it’s good hardware, but that’s still an insane sum to spend on a phone.
Tbh it’s not a bad price looking at what other phones are out at that price. Your looking at a great screen, awesome camera, ok battery life, and snappy enough performance for everyday stuff.
At the end of the day it’s what you can afford and what you need. If you have a small repair shop nearby it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try, see how expensive the repair might bee. If your current phone is fine then keep using it, if you need a phone on a budget I’d go used, anything new under $200 will most likely be worse than anything you can get used, and if you want something new that pixel 7a wouldn’t be half bad tbh.
What are you even doing, throwing your phone on the ground? How does your phone not last that long
I don’t get how people are replacing their phones so damn often. I buy used flagships that are usually a year or two old and rock them for another 4 years. Note 10+ here, and I’ve had it for around 3 years now, probably won’t upgrade for another 2 years, as it’s perfectly fine still.
I had a Sony Xperia something for years, no case. Then I upgraded to a Samsung and gave my Sony to my mum. She cracked the back of it almost immediately lol
Trade in value drops very rapidly for non-iphones after a year or two. You can often get 50% back on the purchase by trading in a functional phone.
If you buy a new phone every 2 years or every 4 years, it’s often about the same total out of pocket cost (with a lot of exceptions)
I’ve never paid more than $150 for a phone, and that’s recently for a 2 year old pixel.
I can keep multiple spares around for the price of a new phone.
They don’t?
I’m still using my OnePlus 8t. Phones lifespans are fine. If you can’t keep your phone working for 4 years, that’s on you.
I see no reason to upgrade until support is dropped.
My Samsung a70 doesn’t get major software updates anymore. I’m OK with it. I’ll use this as long as possible.
For security reasons, don’t do that. Don’t use things older than the supported android version. It’s fucking Linux. It gets vulnerabilities.
I used my 6t for 4 years but it started bootlooping and I needed it for 2fa codes every login on some applications for work. I bought a 10t after a couple of days. Funny enough now the 6t appears stable again, oh well it’s the household backup if any others spontaneously die
Spoiler: They won’t.
forever cars no make profit line go up
Competition, in theory, should combat this. It does, but it should.
Cars do have failure modes other than rust, like crashes. Having not yet read the article, I expect crashes still destroy cars.
Edit: having read the article, it was not a dense technical work and was disappointing on specifics.
I haven’t even read the article yet, and my cynical ass came to the same conclusion based on the headline. 😣
Time to make a billion dollars on something else, then start up a car company designed to fail. No investors, design a car for a 60-70k buying price, few bells and whistles, but built to last indefinitely with basic maintenance. Start the company planning to practically close it down just after the last preorder customer has their car delivered and become a maintenance company with a few employees to make replacement parts and install them. If demand rises, redesign for the new times, ramp up and do it all again.
Who wants an infinite lifespan car anyway? Everything else would be getting safer and more fuel efficient. Might as well get around on horse and buggy.
For one most engines are pretty much at their peak efficiency, for two practical safety features reached peak between the mid 90s to the early 00s. Most modern safety features are ironically enough not all that safe, for example lane assist makes people pay less attention or it tries to assist in the lane and overcorrects. I see the latter rather frequently in my area since windy roads, usually the damned things are trying to avoid the white lines of the shoulder and overcorrect over the yellow.
“Why do you hate freedom? And America? And puppies? And apple pie?” -Republicans, probably
Makes sense. That is why all those Japanese carmakers went bankrupt and diesal hasn’t been a thing since the 1950s.
Wear and tear doesn’t kill a car; rust does.
Climate change is getting rid of snow. No more salted roads. Cars will last forever
You know humidity causes rust too, right? And rain. Lol
Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)
Maybe you can’t do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.
A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.
They don’t.
My current daily driver is 18 years old. I expect at least another 10 barring an accident, maybe 30 more years as a spare vehicle. It got a new transmission at 200,000 miles. Engine seems like it’ll make it to at least 400k. A replacement is $1500, far less than a new car.
Most cars in my family (approximately 30 cars) are between ten and thirty years old.
I’ve had 3 cars since 1996, all bought used, and I traveled for work with one. One car I sold to a family member, and it’s still being driven.
It’s people that choose to not drive cars this long.
You can still do that. They’re called body repair panels. They are usually plain metal. You have to cut out the old, weld in the new, grind them flat, prime and paint them. This isn’t cost efficient if your car is worth less than the paint you’d need. The parts usually are around $100-$300 bucks (if you don’t need OEM parts) but the labor is expensive. And if you do it for cheap it will look like crap.
If you do it for cheap it sure will look like crap.
Source: me doing it in the nineties without really knowing welding :-D
Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.
Companies can’t stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.
Please elaborate on the iTrash slowdown thing. I have an idea of what you’re referring to but want to make sure I’m right.
iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn’t seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn’t installed on current hardware. It’s apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there’s at least something to it.
And don’t get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.
It’s not even almost, in 2019 there was a settlement where they were found to literally be making older devices artificially slower once a newer model or two was out. Settlement sign ups ended in 2020, search Apple slowdown lawsuit.
Yeah you’re talking about batterygate. That was blown way out of proportion by the media. I know this because I worked for Apple from as far back as 2012 and most iPhone repairs were from old batteries shutting off around 30% charge remaining because the battery was so consumed, it couldn’t keep up with the voltage the hardware was pulling. This led to frequent shutoffs, data corruption and a whole lot of angry customers.
In an iOS 10 update they tweaked iOS to throttle to a speed the battery could handle. So yeah, your old phone might run a little slower, but it wouldn’t shut off in the middle of use and corrupt your shit.
The problem was they didn’t elaborate in the release notes and didn’t give customers heads up as to why they did that. Then their press release was written by engineers. Tech blogs spun the story as “OMG APPLE IS SLOWING YOUR PHONE SO YOU BUY A NEW ONE”.
No.
Apple is telling your phone to dumb itself down to what your old-ass battery can handle. As a result, they also dramatically lowered the price of battery swaps for several years after this whole experience to like $29, and just this last week they officially affirmed their unwritten commitment of supporting devices with software updates for at least 5 years.
Be mad at Apple for shit they deserve please. They’re not a great company and do a lot of shitty things that deserve this kind of hatred. But I lived this. You just have a surface level understanding of what happened.
The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.
I appreciate the look behind the curtain but since apple was found in a court to have deceived customers and was proven of wrong doing it certainly is a bit more than just the media blowing it out of proportion or Apple actually doing people a favor that was misinterpreted. For example 3 days a week I use a phone from 2018 that was my daily driver for 3 years and needed to use it as a backup MFA device that I also sometimes stream and watch media on for a few hours a day. Updated it to the latest LineageOS and haven’t had to worry about freezing or being slow or shutting off and corrupting my shit.
The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.
or how about easily replacable batteries. yes, they can be designed in a sleek, apple-y ergonomic way. but its much easier and more profitable to make battery replacements a phone killing endeavour. this applies to other manufacturers as well.
That’s a valid criticism too. But that’s also not exclusively an apple criticism, as you pointed out.
I’m not trying to defend Apple from people who hate them, I just want to make sure we’re not being solely reactionary here.
Again, they dropped the price of out of warranty battery replacements from $99+ to $29 for (don’t quote me on this) something like 2 years as a result of the bad PR they got from this change, which was inherently done to prolong the life of a phone with a consumed battery. That’s anything but a planned obsolescence move. They fucked up the messaging to users sure, but it wasn’t just done to slow your iPhone.
agreed on the batterygate thing. ars did a pretty decent writeup on the reasons behind the CPU throttling.
my issue with Apple has always been their… “its magic!” bullshit. that marketing leads to more and more e-waste as other manufacturers follow the sucessful Apple marketing trend, because, you know… its NOT actually magic and batteries are consumable items.
“Ford, how am I supposed to operate my [insanely expensive] digital watch now [that the battery is broken]?” guess i’ll just get another one!
It happens because of two main reasons, firstly is just because of bloat - software/websites are less optimised or doing more because they expect newer and better hardware. The second thing is the intentional throttling of the hardware by the operating system in response to reduced battery life to maintain longevity. basically if the battery is at 50% original battery, to maintain 10+ hour battery life, the device has to use less power - and the way it does that is by lowering the performance of the hardware.
Yeah that’s not my experience. Maybe it’s yours and I apologize for that, but my 11 is still running like it was brand new.
Got any proof that “Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch”? There was batterygate but that was a messaging problem.
Like I said, it’s apocryphal and probably has other reasons (like the one you mention), but it’s something you hear all the time about them to the point where it becomes major news and there has been some evidence presented, but as I said, it could just be newer versions of software requiring better hardware, which is still a bit iffy when you have an older phone and they want you to update to software that won’t run as optimally on it. In some ways, Android actually benefits from this by just creating security patches for the life of the phone for the older version, and not updating to newer versions of Android like iOS does for old phones.
I think people just like to pick on Apple. They support old phones for at least 5 years with software and security updates, and sometimes even longer. They’ve even been known to push out the occasional security update for devices nearing a decade old.
That’s not to say they’re a perfectly innocent company. I just think there’s an Apple hate bandwagon people like to jump on. Rather than doing that, I’d like to see people focusing on the specific shitty things they do, and giving them credit for the things they get right.
Hey man, I’m an Android dude for phones. Won’t even consider an iPhone as I dislike locked ecosystems for phones, but this is just not true.
Apple supports their devices way longer than any of the major Android producers do. I can’t remember the last time my phone was supported more than 3-4 years, but my iPad was just rock solid and updated for 6 years. Replaced it because I wanted more RAM for scrolling endlessly on Reddit, but it was brilliant for everything else. My daughter still uses it with no issues today, two tears later.
The missus’ Samsung tablet on the other hand…
What a piece of crap, and it was top of the line just three years ago.Yep. Apple supports their stuff a lot longer, but it does seem like it slows down more and more every single update.
I’m really soured on the whole portable device thing completely because I don’t like the interfaces, I don’t like touchscreen (imprecise garbage), I don’t like how locked down it is by default (Android over iOS here plus some Android devices are very hackable to the point of getting root, but still), and I hate the intense data collection and tracking these devices do to you. Even phones rooted with custom OSes still track you by its mobile radio triangulating your position.
The planned obsolescence is just another frustrating aspect to the damn things.
We agree on every point except Apple products slowing down significantly faster than Android. My personal experience has been the polar oposite.
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
In my experience iPhones and iPads are remarkable for keeping the speed up as they age.
My iPhone 6S lasted me untill 2021, and it was the battery that was the main issue, the speed of the iOS was fine
The OS running the phone gets more bloated with new updates because it’s for newer phones with more powerful microprocessors and more RAM.
I mean yeah it’s not as optimized, but that’s not what the claim was. That’s also not exclusively an Apple behavior so I don’t get why we’re singling out one manufacturer here.
Apple doesn’t make anyone buy anything every year. They support older devices longer than most other manufacturers, so I still don’t understand your point.
Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.
And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there’s plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren’t necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they’re wearing.
I bought about 20 Cree bulbs 5 years ago, 15 are on about 15 hours a day. I’ve had 2 fail in that time.
Not a bad record in my book.
Even the off brands, IKEA, Amazon, etc, seem to last as long. They’re all in open fixtures, so no cooling issues.
It’s more than just a rectifier. LEDs of any type, white or otherwise, require regulated current, not just any voltage, otherwise even an LED will burn out. Vis-a-vis: cheap white LED flashlights that take 3 AA or AAA batteries; there’s no current regulation, they just call it ‘close enough’. Over time some of those LEDs will fail and start flashing when they heat up. So what usuall fails in white LED bulbs in your house is the electronics responsible for regulation. Sometimes the LEDs themselves (of which there is usually more than one LED, they’re usually an array of several) will burn out, killing the whole bulb. I have a 1080p TV that the backlight went out on it after a few years use, which I replaced myself. Inside it are three circuit board strips with white LEDs on them, all wired in series like christmas tree lights used to be wired. All it takes is one of them opening up and the whole backlight stops working. Anything like this that is manufactured at massive scale is bound to have some failures, and white LEDs and white LED bulbs are no exception.
The problem with LEDs isn’t the bit that emits lights. It’s the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.
Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It’s better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.
The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don’t last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.
If the bulb starts flickering, that’s usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.
The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.
The newer designs that use very long, filament-attached LEDs in a large helium filled glass bulb also work quite well, even in a classical light fixture. The helium filling helps with cooling because helium has higher convective heat transfer than air.
100% true, the first CREE bulbs I had would die in these damned enclosed pimple-like ceiling fixtures. I got them replaced but I now run them without the frosted glass domes on them so they don’t overheat and get killed again.
Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.
From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.
My SE that’s old as hell now. I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.
SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.
I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down. Admittedly, it was after my 12 year old Acer plastic clunker decided to not wake up one day.
I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.
If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.
All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.
this whole ass marketing script for apple as a response to a throwaway line about planned obsolescence strikes joy in me. it’s 100% like something i would do. thank you, i love you, you are fun and valued
Sometimes I think people don’t understand how capitalism works…
I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) so they only have to make one kind of pack. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.
Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.
Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you’d do well.
nice concept and i think framework might actually do a protoype of this kind of car when they get the investors and the funds currently they still are a small company so i really hope that they become larger in this decade
This already exists.
Look up Nio. They already have fully automatic battery swapping stations for cars leasing the pack. You literally swap the whole pack instead of charging when it’s empty.
Takes less than 10 minutes
Nio
Ugh, looks like they designed their door handles just like Tesla did. Are EVs in general adopting that design standard? Cuz thanks I hate it.
Luckily no, not all do.
We specifically chose a car with normal handles because ice/snow is a bitch with the motorized/flush ones
That is very interesting and their cars look appealing.
I think in the US, a company may have a better time selling the whole car including battery and still offering quick replacement when it comes time to upgrade.
I’m about to search more but do you happen to know if Nio is selling in the US?
Edit: Dang… Not selling in the US yet. And with these new tariffs it’s not looking good.
