I wanna meet the engineer who designs devices to do this kind of thing. Like the people who work for apple and deliberately create proprietary interfaces and closed systems. Planned obsolescence. Machines that can’t be reused and end up in landfill. These people have received a technical education. Isn’t this way of creating technology obviously unsustainable to a highly educated person?
I’m wondering the same when I’m watching disassembly videos. So much of that stuff is obviously deliberately made to be unrepairable. Like charging ports soldered onto the motherboard. Never mind glued in batteries that you almost can’t replace without destroying the screen. Soft screws that fall apart. And little details too, like layouts pointlessly changing with every model so you can’t use your knowledge from a year ago, or use the same parts even for the most trivial things.
No sane designer can desire that.
It comes from the top. CEOs, marketing, sales. Sell more shit. Convince people to buy more shit by inconveniencing them.
It’s the only way that makes any sense. Some machines are designed for profit and profit alone. That is the legal obligation of a corporation. Some of the choices I’ve noticed even seem to go beyond profit and are anti-people. I was creating a wireless access point to extend a home network. Found a British Telecom router, seemed ideal. The firmware was locked out for use with BT only. Raspberry pi, on the other hand, configured in minutes for the task. RPI is a good example of how to design a sustainable machine. I believe they still make profit but it hasn’t interfered with their ethical compass.
I have to admit, I do hate the “companies need to make money” argument. It’s true of course, but the other half is that customers need to get a good product.
Unfortunately people aren’t smart customers. We’ve even happily accepted the “consumer” designation instead. And that really says everything.
If customers won’t stop buying products that are deliberately designed to fuck with them, then that’s what the companies will do. It’s a downhill slope too, like with the batteries example.
You give company a finger because “it needs to make money” or you just don’t care enough, they’ll take the whole arm.
It’s okay for companies to make money. But the problem right now is that simply making profit isn’t acceptable for shareholders. You need to make the maximum profit possible and keep it growing.
So here we are right now with subscription based printer.
Yea, and what I mean is that customers should reject this crap and not buy such products. But we know that only a few actually care, most will just get dragged along, and eventually they’ll wear us down and subscription ink and whatever other nonsense will be normalised.
It’s always like that. Look how hard have videogames devolved into just being monetisation schemes in the last couple years.
Totally agree. The solution is a mix of factors. Customers should understand what they are getting into when they buy something. Part of that is general education level but also product information. Regulations are a last resort and a necessary evil. A good example is the fight against producers of farm machinery. Farmers tend to maintain their machines DIY but the manufacturers are producing machines that cannot be maintained except at great cost by the dealerships. This came to court in the form of a ‘right to repair’ campaign and who should turn up at the hearings? The undisputed champion and final boss of closed, proprietary systems, Apple.
I wanna meet the engineer who designs devices to do this kind of thing. Like the people who work for apple and deliberately create proprietary interfaces and closed systems. Planned obsolescence. Machines that can’t be reused and end up in landfill. These people have received a technical education. Isn’t this way of creating technology obviously unsustainable to a highly educated person?
I’m wondering the same when I’m watching disassembly videos. So much of that stuff is obviously deliberately made to be unrepairable. Like charging ports soldered onto the motherboard. Never mind glued in batteries that you almost can’t replace without destroying the screen. Soft screws that fall apart. And little details too, like layouts pointlessly changing with every model so you can’t use your knowledge from a year ago, or use the same parts even for the most trivial things.
No sane designer can desire that.
It comes from the top. CEOs, marketing, sales. Sell more shit. Convince people to buy more shit by inconveniencing them.
Corporations are cancer.
It’s the only way that makes any sense. Some machines are designed for profit and profit alone. That is the legal obligation of a corporation. Some of the choices I’ve noticed even seem to go beyond profit and are anti-people. I was creating a wireless access point to extend a home network. Found a British Telecom router, seemed ideal. The firmware was locked out for use with BT only. Raspberry pi, on the other hand, configured in minutes for the task. RPI is a good example of how to design a sustainable machine. I believe they still make profit but it hasn’t interfered with their ethical compass.
I have to admit, I do hate the “companies need to make money” argument. It’s true of course, but the other half is that customers need to get a good product.
Unfortunately people aren’t smart customers. We’ve even happily accepted the “consumer” designation instead. And that really says everything.
If customers won’t stop buying products that are deliberately designed to fuck with them, then that’s what the companies will do. It’s a downhill slope too, like with the batteries example.
You give company a finger because “it needs to make money” or you just don’t care enough, they’ll take the whole arm.
It’s okay for companies to make money. But the problem right now is that simply making profit isn’t acceptable for shareholders. You need to make the maximum profit possible and keep it growing.
So here we are right now with subscription based printer.
Yea, and what I mean is that customers should reject this crap and not buy such products. But we know that only a few actually care, most will just get dragged along, and eventually they’ll wear us down and subscription ink and whatever other nonsense will be normalised.
It’s always like that. Look how hard have videogames devolved into just being monetisation schemes in the last couple years.
Totally agree. The solution is a mix of factors. Customers should understand what they are getting into when they buy something. Part of that is general education level but also product information. Regulations are a last resort and a necessary evil. A good example is the fight against producers of farm machinery. Farmers tend to maintain their machines DIY but the manufacturers are producing machines that cannot be maintained except at great cost by the dealerships. This came to court in the form of a ‘right to repair’ campaign and who should turn up at the hearings? The undisputed champion and final boss of closed, proprietary systems, Apple.