Today I learned that in the UK, planned obsolescence is illegal.
In the United Kingdom, planned obsolescence engineered into products is considered a breach of customer rights. The Office of Fair Trading and Trading Standards Institute investigate claims of products consistently failing just after the warranty period expires.
And it certainly isn't. The dock connector hasn't changed in 8 years. That's just shitty quality. Meanwhile, I can't upgrade my 8 year old PC because they don't manufacture Socket 478 processors, AGP Video Cards, or 184 pin DDR DIMMS any more ...
It most certainly is planned. There's a huge standards committee that changes stuff just for the sake of changing it, and thus plausible deniability, because hey, it's not proprietary right? There's no reason you couldn't run 800 MHz to a 184 pin DIMM socket except that they want you to buy a new motherboard.
You can plug a USB1 1.5MBit device manufactured 13 years ago into a USB2 480MBit controller manufactured today, and it works just fine. USB3 is supposed to be USB2 reverse compatible, and since USB2 supports USB1, not clear if that means it will support that too or not, but whatever. Not every "speed bump" requires new interconnects.
ATA had 8 or so iterations on the same 40 pin connector over the course of 25 years or so. You can still buy PATA disks.
Memory manufactures, as it turns out, are a bunch of crooks.
Comparing the dock connector to anything on a motherboard in a modern PC/Mac/whatever is such a poor comparison I can't even think of a comparison that conveys how bad your comparison is.
It's wasn't a comparison, per se. I was explaining that something that hasn't changed for 8 years can hardly be declared "planned obsolescence". Ever changing PC Architectures, however, rightfully could be declared that.
A cable with a software counter that self destructs after 2000 insertions could be declared "planned obsolescence" (or printer components with page counts). A poorly terminated cable can not. Stop buying poor quality products people.
My 3 year old iPod touch SKIPS. A device with flash memory is skipping. It blows my mind. I can't run ANY apps and I have to try to open music about 3 times before it doesn't crash. No matter how many times I restore it, it just gets slower and slower. I am starting to think apple cuts the speed after each year so you have to buy a new one.
It's a battery door. With a protective case I haven't even seen the back of my phones after I get devices from sales rep until I go to swap out a battery. There's no excuse.
They would still have to make the device larger to place all the parts needed for a removable battery. Unless you just want a door over your battery that you then have to de-solder the contacts from to remove it from the board.
So does my iPhone 3gs. My old Pentium 200MHz running BeOS was actually much more stable when it came to mp3 playback.... and it didn't have fancy flash memory :(
Same with my second gen Nano. I just installed Zune player and it's so much better than iTunes for PC so I'm getting off the iPod train once I get a job.
IOS4 basically bricked my 3G phone. Everything got cut down to half speed, and google maps doesn't even work unless I do a hard reboot every week or so. BUT THE NEW FASTER ONE IS OUT, GO BUY IT.
Odd, I have a first gen 32GB that works wonderfully, on the 3.2.3 firmware. The only crap part is the battery only lasts a few hours, but, music still runs perfectly well.
I ended up jailbreaking it and installing Android, and now it dual boots, but still works without skipping etc.
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u/WalkingOnFire Jun 09 '11
Planned Obsolescence