November 24, 2022 • 47 mins
Do companies really implement planned obsolescence to get you to buy more stuff? (Spoiler: yes). And do they really resist giving you the option to repair gadgets? (Spoiler: Also yes).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you. Well, it's Thanksgiving here
in the United States, which means we are actually off
(00:26):
work today, but we thought we'd bring you a rerun episode.
This episode published last year March nine, two thousand twenty one,
with the title Planned Obsolescence and the Right to Repair.
I thought this would be an appropriate topic to bring
back up because we are in the heart of holiday
(00:47):
gift buying season. You know, tomorrow is Black Friday, which
is traditionally a big shopping day, but we all know
that those shopping days have been expanded both before and
after Black Friday. But one of the big things people
like to get our tech gifts for their loved ones.
And one of the downsides to tech is that it
(01:09):
can go obsolete pretty quickly, and sometimes when stuff goes wrong,
there's not necessarily an easy way to fix it, and
that brings us to the right to Repair movement. So
sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode from last year,
Planned Obsolescence and the Right to Repair. I recently did
(01:31):
a series of episodes about General Motors, and one of
the many things I talked about in those episodes was
how Alfred Sloan, who was an absolutely critical leader of
GM early on, established a practice of planned obsolescence. That
is part of Sloan's market strategy was creating a company
(01:53):
that every year would release cars that had updated styling
and features in order to entire not just first time
car buyers, but people who had already, you know, purchased
a car in the past. And that got me to
thinking that I should really talk about planned obsolescence in
general and examine the facts and consider the myths, and
(02:15):
also chat a bit about the right to repair movement
and recycling, because all of this is kind of connected together.
We're talking about casual consumption of electronic goods, almost a
disposable approach to them, and electronic goods are not necessarily
the best thing in the world to treat as disposable.
(02:37):
So let's just start off by defining what planned obsolescence
is really all about. Now. Generally, people talk about planned
obsolescence as a strategy in which the maker of a thing,
whether it's a physical good or an app or whatever,
builds into that thing a predetermined end of life. Other words,
(03:00):
you've already determined how long this thing is supposed to last.
And the purpose of planned obsolescens is to not just
sell one thing to each customer one time, but to
sell many of that same thing to every customer over time.
It's the same reason why a lot of software companies
(03:20):
will migrate toward a subscription based revenue model, because it's
more profitable to get customers to regularly give you money
than to bank on selling them a lot of the
same thing to a huge customer base. Like if I'm
selling a software package for two hundred dollars, I'm going
to get you know, X number of customers, and chances
(03:43):
are they're not going to buy another product for me
for a while. If I offer a subscription fee for
a much lower monthly plan, I might get people locked
into that system for years and thus make way more
money off of them in the long run than I
would if I had gone with the big ticket i'd
up front. This can actually manifest in lots of different ways. Now, typically,
(04:05):
I get the sense that the popular perception of you know,
planned ups lessons is that companies make stuff that's just
designed to stop working after a certain number of hours
of operation. So, in other words, the manufacturer isn't making
products that are meant to stand the test of time. Rather,
these are products that will at some point break down
(04:27):
and either require repairs or a replacement. Now, repairs were
great if you happen to be the not only the
company that's selling the thing, but you're also the company
that provides maintenance and repair services. Car dealerships often fall
into this category. You can purchase a car at a dealership,
(04:47):
and then most dealerships have service centers as well, or
they have, you know, an agreement with a service center,
so the dealership can continue to make money off of
a sale if the salesperson can and convince the customer
to bring the car back to the dealership's service center
for regular maintenance or repair work. But not all technology
(05:08):
has the value of a car. Obviously, there's a lot
of tech out there that's fairly inexpensive to make, and
companies might price that technology it's such a relatively low
cost that a repair might set you back the same
amount or more than buying just a new version of
whatever that tech is. For a lot of us, I
(05:29):
figure the reaction to that as well, I might as
well buy a new one if I'm going to be
spending that kind of money. Heck, the new thing of
a jig might have more features than the old one,
or it might look a little different, you know, more stylish,
and so we toss aside whatever old thing of a
jig we have and then we go out and buy
a new one. Or maybe you would actually like to
(05:51):
do repairs yourself. That's something we're going to chat about
more towards the end of this episode. But some companies
have been known to make it challenge or maybe even impossible,
for the end customer to really repair the technology they purchase,
whether it's through using proprietary screws that need a specific
tool to remove them, or actually sealing components into compartments
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with glue and rivets and solder or other fasteners, making
it impossible to open without risk of causing further damage.
Companies have used a few different ways to obscure or
impede repairs mm apple. Or you could also get to
a point with stuff like cars where it just becomes
(06:36):
harder to make repairs because it's hard to even determine
what is wrong with the thing without a special diagnostic
device like a computer. This is the case with a
lot of modern cars. You might be able to lift
the hood and look around a little bit, but some
vehicles have various covers or engine configurations that make it
really challenging for the average person to access specific parts
(06:59):
of the motor, let alone do any work on it. Again,
this limits what you can do with tech once it
starts to fail, and all tech does fail over time,
because well, entropy is something we just can't avoid. It's
it's a fundamental law of the universe, particularly when it
comes to cheap technology. The sort of disposable approach has
(07:23):
a lot of negative drawbacks, including what to do with
old tech that no longer works. I mean, a lot
of technology contains stuff that's pretty toxic, so throwing it
out in the garbage could lead to it ending up
in a landfill somewhere, and then harmful stuff like lead
or mercury could leach into the environment. Because of that,
(07:44):
that's not great. So we'll touch a tiny bit on
electronics recycling in this episode two, but I have done
full episodes about e waste recycling, so I'm not going
to spend too much time on it, and there are
often ways to make older tech obsle elite that are
not necessarily obvious on the face of it. So let's
(08:04):
talk about smartphones, for example. That's an easy one. One
of the big trends we see in technology is that
as devices or components within devices get more powerful, the
software developers end up making software that eats up that
extra power. Nicholas Worth wrote about this pro problem back
(08:25):
in the ninety nineties. He wrote a paper titled a
Plea for Lean Software, and his point has essentially boiled
down into what we now call Worth's law, which is
that software is getting slower. That is, it's getting more
resource hungry at a rate that's faster than hardware is
(08:46):
getting faster. So while subsequent generations of hardware are getting
more powerful, the requirements of software are outpacing that progress,
and the end result is that we often feel our
shiny new devices just aren't keeping up as much as
we expected them to. We're basing our perception on what
the new device should be able to do based on
(09:07):
what we have right now, and that's just not how
stuff works. Unfortunately, gamers who want to be on the
bleeding edge of computing capability experience this a lot. A
top gaming rig would cost thousands of dollars. It requires
a powerful central processor or CPU, and quite likely multiple
powerful graphics processing units or GPUs. Plus you need a
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power supply that's capable of providing the juice that these
components need, and you need a killer cooling system to
make sure the whole thing doesn't overheat. And just as
you get all of this stuff set up and running
the latest games, developers start making games that are so
resource hungry that even with your killer rig you might
have to knock a few of the game's settings down
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a couple of notches just to make it run smoothly. Meanwhile,
you're already anticipating the next big development and hardware that
will let you move all those sliders all the way
to the top. That's going to set you back a
few more thousand dollars, which is brutal. With smartphones, we
see this happen a lot as newer models use better processors,
and typically new processors are usually more powerful and hopefully
(10:20):
more efficient, so in other words, you're not seeing battery
life just plummet from one generation to the next, or
phones get way bigger because you need a bigger battery
in order to make them last long enough. Processor technologies
follow pretty close to Moore's law, and we typically interpret
that as meaning that a processor's capabilities effectively double every
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two years or so. Not the same processor, but rather
new processors on the market end up being twice as
powerful as the processors that came out two years earlier.
That's generally what we mean. More's laws more subtle than that,
but we won't go into it. Battery life does not
follow this same trajectory. It's again a law of physics.
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We're talking about electrochemical reactions, and so there's not a
magic way to make batteries just last longer. It requires
more incremental improvement. So if we only concentrated on making
processors more powerful, they would just pull more juice per
hour than older processors, and soon we would have smartphones.
They would only have a couple of hours of useful
(11:26):
battery life. So there is a balance to be made here. Meanwhile,
smartphone apps still follow Worth's law. The apps drawn more
processor power, or they interact with more components, and smartphones
like GPS receivers or accelerometers or the camera or microphone,
or some combination of all of these and more, and
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the smartphone operating systems themselves evolved to support these apps
and provide more functionality. Well, older smartphones just can't keep
up with this all the time, and so you will
often see companies make a cut off for operating system updates.
Older phones might stall out at a certain OS version
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and be unable to install more recent updates of the
operating system. So you could have an Android smartphone that's
maybe a few years old, and it's running a version
of Android that's several generations old at this point because
Google has determined that the hardware you're using simply cannot
meet the needs of later operating systems. Meanwhile, the app
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developers are focusing on what they can do with the
most recent OS version, which means you might not be
able to run a new app with all of its features,
or you might not even be able to run the
app at all if you're using an older phone. And
since apps are what makes smartphones smart, that ends up
being a big problem. And so now the incentive is
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there for you to upgrade your phone, even if your
old phone still works, so that you can, you know,
just use your smartphone the way you want to. And
you're not stuck older versions of apps. And that's particularly
important because sometimes these older versions of apps end up
being tied to servers that could go offline, or they
might swap over to a new process, and then you
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have an outdated smartphone that has a bunch of inactive
apps stored on it and it becomes practically useless. On
a related note, battery life decreases over time and use,
so older batteries just don't hold as much of a
charge as newer batteries, and they drain faster, which means
that your older battery operated devices will need recharging more frequently.
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Apple famously tried to address this problem by purposefully throttling
the processing speed of older iPhones. The processors would work
more slowly so that they would consume less battery power,
thus extending the usefulness of a battery at the cost
of smartphone performance. But Apple didn't, you know, tell anyone
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about it, and a lot of users figured out that
there too, vices were slowing down due to age. That's
what they assumed. It's just, oh, this is older, that's
why it's getting slower. And in a way that was
kind of true, but not in the same way that
these users thought. They just thought, this thing is getting old,
I need a new one, so they opted to buy
a new, later generation iPhone. But in iPhone, users figured
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out that their phones were being throttled and they had
no choice in the matter, and that led to a
big class action lawsuit. As users said, had they known
what was going on, they would have opted to replace
the battery in their old iPhone rather than buy a
brand new iPhone. And I should add that Apple does
not make it easy for you to do this. You
(14:41):
you really can't replace a battery in your iPhone, at
least not without violating your warranty. But under certain circumstances,
like if you enroll in Apple Care Plus, then Apple
actually will replace an iPhone battery free of charge. I say,
for your charge. Really, I should say that prices included
(15:03):
in your enrollment into Apple Care Plus. So for those users,
the people who had enrolled in Apple Care Plus, they
could have chosen to have a new battery put into
their older iPhone and it would have extended the life
of that device, but they weren't told about what was
going on, so instead they opted to buy a brand
new phone, which was way more expensive. In Apple reached
(15:26):
a settlement agreement, actually to settlement agreements for two different
class action lawsuits brought against the company about this very issue.
The first settlement was for five hundred million dollars a
princely some, and the second was for another one thirteen
million dollars. In both cases, prosecution argued that Apple was
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deliberately hiding the fact that it was throttling processing output
and that the battery was degrading over time, and they
knew that most users would opt to upgrade to a
newer iPhone as long as they didn't realize that there
was an alternative path they could have taken. Now, that
pretty much hits the planned obsolescence definition right on the nose.
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So it turns out there are a lot of different
approaches to planned obsolescence. While the phrase might make you
think that the company is purposefully making stuff that just
won't stand the test of time, as in the company
is choosing to create substandard products knowing that these products
will break down and the customer is likely to come
back and buy another one. Really, that's just the tip
(16:30):
of the iceberg, and it's usually not even the case.
If a company's reputation gets tied to the idea that
the stuff they make breaks easily. That's not good for business.
And the rest of this episode, we're going to take
a closer look at some historical examples of planned obsolescence
and what was going on from different perspectives, and we'll
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also get into the right to Repair movement and what
it might mean to the tech industry moving forward, assuming
the movement actually achieves its goal. But first let's take
a quick break. We're back and on December twenty three,
(17:14):
nineteen twenty four, a group of elite entrepreneurs met to
establish some shady guidelines, which was pretty ironic because they
were all in the lightbulb business. That's sort of a
pun I guess anyway. The leaders represented some of the
largest light bulb manufacturers in the world. There was General Electric,
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the grand daddy of big tech companies in the United States.
There was the company Phillips from the Netherlands, as Rum,
a company from Germany had a representative present, and the
French had their place too, with executives from the company
De Lump And together they created a powerful idea, which
we can represent as a very large lightbulb turning on
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behind their heads or at least we could if this
were a video and not an audio podcast. Their idea
was to form a new company, an organization that would
coordinate how lightbulbs should work, as in how bright they
should be and how long they should last, as well
as which company would be allowed to sell its products
in certain specific regions. It was collusion of the highest order,
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and it violated pretty much every antitrust law you can
think of. And it became known as the Phoebus Cartel.
Cute huh, because Phoebus is another name for Apollo, the
god of the sun. Before the cartel, manufacturers were making
lightbulbs that could last between fifteen hundred and two thousand
hours of operation. But the cartel collectively decided that their
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light bulbs should have a life expectancy of one thousand
hours of use. A ha. These companies were producing a
technology that already had a limited lifespan just because of
how it works. You know, the filaments and light bulbs,
the part that actually gives off light, they eventually burned
through and break, and that's what makes incandescent lightbulbs die. Clearly,
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this group of people were all agreeing to a worldwide
limit on the useful number of hours a light bulb
would operate in in order to sell more light bulbs. Right,
they were making a predetermined end of life cycle for
light bulbs, and by making everyone agree to this limitation,
no manufacturer would be able to defy the others and
start selling bulbs that had longer lifespans, which would ruin
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it for everybody else. Now you can see the appeal
of that narrative, right, rich fat cats are cynically limiting
a technology just to sell more light bulbs, while simultaneously
creating pressure to prevent any other company from offering up
a superior product. You could just hear the thumbs twiddling,
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you know, the mustaches waxing, and the chore as shortling. Heck,
the cartel would even test light bulbs from each manufacturer,
and if any of those light bulbs proved to have
a lifespan that was well beyond those one thousand hours
of operation, the cartel would find the responsible manufacturer keep
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those light bulbs lives shorter or else. But if we
want to be a little more fair, we should take
into consideration another factor. As light bulbs age, they would
give off less light. Incandescent bulbs they are less luminously efficient,
in other words, and so the counter argument was made
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that by limiting the lifespan to one thousand hours, it
was more about maximizing luminous efficiency. It was to make
certain that the light bulbs were providing enough light throughout
their lifespans and not just turning into increasingly dim light sources.
So there was an argument being made that the restriction
of the life span was more about improving the quality
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of the performance of light bulbs rather than speeding up
the need to replace those light bulbs. It was a
compelling enough argument to lead the u K's Monopolies and
Restrictive Practices Commission to give the companies some slack with
that regard. Though there were many other things the Phoebus
Cartel did that did not get a free pass, but
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those are more market focused than tech focused, so I'm
not going to go into them. The cartel itself, by
the way, dissolved in the late nineteen thirties, not because
of government pressure, or at least not the kind of
regulation pressure, but because of a little thing called World
War Two. Now, I suspect that the decision to arrive
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at one thousand hours of useful life was guided both
by practical considerations and good old fashioned greed. So I
suspect there is some truth to both of the scenarios
I mentioned, or if you listen to ridiculous history scenarios
and considering that some of the other moves that the
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cartel made, like namely price fixing, you definitely cannot count
greed out because that was the primary motivator for those decisions.
But there are at least some people who are a
little more charitable toward the idea of limiting bulb lifespan
in an effort to favor better luminous efficiency. So we'll
move on. The next big example is the one that
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I mentioned earlier and talked about a little bit in
my episodes about General Motors. This was the GM under
Alfred B. Sloan, the man who took a big mess
of companies that were acquired by GM founder William C. Durant,
and then he organized all of this mishmash into individual
business units looking over specific makes of car, and each
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of those units had a great deal of autonomy between them.
He was also a consummate capitalist, and I don't necessarily
mean that in a flattering way. He had a habit
of focusing on profits and ignoring people. But you can
learn more about that in the GM episodes. One of
Sloan's many contributions to the automotive industry was the introduction
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of stylistic changes to various car models year over year.
In the early days of automobiles, the dominating manufacturer was
the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford's company produced the famous
Model T. Ford and first introduced that Model T in
nineteen o eight, and it remained in production until nineteen
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twenty seven. By nine, this was a mass produced cars,
so on a huge scale, Ford dominated car sales in
the United States for like decades now. Allegedly, Ford himself
once said that there was no use in overtaking and
passing a Model T on the road because you would
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just find yourself behind a different Model T. That's how
commonplace they were. He also reportedly said that a customer
could get a Model T and whatever color they wanted
as long as it was black. While the company would
offer Model T s and other colors up to nineteen fourteen,
between nineteen fourteen and nineteen Ford only churned out black
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Model T cars. This meant that Ford's factories could build
nearly identical cars, one right after the other, using mass
production techniques, thus increasing efficiency and keeping costs down. And
it also meant that Ford could sell these cars at
affordable prices. They were meant to be practical, durable, and reliable,
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and that's how he made so many early sales. Now
there was a big emphasis on uniformity and consistency, in
other words, because those are things that make it easier
to mass produce something. And Alfred Sloan saw an opportunity
to appeal to people on a different level over at
General Motors. He thought it would be a good idea
to change up the style of a model of car
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on a regular basis. At a glance, you would be
able to give a ballpark estimate of the year when
a certain model came out due to distinguishing features that
were on that car. You know, maybe the headlights are
in a slightly different spot, or maybe the car has
a different kind of grill on the front of it,
or maybe you put a pair of big old tail
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fins on the back of the thing. That's the sort
of thing that Sloan was thinking about. Harley Earl, a
man whom many historians credit as the first professional designer
to work in the automotive industry. Worked was Sloan to
make this vision a reality, and Earl would sculpt models
out of clay and then mold them in different ways
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to create new features, and as tastes changed, he could
reflect that in different car body designs, and now cars
could appeal to people by embodying certain design trends. This
approach meant that car has now had a sort of
planned obsolescence. As time passes, fashions change and older cars
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will pass out of fashion. Out of style, they'll become unfashionable,
and that creates a psychological lever that GM could lean
on to convince people to come in trade in their
older cars and buy newer ones. The older cars might
still work perfectly well from an operational point of view,
but they could be seen as being old fashioned, and
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that was enough to push some people to upgrade to
a new vehicle. It was still important for GM to
make cars that were perceived to be reliable and powerful.
If the cars were known to break down quickly, that
kind of reputation would hurt sales. So while you could
keep driving the same car for many years, assuming you
took good care of the car, Sloan's goal was to
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make you feel like a like kind of a social
pariah if you did that for a really long time, Like, Oh,
that poor so and so they can't afford a new car.
Look them driving that old, you know, Chevy or whatever
it might be. Sloan's approach accelerated car pon the role
of a car as a status symbol. GM offered several
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different makes of cars, and each make targeted a different
economic demographic. So on the cheaper end was the Chevrolet
line and on the opposite side of the spectrum was
the Cadillac. But no matter which make of car you
talked about, that strategy of planned obsolescence was at play.
You can see Sloan's impact in consumer products across the board,
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and not just in tech, though it tends to be
particularly evident in the tech world. It's why Apple releases
a new iPhone every year, or more to the point,
it's why companies like Apple hold really big exclusive press
events to hype the release of a new model of
iPhone every year. And to be clear, Apple does this
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with lots of its products, not just the iPhone. It's
just the iPhone event tends to get the most attention.
So let's think about that yearly schedule for a moment,
and also think back to how phones were marketed in
the US when the iPhone first launched in two thousand seven.
So at that time, Apple had signed an exclusive agreement
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with the carrier A T and T here in the
United States. Now, the reasons behind that agreement are fascinating,
but they also go beyond what I'm going to talk about,
so I'll save that for some future episode. You're welcome.
But back in those days, it was pretty common practice
in the United States for carriers like A T and
T to offer subsidized phones in return for signing two
(28:41):
year contracts where you agreed that this was your carrier
for two years. You were locked into a carrier. That
made the initial purchase price of phones a little bit
more affordable, at least initially, so rather than shelling out
a thousand dollars for a phone, you might spend a
couple hundred by signing onto a two year agreement with
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the carrier. Typically, those agreements would limit your options when
it came to upgrades. Normally you would have to wait
out the two years to get to the point where
you would renew your agreement or sign whatever newer version
of the agreement the carrier was offering, and then you
could upgrade to a new phone at a reduced cost,
or sometimes the phone would be included as part of
(29:26):
the agreement. But Apple was releasing a brand new iPhone
every year, and each new iPhone would have new features
and new styling, so the phones were following Sloan's approach
to product design. A new iPhone wasn't just flashy technology.
It was also a status symbol, and a lot of
folks would choose to upgrade to the new version, even
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if it meant they had to pay more to do
it because they were only a year into a service
agreement with their carrier and they could not yet qualify
for a subsidized phone. Now. This happened for a few years,
but gradually US carriers kind of phased out those two
year contract plans, which also meant that the subsidized phone
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model began to disappear. Customers had more freedom to choose
whichever carrier they wanted to without getting locked into things,
but it also meant that they often had to pay
full price for phones. For those who had been upgrading
to a new iPhone every year, despite the limitations of
two year contracts. This was actually probably a welcome change
(30:29):
to the rest of us. It was a bit of
an adjustment, not a bad thing, but it did take
some time to adjust to it. The brilliant thing about
Sloan's approach, the thing that Apple often relies upon, is
that you're encouraging customers to crave the new There's this
built in desire in the market to get the coolest
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new toy with the latest features and the latest options.
Companies don't have to trash the older technology. They just
helped the new things that the latest version can do.
And it might mean that companies take steps to roll
out new features very carefully. So in some cases a
company might be ready to implement a brand new feature,
(31:12):
at least from a technological level. However, the whole back,
they'll make a market based decision to wait and sit
on that technology for a little bit in order to
maximize sales. You might say, well, we could install these
three new features in our next phone, but if we
only install one of them, and then the phone after
that we add a second one, and the phone after
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that we add the third one, we are able to
keep boosting sales year over year. If we do all
three right now, we might not have enough of an
improvement to get that same boost next year. So it
becomes this kind of game of chess. So why would
you put in all the bells and whistles if you
can hold back a few of them and then make
(31:54):
many more sales in the next update. Now, is this insidious?
I don't really think so. I mean, from a business perspective,
it does make a lot of sense. From a consumer perspective,
I say, what this should do is teach us that
jumping on a brand new technology, or even just a
new model of an existing technology, might not be the
(32:15):
best option right out of the gate. We might need
to use some self control before we buy the next
shiny thing. Of course, this approach requires moderation as well,
or else you would never buy anything at all. If
I need a new phone and I know that I'm
three months out from the release of something that I
think is really worthwhile, then I can wait that out.
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But if I'm perpetually waiting for a phone that blows
me away with all the features, I'll probably be worried
that I'm going to experience buyer's remorse. If I jump
in right. So in other words, if I buy something
and I don't feel like it's really what I was
waiting for, then maybe the next thing that comes out
the next month makes me feel badly about it, and
(32:58):
so that can actually become um a bit of a crisis.
It can. It can prevent you from taking action because
you're always worried that once you take action, you're committed,
and then the next day you find out there was
a better option. But yeah, that desire for the new
is something that's really ingrained in the tech world. Companies
don't have to make products that will break after a
(33:21):
certain amount of time. They don't have to have that
kind of planned obsolescence because with lots of tech, just
the desire to have the latest thing is enough all
on its own. That means the companies just have to
focus on offering up products that are different enough from
the previous generation to spark our desire. When we come back,
i'll talk a little bit more about this, and then
(33:42):
we'll learn about the right to repair. But first let's
take a quick break. So, if manufacturers are actually giving
the people what they want, that is update, it's to
technology that flesh out what it can do at least
(34:03):
in the ways that consumers desire. Then we can't really
put all the blame on manufacturers for planned obsolescence. We
are somewhat responsible for it too. It's good to keep
in mind, and if we recognize that part of us,
we can try to make a better balance of when
we actually need something new and when we just want
(34:25):
something new. I struggle with this all the time, whether
it's a new flagship phone. I mean, when Android comes
up with a brand new flagship phone, I feel the
temptation to jump on it. Not literally jump on it,
but you know what I mean. However, in most cases,
the phone I have at the time tends to be
(34:46):
perfectly fine for my needs. The last time I did
upgrade a phone, it was because the microphone on my
phone had broken. I could use Bluetooth devices and talk
on the phone, but I couldn't use my phone as
a phone just on its own, so I did have
to upgrade then. But I tend to stick to getting
a new phone just every few years as the older
(35:07):
one starts to lag behind, especially when it comes to
what apps it can run. And the same is true
for game systems. I've gotten a lot better about that too.
It used to be that as soon as a game
system came out, I felt the urge to rush out
and buy it. I usually didn't because I usually didn't
have the money, but I always wanted to. However, now
(35:27):
I actually prefer to hang back, both so that any
bugs in those early versions can be worked out. I mean,
I do not want another red Ring of Death situation
ever again, and also so that game developers can release
more titles for the system. It's not much fun pouring
a bunch of money into a technology and then having
to wait around for it to become useful. But now
(35:49):
we also have to talk about the issue of right
to repair. So earlier I talked about the ways companies
make it challenging or impossible for the average person and
to repair stuff. And initially my reaction to that kind
of thing is this is how they get you. They
want you to get back to them and bring all
the stuff to get it fixed by them themselves. But
(36:11):
there can be other reasons for this that, while you
may or may not agree with them, can be a
little more subtle. So, for example, let's take Apple again.
For most of the company's history, Apple products have been
largely inaccessible to those who wish to do their own repairs,
at least to do so without violating a warranty. But
one of the big reasons for that is that Apple
(36:34):
has a specific vision as to how consumers are supposed
to experience Apple products. This was a philosophy that Steve
Jobs had pushed pretty hard. The goal was to create
a controlled experience from beginning to end. The company would
have an enormous amount of authority in deciding this, from
hardware configurations to the kinds of software that would be
(36:56):
allowed to run on the device. We see this reflected
in the iPhone app store, where developers have to get
approval from Apple before their apps will actually appear on
the market. This level of control helps a company deliver
consistent quality to users. The challenge is then selling users
on the idea that the company's approach is what the
(37:18):
customer actually wants. Jobs was amazing at this. He could
bring a device to a crowd and by the end
of a presentation have that crowd convinced that Apple's product
is exactly what the crowd wanted and needed. But Apple
relinquishing control in any way wouldn't make that more difficult
to do. Because a third party might not perform up
(37:41):
to Apple's standards and it would reflect poorly on Apple.
But that also meant that Apple products were difficult to modify.
Early consumer computers came out as kits, and the people
who bought those kits would typically put them together themselves.
You could also pay to have some of those kits
fully assembled. You would have to pay extra for that,
(38:03):
but a lot of early computer owners actually enjoyed the
experience of building the computers from the kits, and this
meant that really enterprising hobbyists could even make little tweaks
to the design to change the performance of the end
machine a little bit. This was the early era of
the hacker, as people figured out how these systems worked,
(38:24):
and then they modified those systems in different ways. And
it was pretty common practice along many different computer manufacturers
to have components that you could swap out, like RAM chips.
So if you wanted your computer to have more memory,
you could open up your computer case and install more RAM,
assuming your computer's motherboard and processor could support the additional RAM.
(38:47):
But Apple typically made this really hard to do. If
you wanted an Apple computer with more RAM, you were
going to have to pay extra to buy a computer
model that was a step up from whichever one we're
looking at. And that also extends to making it really
hard to repair Apple computers if something were to go wrong,
(39:07):
and thus we get to the birth of the genius bar.
So we get companies creating complicated electronic devices, many of
which have proprietary fasteners and such holding them together, and
the message that the customer is to bring any of
those devices that aren't working, you know, they might need
some repair. You're supposed to bring those back to the
company or maybe an authorized service vendor. Critics of this
(39:31):
approach say it's anti competitive and it hurts the consumer. Ideally,
the consumer would have an open choice as to whom
they could bring a broken device for a repair. So
if I were particularly talented at repairs, I would be
able to open up a shop and work on all
sorts of devices. I might offer more competitive rates than
(39:52):
what people might find going through the original manufacturer or
enrolling in an extended care or warranty program. And these
are ideas are the underlying principles of the right to
repair movement. There are a lot of organizations that advocate
for the right to repair, and they weren't to lobby
governments to pass legislation that would mandate it. Primarily we
(40:14):
see the movement in the United States and even more
prominently in the European Union. This is also tied to
the problem of electronic waste. As I mentioned earlier. According
to the Public Internet Research Group, which I should add
is not an unbiased source of information, but according to them,
Americans throughout four hundred sixteen thousand cell phones a day.
(40:36):
I find that number a little hard to believe. Maybe
it's true. I didn't find, you know, other sources that
backed this up, but I did find other sources that
had similar eye popping statistics. Only a fraction of the
electronic devices we throw away, ever, end up in recycling centers.
I mean, that's mostly on us. If we just toss
(40:57):
it in the garbage, then that's where it's gonna go.
Take effort to find good recycling centers. Not all of
them are ethical, by the way. It takes some research.
So considering all the stuff that's in electronics, including valuable metals.
There's like gold and copper in this stuff, it's a
real shame to just throw them out. And then you
(41:17):
consider the environmental impact and it gets worse. Right to
repair groups want to see companies include access to stuff
like repair guides, so make it possible to understand how
these things work and how to fix them. Make it
repair tools accessible if any proprietary tools are needed, and
also make us accessible parts needed for repairs. Sell the
(41:39):
parts individually as well, so none of this would be free.
You know, the companies could still make money. They could
actually offer repair kits that you can purchase. But imagine
that instead of having to bring back your smartphone to
some store or send it off to a manufacturer through
the mail, you instead could order a repair kit, and
if you have steady hands, maybe you replace that cracked
(42:01):
screen or that dead battery by yourself. That's the appeal
of the right to repair movement. But as electronics get
more complicated, it's more challenging to meet that kind of standard.
Some devices are complex enough that it requires a person
with specialized knowledge and skill in order to tackle the problem,
(42:23):
and a lot of us, myself included, would probably find
ourselves popping into an independent repair shop to have our
stuff fixed rather than take it on ourselves and risk
breaking it more. Look, all I'm saying is I know
what my track record is for taking stuff apart versus
putting it together again, and that ratio is way out
(42:44):
of balance. We're seeing this movement embrace not just consumer
goods like smartphones, but really big stuff like farming equipment
and tractors. Farmers have criticized manufacturer John Dear for including
essentially the equivalent of a digital lock and those limits
who can actually make repairs to a machine. For farmers
(43:05):
who depend upon these big vehicles for their livelihood, that
represents a lack of freedom and lack of options, and
it really does feel anti competitive. It's saying you have
to go to people of our choosing if you want
to have the thing you bought repaired. And this also
gets into that weird area we find ourselves in in
(43:28):
the digital age. In the old days, you would buy
something and you would just think this is mine, right,
Like you bought a watch, that's your watch. You could
repair that watch however you liked. But these days things
are being sold not just as a product but as
an ongoing service. And it's not so much that you
(43:48):
own the thing, it's that you own access to that thing,
and some ownership is retained by the original manufacturer. This
is an idea that I'm not super keen on because
it does put a lot more power back in the
hands of the manufacturers and and takes a lot of
power away from consumers. Well, in the United States, twenty
(44:11):
states have filed legislation in an effort to address these
kinds of issues, and in the EU some progress on
this front has already been made. This month a series
of regulations that apply to manufacturers that make appliances like
washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, I think computer monitors too. It
(44:31):
goes into effect and those regulations state that companies need
to offer products that have replaceable components, and moreover, that
anyone would be able to make these replacements using common tools.
You shouldn't need anything special in order to do this
repair work. So, in other words, companies are not supposed
to solder stuff together or otherwise make it impossible or
(44:54):
difficult to access components without causing further damage. And you
shouldn't need a you know, number seventy three spanner up
to iconological wrench or something in order to work on it.
The EU has yet to pass regulations that would cover
stuff like cell phones, computers, and tablets, though and that
is a big problem because these are some of the
(45:15):
most common and harmful forms of consumer waste. People go
through these types of devices on a pretty regular basis,
and some of the member nations of the EU have
gone on to move ahead and pass their own regulations
since the EU as a whole has been a little
slow on this. So, for example, in France, a new
piece of information will be included with consumer electronics. It's
(45:39):
essentially a repair index, is a score that ranges between
one and ten. The index gives consumers the idea of
how easy or difficult it is to disassemble a device,
whether or not you can find information on how to
repair the device, you know, if it's readily available or not,
whether or not you can find spare parts of that
(46:00):
kind of device, how expensive those spare parts are, So
you know, the the more difficult it is to repair something,
the lower that score is going to be for that
particular item. Now, where we go from here will depend
upon how governments either past legislation or they opt not to,
plus how they intend to enforce legislation. Companies have very
(46:24):
little incentive to offer up, you know, repair options to
the end user because those can end up hitting revenue
down the line. Now, personally, I would love to see
a lot more options for repair. I'd like to see
an approach similar to what it was like to buy
a car twenty years ago, because yeah, you could bring
your car back to the dealership for maintenance, but chances
(46:46):
are you might find a great mechanic who is more
convenient to where you live, or maybe they have more
competitive rates and that might end up being your first
choice instead of bringing it back to the dealership, or
maybe you invest the time and energy to learn how
to do the repairs yourself. I think the options should
(47:06):
all be there, and I definitely think that's an improvement
over the status quo we have now. Well, that wraps
up this episode. I hope you enjoyed learning about planned
obsolescence and the right to repair. If you have suggestions
for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff,
let me know. The best way to reach out is
over on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff h s
(47:29):
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Ye.
Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you. Well, it's Thanksgiving here
in the United States, which means we are actually off
(00:26):
work today, but we thought we'd bring you a rerun episode.
This episode published last year March nine, two thousand twenty one,
with the title Planned Obsolescence and the Right to Repair.
I thought this would be an appropriate topic to bring
back up because we are in the heart of holiday
(00:47):
gift buying season. You know, tomorrow is Black Friday, which
is traditionally a big shopping day, but we all know
that those shopping days have been expanded both before and
after Black Friday. But one of the big things people
like to get our tech gifts for their loved ones.
And one of the downsides to tech is that it
(01:09):
can go obsolete pretty quickly, and sometimes when stuff goes wrong,
there's not necessarily an easy way to fix it, and
that brings us to the right to Repair movement. So
sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode from last year,
Planned Obsolescence and the Right to Repair. I recently did
(01:31):
a series of episodes about General Motors, and one of
the many things I talked about in those episodes was
how Alfred Sloan, who was an absolutely critical leader of
GM early on, established a practice of planned obsolescence. That
is part of Sloan's market strategy was creating a company
(01:53):
that every year would release cars that had updated styling
and features in order to entire not just first time
car buyers, but people who had already, you know, purchased
a car in the past. And that got me to
thinking that I should really talk about planned obsolescence in
general and examine the facts and consider the myths, and
(02:15):
also chat a bit about the right to repair movement
and recycling, because all of this is kind of connected together.
We're talking about casual consumption of electronic goods, almost a
disposable approach to them, and electronic goods are not necessarily
the best thing in the world to treat as disposable.
(02:37):
So let's just start off by defining what planned obsolescence
is really all about. Now. Generally, people talk about planned
obsolescence as a strategy in which the maker of a thing,
whether it's a physical good or an app or whatever,
builds into that thing a predetermined end of life. Other words,
(03:00):
you've already determined how long this thing is supposed to last.
And the purpose of planned obsolescens is to not just
sell one thing to each customer one time, but to
sell many of that same thing to every customer over time.
It's the same reason why a lot of software companies
(03:20):
will migrate toward a subscription based revenue model, because it's
more profitable to get customers to regularly give you money
than to bank on selling them a lot of the
same thing to a huge customer base. Like if I'm
selling a software package for two hundred dollars, I'm going
to get you know, X number of customers, and chances
(03:43):
are they're not going to buy another product for me
for a while. If I offer a subscription fee for
a much lower monthly plan, I might get people locked
into that system for years and thus make way more
money off of them in the long run than I
would if I had gone with the big ticket i'd
up front. This can actually manifest in lots of different ways. Now, typically,
(04:05):
I get the sense that the popular perception of you know,
planned ups lessons is that companies make stuff that's just
designed to stop working after a certain number of hours
of operation. So, in other words, the manufacturer isn't making
products that are meant to stand the test of time. Rather,
these are products that will at some point break down
(04:27):
and either require repairs or a replacement. Now, repairs were
great if you happen to be the not only the
company that's selling the thing, but you're also the company
that provides maintenance and repair services. Car dealerships often fall
into this category. You can purchase a car at a dealership,
(04:47):
and then most dealerships have service centers as well, or
they have, you know, an agreement with a service center,
so the dealership can continue to make money off of
a sale if the salesperson can and convince the customer
to bring the car back to the dealership's service center
for regular maintenance or repair work. But not all technology
(05:08):
has the value of a car. Obviously, there's a lot
of tech out there that's fairly inexpensive to make, and
companies might price that technology it's such a relatively low
cost that a repair might set you back the same
amount or more than buying just a new version of
whatever that tech is. For a lot of us, I
(05:29):
figure the reaction to that as well, I might as
well buy a new one if I'm going to be
spending that kind of money. Heck, the new thing of
a jig might have more features than the old one,
or it might look a little different, you know, more stylish,
and so we toss aside whatever old thing of a
jig we have and then we go out and buy
a new one. Or maybe you would actually like to
(05:51):
do repairs yourself. That's something we're going to chat about
more towards the end of this episode. But some companies
have been known to make it challenge or maybe even impossible,
for the end customer to really repair the technology they purchase,
whether it's through using proprietary screws that need a specific
tool to remove them, or actually sealing components into compartments
(06:14):
with glue and rivets and solder or other fasteners, making
it impossible to open without risk of causing further damage.
Companies have used a few different ways to obscure or
impede repairs mm apple. Or you could also get to
a point with stuff like cars where it just becomes
(06:36):
harder to make repairs because it's hard to even determine
what is wrong with the thing without a special diagnostic
device like a computer. This is the case with a
lot of modern cars. You might be able to lift
the hood and look around a little bit, but some
vehicles have various covers or engine configurations that make it
really challenging for the average person to access specific parts
(06:59):
of the motor, let alone do any work on it. Again,
this limits what you can do with tech once it
starts to fail, and all tech does fail over time,
because well, entropy is something we just can't avoid. It's
it's a fundamental law of the universe, particularly when it
comes to cheap technology. The sort of disposable approach has
(07:23):
a lot of negative drawbacks, including what to do with
old tech that no longer works. I mean, a lot
of technology contains stuff that's pretty toxic, so throwing it
out in the garbage could lead to it ending up
in a landfill somewhere, and then harmful stuff like lead
or mercury could leach into the environment. Because of that,
(07:44):
that's not great. So we'll touch a tiny bit on
electronics recycling in this episode two, but I have done
full episodes about e waste recycling, so I'm not going
to spend too much time on it, and there are
often ways to make older tech obsle elite that are
not necessarily obvious on the face of it. So let's
(08:04):
talk about smartphones, for example. That's an easy one. One
of the big trends we see in technology is that
as devices or components within devices get more powerful, the
software developers end up making software that eats up that
extra power. Nicholas Worth wrote about this pro problem back
(08:25):
in the ninety nineties. He wrote a paper titled a
Plea for Lean Software, and his point has essentially boiled
down into what we now call Worth's law, which is
that software is getting slower. That is, it's getting more
resource hungry at a rate that's faster than hardware is
(08:46):
getting faster. So while subsequent generations of hardware are getting
more powerful, the requirements of software are outpacing that progress,
and the end result is that we often feel our
shiny new devices just aren't keeping up as much as
we expected them to. We're basing our perception on what
the new device should be able to do based on
(09:07):
what we have right now, and that's just not how
stuff works. Unfortunately, gamers who want to be on the
bleeding edge of computing capability experience this a lot. A
top gaming rig would cost thousands of dollars. It requires
a powerful central processor or CPU, and quite likely multiple
powerful graphics processing units or GPUs. Plus you need a
(09:32):
power supply that's capable of providing the juice that these
components need, and you need a killer cooling system to
make sure the whole thing doesn't overheat. And just as
you get all of this stuff set up and running
the latest games, developers start making games that are so
resource hungry that even with your killer rig you might
have to knock a few of the game's settings down
(09:55):
a couple of notches just to make it run smoothly. Meanwhile,
you're already anticipating the next big development and hardware that
will let you move all those sliders all the way
to the top. That's going to set you back a
few more thousand dollars, which is brutal. With smartphones, we
see this happen a lot as newer models use better processors,
and typically new processors are usually more powerful and hopefully
(10:20):
more efficient, so in other words, you're not seeing battery
life just plummet from one generation to the next, or
phones get way bigger because you need a bigger battery
in order to make them last long enough. Processor technologies
follow pretty close to Moore's law, and we typically interpret
that as meaning that a processor's capabilities effectively double every
(10:42):
two years or so. Not the same processor, but rather
new processors on the market end up being twice as
powerful as the processors that came out two years earlier.
That's generally what we mean. More's laws more subtle than that,
but we won't go into it. Battery life does not
follow this same trajectory. It's again a law of physics.
(11:05):
We're talking about electrochemical reactions, and so there's not a
magic way to make batteries just last longer. It requires
more incremental improvement. So if we only concentrated on making
processors more powerful, they would just pull more juice per
hour than older processors, and soon we would have smartphones.
They would only have a couple of hours of useful
(11:26):
battery life. So there is a balance to be made here. Meanwhile,
smartphone apps still follow Worth's law. The apps drawn more
processor power, or they interact with more components, and smartphones
like GPS receivers or accelerometers or the camera or microphone,
or some combination of all of these and more, and
(11:46):
the smartphone operating systems themselves evolved to support these apps
and provide more functionality. Well, older smartphones just can't keep
up with this all the time, and so you will
often see companies make a cut off for operating system updates.
Older phones might stall out at a certain OS version
(12:06):
and be unable to install more recent updates of the
operating system. So you could have an Android smartphone that's
maybe a few years old, and it's running a version
of Android that's several generations old at this point because
Google has determined that the hardware you're using simply cannot
meet the needs of later operating systems. Meanwhile, the app
(12:29):
developers are focusing on what they can do with the
most recent OS version, which means you might not be
able to run a new app with all of its features,
or you might not even be able to run the
app at all if you're using an older phone. And
since apps are what makes smartphones smart, that ends up
being a big problem. And so now the incentive is
(12:50):
there for you to upgrade your phone, even if your
old phone still works, so that you can, you know,
just use your smartphone the way you want to. And
you're not stuck older versions of apps. And that's particularly
important because sometimes these older versions of apps end up
being tied to servers that could go offline, or they
might swap over to a new process, and then you
(13:12):
have an outdated smartphone that has a bunch of inactive
apps stored on it and it becomes practically useless. On
a related note, battery life decreases over time and use,
so older batteries just don't hold as much of a
charge as newer batteries, and they drain faster, which means
that your older battery operated devices will need recharging more frequently.
(13:36):
Apple famously tried to address this problem by purposefully throttling
the processing speed of older iPhones. The processors would work
more slowly so that they would consume less battery power,
thus extending the usefulness of a battery at the cost
of smartphone performance. But Apple didn't, you know, tell anyone
(13:57):
about it, and a lot of users figured out that
there too, vices were slowing down due to age. That's
what they assumed. It's just, oh, this is older, that's
why it's getting slower. And in a way that was
kind of true, but not in the same way that
these users thought. They just thought, this thing is getting old,
I need a new one, so they opted to buy
a new, later generation iPhone. But in iPhone, users figured
(14:21):
out that their phones were being throttled and they had
no choice in the matter, and that led to a
big class action lawsuit. As users said, had they known
what was going on, they would have opted to replace
the battery in their old iPhone rather than buy a
brand new iPhone. And I should add that Apple does
not make it easy for you to do this. You
(14:41):
you really can't replace a battery in your iPhone, at
least not without violating your warranty. But under certain circumstances,
like if you enroll in Apple Care Plus, then Apple
actually will replace an iPhone battery free of charge. I say,
for your charge. Really, I should say that prices included
(15:03):
in your enrollment into Apple Care Plus. So for those users,
the people who had enrolled in Apple Care Plus, they
could have chosen to have a new battery put into
their older iPhone and it would have extended the life
of that device, but they weren't told about what was
going on, so instead they opted to buy a brand
new phone, which was way more expensive. In Apple reached
(15:26):
a settlement agreement, actually to settlement agreements for two different
class action lawsuits brought against the company about this very issue.
The first settlement was for five hundred million dollars a
princely some, and the second was for another one thirteen
million dollars. In both cases, prosecution argued that Apple was
(15:46):
deliberately hiding the fact that it was throttling processing output
and that the battery was degrading over time, and they
knew that most users would opt to upgrade to a
newer iPhone as long as they didn't realize that there
was an alternative path they could have taken. Now, that
pretty much hits the planned obsolescence definition right on the nose.
(16:08):
So it turns out there are a lot of different
approaches to planned obsolescence. While the phrase might make you
think that the company is purposefully making stuff that just
won't stand the test of time, as in the company
is choosing to create substandard products knowing that these products
will break down and the customer is likely to come
back and buy another one. Really, that's just the tip
(16:30):
of the iceberg, and it's usually not even the case.
If a company's reputation gets tied to the idea that
the stuff they make breaks easily. That's not good for business.
And the rest of this episode, we're going to take
a closer look at some historical examples of planned obsolescence
and what was going on from different perspectives, and we'll
(16:51):
also get into the right to Repair movement and what
it might mean to the tech industry moving forward, assuming
the movement actually achieves its goal. But first let's take
a quick break. We're back and on December twenty three,
(17:14):
nineteen twenty four, a group of elite entrepreneurs met to
establish some shady guidelines, which was pretty ironic because they
were all in the lightbulb business. That's sort of a
pun I guess anyway. The leaders represented some of the
largest light bulb manufacturers in the world. There was General Electric,
(17:38):
the grand daddy of big tech companies in the United States.
There was the company Phillips from the Netherlands, as Rum,
a company from Germany had a representative present, and the
French had their place too, with executives from the company
De Lump And together they created a powerful idea, which
we can represent as a very large lightbulb turning on
(18:00):
behind their heads or at least we could if this
were a video and not an audio podcast. Their idea
was to form a new company, an organization that would
coordinate how lightbulbs should work, as in how bright they
should be and how long they should last, as well
as which company would be allowed to sell its products
in certain specific regions. It was collusion of the highest order,
(18:24):
and it violated pretty much every antitrust law you can
think of. And it became known as the Phoebus Cartel.
Cute huh, because Phoebus is another name for Apollo, the
god of the sun. Before the cartel, manufacturers were making
lightbulbs that could last between fifteen hundred and two thousand
hours of operation. But the cartel collectively decided that their
(18:48):
light bulbs should have a life expectancy of one thousand
hours of use. A ha. These companies were producing a
technology that already had a limited lifespan just because of
how it works. You know, the filaments and light bulbs,
the part that actually gives off light, they eventually burned
through and break, and that's what makes incandescent lightbulbs die. Clearly,
(19:11):
this group of people were all agreeing to a worldwide
limit on the useful number of hours a light bulb
would operate in in order to sell more light bulbs. Right,
they were making a predetermined end of life cycle for
light bulbs, and by making everyone agree to this limitation,
no manufacturer would be able to defy the others and
start selling bulbs that had longer lifespans, which would ruin
(19:35):
it for everybody else. Now you can see the appeal
of that narrative, right, rich fat cats are cynically limiting
a technology just to sell more light bulbs, while simultaneously
creating pressure to prevent any other company from offering up
a superior product. You could just hear the thumbs twiddling,
(19:57):
you know, the mustaches waxing, and the chore as shortling. Heck,
the cartel would even test light bulbs from each manufacturer,
and if any of those light bulbs proved to have
a lifespan that was well beyond those one thousand hours
of operation, the cartel would find the responsible manufacturer keep
(20:18):
those light bulbs lives shorter or else. But if we
want to be a little more fair, we should take
into consideration another factor. As light bulbs age, they would
give off less light. Incandescent bulbs they are less luminously efficient,
in other words, and so the counter argument was made
(20:39):
that by limiting the lifespan to one thousand hours, it
was more about maximizing luminous efficiency. It was to make
certain that the light bulbs were providing enough light throughout
their lifespans and not just turning into increasingly dim light sources.
So there was an argument being made that the restriction
of the life span was more about improving the quality
(21:02):
of the performance of light bulbs rather than speeding up
the need to replace those light bulbs. It was a
compelling enough argument to lead the u K's Monopolies and
Restrictive Practices Commission to give the companies some slack with
that regard. Though there were many other things the Phoebus
Cartel did that did not get a free pass, but
(21:23):
those are more market focused than tech focused, so I'm
not going to go into them. The cartel itself, by
the way, dissolved in the late nineteen thirties, not because
of government pressure, or at least not the kind of
regulation pressure, but because of a little thing called World
War Two. Now, I suspect that the decision to arrive
(21:44):
at one thousand hours of useful life was guided both
by practical considerations and good old fashioned greed. So I
suspect there is some truth to both of the scenarios
I mentioned, or if you listen to ridiculous history scenarios
and considering that some of the other moves that the
(22:05):
cartel made, like namely price fixing, you definitely cannot count
greed out because that was the primary motivator for those decisions.
But there are at least some people who are a
little more charitable toward the idea of limiting bulb lifespan
in an effort to favor better luminous efficiency. So we'll
move on. The next big example is the one that
(22:28):
I mentioned earlier and talked about a little bit in
my episodes about General Motors. This was the GM under
Alfred B. Sloan, the man who took a big mess
of companies that were acquired by GM founder William C. Durant,
and then he organized all of this mishmash into individual
business units looking over specific makes of car, and each
(22:51):
of those units had a great deal of autonomy between them.
He was also a consummate capitalist, and I don't necessarily
mean that in a flattering way. He had a habit
of focusing on profits and ignoring people. But you can
learn more about that in the GM episodes. One of
Sloan's many contributions to the automotive industry was the introduction
(23:13):
of stylistic changes to various car models year over year.
In the early days of automobiles, the dominating manufacturer was
the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford's company produced the famous
Model T. Ford and first introduced that Model T in
nineteen o eight, and it remained in production until nineteen
(23:35):
twenty seven. By nine, this was a mass produced cars,
so on a huge scale, Ford dominated car sales in
the United States for like decades now. Allegedly, Ford himself
once said that there was no use in overtaking and
passing a Model T on the road because you would
(23:56):
just find yourself behind a different Model T. That's how
commonplace they were. He also reportedly said that a customer
could get a Model T and whatever color they wanted
as long as it was black. While the company would
offer Model T s and other colors up to nineteen fourteen,
between nineteen fourteen and nineteen Ford only churned out black
(24:20):
Model T cars. This meant that Ford's factories could build
nearly identical cars, one right after the other, using mass
production techniques, thus increasing efficiency and keeping costs down. And
it also meant that Ford could sell these cars at
affordable prices. They were meant to be practical, durable, and reliable,
(24:41):
and that's how he made so many early sales. Now
there was a big emphasis on uniformity and consistency, in
other words, because those are things that make it easier
to mass produce something. And Alfred Sloan saw an opportunity
to appeal to people on a different level over at
General Motors. He thought it would be a good idea
to change up the style of a model of car
(25:04):
on a regular basis. At a glance, you would be
able to give a ballpark estimate of the year when
a certain model came out due to distinguishing features that
were on that car. You know, maybe the headlights are
in a slightly different spot, or maybe the car has
a different kind of grill on the front of it,
or maybe you put a pair of big old tail
(25:25):
fins on the back of the thing. That's the sort
of thing that Sloan was thinking about. Harley Earl, a
man whom many historians credit as the first professional designer
to work in the automotive industry. Worked was Sloan to
make this vision a reality, and Earl would sculpt models
out of clay and then mold them in different ways
(25:46):
to create new features, and as tastes changed, he could
reflect that in different car body designs, and now cars
could appeal to people by embodying certain design trends. This
approach meant that car has now had a sort of
planned obsolescence. As time passes, fashions change and older cars
(26:07):
will pass out of fashion. Out of style, they'll become unfashionable,
and that creates a psychological lever that GM could lean
on to convince people to come in trade in their
older cars and buy newer ones. The older cars might
still work perfectly well from an operational point of view,
but they could be seen as being old fashioned, and
(26:28):
that was enough to push some people to upgrade to
a new vehicle. It was still important for GM to
make cars that were perceived to be reliable and powerful.
If the cars were known to break down quickly, that
kind of reputation would hurt sales. So while you could
keep driving the same car for many years, assuming you
took good care of the car, Sloan's goal was to
(26:50):
make you feel like a like kind of a social
pariah if you did that for a really long time, Like, Oh,
that poor so and so they can't afford a new car.
Look them driving that old, you know, Chevy or whatever
it might be. Sloan's approach accelerated car pon the role
of a car as a status symbol. GM offered several
(27:12):
different makes of cars, and each make targeted a different
economic demographic. So on the cheaper end was the Chevrolet
line and on the opposite side of the spectrum was
the Cadillac. But no matter which make of car you
talked about, that strategy of planned obsolescence was at play.
You can see Sloan's impact in consumer products across the board,
(27:34):
and not just in tech, though it tends to be
particularly evident in the tech world. It's why Apple releases
a new iPhone every year, or more to the point,
it's why companies like Apple hold really big exclusive press
events to hype the release of a new model of
iPhone every year. And to be clear, Apple does this
(27:56):
with lots of its products, not just the iPhone. It's
just the iPhone event tends to get the most attention.
So let's think about that yearly schedule for a moment,
and also think back to how phones were marketed in
the US when the iPhone first launched in two thousand seven.
So at that time, Apple had signed an exclusive agreement
(28:17):
with the carrier A T and T here in the
United States. Now, the reasons behind that agreement are fascinating,
but they also go beyond what I'm going to talk about,
so I'll save that for some future episode. You're welcome.
But back in those days, it was pretty common practice
in the United States for carriers like A T and
T to offer subsidized phones in return for signing two
(28:41):
year contracts where you agreed that this was your carrier
for two years. You were locked into a carrier. That
made the initial purchase price of phones a little bit
more affordable, at least initially, so rather than shelling out
a thousand dollars for a phone, you might spend a
couple hundred by signing onto a two year agreement with
(29:03):
the carrier. Typically, those agreements would limit your options when
it came to upgrades. Normally you would have to wait
out the two years to get to the point where
you would renew your agreement or sign whatever newer version
of the agreement the carrier was offering, and then you
could upgrade to a new phone at a reduced cost,
or sometimes the phone would be included as part of
(29:26):
the agreement. But Apple was releasing a brand new iPhone
every year, and each new iPhone would have new features
and new styling, so the phones were following Sloan's approach
to product design. A new iPhone wasn't just flashy technology.
It was also a status symbol, and a lot of
folks would choose to upgrade to the new version, even
(29:48):
if it meant they had to pay more to do
it because they were only a year into a service
agreement with their carrier and they could not yet qualify
for a subsidized phone. Now. This happened for a few years,
but gradually US carriers kind of phased out those two
year contract plans, which also meant that the subsidized phone
(30:08):
model began to disappear. Customers had more freedom to choose
whichever carrier they wanted to without getting locked into things,
but it also meant that they often had to pay
full price for phones. For those who had been upgrading
to a new iPhone every year, despite the limitations of
two year contracts. This was actually probably a welcome change
(30:29):
to the rest of us. It was a bit of
an adjustment, not a bad thing, but it did take
some time to adjust to it. The brilliant thing about
Sloan's approach, the thing that Apple often relies upon, is
that you're encouraging customers to crave the new There's this
built in desire in the market to get the coolest
(30:51):
new toy with the latest features and the latest options.
Companies don't have to trash the older technology. They just
helped the new things that the latest version can do.
And it might mean that companies take steps to roll
out new features very carefully. So in some cases a
company might be ready to implement a brand new feature,
(31:12):
at least from a technological level. However, the whole back,
they'll make a market based decision to wait and sit
on that technology for a little bit in order to
maximize sales. You might say, well, we could install these
three new features in our next phone, but if we
only install one of them, and then the phone after
that we add a second one, and the phone after
(31:34):
that we add the third one, we are able to
keep boosting sales year over year. If we do all
three right now, we might not have enough of an
improvement to get that same boost next year. So it
becomes this kind of game of chess. So why would
you put in all the bells and whistles if you
can hold back a few of them and then make
(31:54):
many more sales in the next update. Now, is this insidious?
I don't really think so. I mean, from a business perspective,
it does make a lot of sense. From a consumer perspective,
I say, what this should do is teach us that
jumping on a brand new technology, or even just a
new model of an existing technology, might not be the
(32:15):
best option right out of the gate. We might need
to use some self control before we buy the next
shiny thing. Of course, this approach requires moderation as well,
or else you would never buy anything at all. If
I need a new phone and I know that I'm
three months out from the release of something that I
think is really worthwhile, then I can wait that out.
(32:37):
But if I'm perpetually waiting for a phone that blows
me away with all the features, I'll probably be worried
that I'm going to experience buyer's remorse. If I jump
in right. So in other words, if I buy something
and I don't feel like it's really what I was
waiting for, then maybe the next thing that comes out
the next month makes me feel badly about it, and
(32:58):
so that can actually become um a bit of a crisis.
It can. It can prevent you from taking action because
you're always worried that once you take action, you're committed,
and then the next day you find out there was
a better option. But yeah, that desire for the new
is something that's really ingrained in the tech world. Companies
don't have to make products that will break after a
(33:21):
certain amount of time. They don't have to have that
kind of planned obsolescence because with lots of tech, just
the desire to have the latest thing is enough all
on its own. That means the companies just have to
focus on offering up products that are different enough from
the previous generation to spark our desire. When we come back,
i'll talk a little bit more about this, and then
(33:42):
we'll learn about the right to repair. But first let's
take a quick break. So, if manufacturers are actually giving
the people what they want, that is update, it's to
technology that flesh out what it can do at least
(34:03):
in the ways that consumers desire. Then we can't really
put all the blame on manufacturers for planned obsolescence. We
are somewhat responsible for it too. It's good to keep
in mind, and if we recognize that part of us,
we can try to make a better balance of when
we actually need something new and when we just want
(34:25):
something new. I struggle with this all the time, whether
it's a new flagship phone. I mean, when Android comes
up with a brand new flagship phone, I feel the
temptation to jump on it. Not literally jump on it,
but you know what I mean. However, in most cases,
the phone I have at the time tends to be
(34:46):
perfectly fine for my needs. The last time I did
upgrade a phone, it was because the microphone on my
phone had broken. I could use Bluetooth devices and talk
on the phone, but I couldn't use my phone as
a phone just on its own, so I did have
to upgrade then. But I tend to stick to getting
a new phone just every few years as the older
(35:07):
one starts to lag behind, especially when it comes to
what apps it can run. And the same is true
for game systems. I've gotten a lot better about that too.
It used to be that as soon as a game
system came out, I felt the urge to rush out
and buy it. I usually didn't because I usually didn't
have the money, but I always wanted to. However, now
(35:27):
I actually prefer to hang back, both so that any
bugs in those early versions can be worked out. I mean,
I do not want another red Ring of Death situation
ever again, and also so that game developers can release
more titles for the system. It's not much fun pouring
a bunch of money into a technology and then having
to wait around for it to become useful. But now
(35:49):
we also have to talk about the issue of right
to repair. So earlier I talked about the ways companies
make it challenging or impossible for the average person and
to repair stuff. And initially my reaction to that kind
of thing is this is how they get you. They
want you to get back to them and bring all
the stuff to get it fixed by them themselves. But
(36:11):
there can be other reasons for this that, while you
may or may not agree with them, can be a
little more subtle. So, for example, let's take Apple again.
For most of the company's history, Apple products have been
largely inaccessible to those who wish to do their own repairs,
at least to do so without violating a warranty. But
one of the big reasons for that is that Apple
(36:34):
has a specific vision as to how consumers are supposed
to experience Apple products. This was a philosophy that Steve
Jobs had pushed pretty hard. The goal was to create
a controlled experience from beginning to end. The company would
have an enormous amount of authority in deciding this, from
hardware configurations to the kinds of software that would be
(36:56):
allowed to run on the device. We see this reflected
in the iPhone app store, where developers have to get
approval from Apple before their apps will actually appear on
the market. This level of control helps a company deliver
consistent quality to users. The challenge is then selling users
on the idea that the company's approach is what the
(37:18):
customer actually wants. Jobs was amazing at this. He could
bring a device to a crowd and by the end
of a presentation have that crowd convinced that Apple's product
is exactly what the crowd wanted and needed. But Apple
relinquishing control in any way wouldn't make that more difficult
to do. Because a third party might not perform up
(37:41):
to Apple's standards and it would reflect poorly on Apple.
But that also meant that Apple products were difficult to modify.
Early consumer computers came out as kits, and the people
who bought those kits would typically put them together themselves.
You could also pay to have some of those kits
fully assembled. You would have to pay extra for that,
(38:03):
but a lot of early computer owners actually enjoyed the
experience of building the computers from the kits, and this
meant that really enterprising hobbyists could even make little tweaks
to the design to change the performance of the end
machine a little bit. This was the early era of
the hacker, as people figured out how these systems worked,
(38:24):
and then they modified those systems in different ways. And
it was pretty common practice along many different computer manufacturers
to have components that you could swap out, like RAM chips.
So if you wanted your computer to have more memory,
you could open up your computer case and install more RAM,
assuming your computer's motherboard and processor could support the additional RAM.
(38:47):
But Apple typically made this really hard to do. If
you wanted an Apple computer with more RAM, you were
going to have to pay extra to buy a computer
model that was a step up from whichever one we're
looking at. And that also extends to making it really
hard to repair Apple computers if something were to go wrong,
(39:07):
and thus we get to the birth of the genius bar.
So we get companies creating complicated electronic devices, many of
which have proprietary fasteners and such holding them together, and
the message that the customer is to bring any of
those devices that aren't working, you know, they might need
some repair. You're supposed to bring those back to the
company or maybe an authorized service vendor. Critics of this
(39:31):
approach say it's anti competitive and it hurts the consumer. Ideally,
the consumer would have an open choice as to whom
they could bring a broken device for a repair. So
if I were particularly talented at repairs, I would be
able to open up a shop and work on all
sorts of devices. I might offer more competitive rates than
(39:52):
what people might find going through the original manufacturer or
enrolling in an extended care or warranty program. And these
are ideas are the underlying principles of the right to
repair movement. There are a lot of organizations that advocate
for the right to repair, and they weren't to lobby
governments to pass legislation that would mandate it. Primarily we
(40:14):
see the movement in the United States and even more
prominently in the European Union. This is also tied to
the problem of electronic waste. As I mentioned earlier. According
to the Public Internet Research Group, which I should add
is not an unbiased source of information, but according to them,
Americans throughout four hundred sixteen thousand cell phones a day.
(40:36):
I find that number a little hard to believe. Maybe
it's true. I didn't find, you know, other sources that
backed this up, but I did find other sources that
had similar eye popping statistics. Only a fraction of the
electronic devices we throw away, ever, end up in recycling centers.
I mean, that's mostly on us. If we just toss
(40:57):
it in the garbage, then that's where it's gonna go.
Take effort to find good recycling centers. Not all of
them are ethical, by the way. It takes some research.
So considering all the stuff that's in electronics, including valuable metals.
There's like gold and copper in this stuff, it's a
real shame to just throw them out. And then you
(41:17):
consider the environmental impact and it gets worse. Right to
repair groups want to see companies include access to stuff
like repair guides, so make it possible to understand how
these things work and how to fix them. Make it
repair tools accessible if any proprietary tools are needed, and
also make us accessible parts needed for repairs. Sell the
(41:39):
parts individually as well, so none of this would be free.
You know, the companies could still make money. They could
actually offer repair kits that you can purchase. But imagine
that instead of having to bring back your smartphone to
some store or send it off to a manufacturer through
the mail, you instead could order a repair kit, and
if you have steady hands, maybe you replace that cracked
(42:01):
screen or that dead battery by yourself. That's the appeal
of the right to repair movement. But as electronics get
more complicated, it's more challenging to meet that kind of standard.
Some devices are complex enough that it requires a person
with specialized knowledge and skill in order to tackle the problem,
(42:23):
and a lot of us, myself included, would probably find
ourselves popping into an independent repair shop to have our
stuff fixed rather than take it on ourselves and risk
breaking it more. Look, all I'm saying is I know
what my track record is for taking stuff apart versus
putting it together again, and that ratio is way out
(42:44):
of balance. We're seeing this movement embrace not just consumer
goods like smartphones, but really big stuff like farming equipment
and tractors. Farmers have criticized manufacturer John Dear for including
essentially the equivalent of a digital lock and those limits
who can actually make repairs to a machine. For farmers
(43:05):
who depend upon these big vehicles for their livelihood, that
represents a lack of freedom and lack of options, and
it really does feel anti competitive. It's saying you have
to go to people of our choosing if you want
to have the thing you bought repaired. And this also
gets into that weird area we find ourselves in in
(43:28):
the digital age. In the old days, you would buy
something and you would just think this is mine, right,
Like you bought a watch, that's your watch. You could
repair that watch however you liked. But these days things
are being sold not just as a product but as
an ongoing service. And it's not so much that you
(43:48):
own the thing, it's that you own access to that thing,
and some ownership is retained by the original manufacturer. This
is an idea that I'm not super keen on because
it does put a lot more power back in the
hands of the manufacturers and and takes a lot of
power away from consumers. Well, in the United States, twenty
(44:11):
states have filed legislation in an effort to address these
kinds of issues, and in the EU some progress on
this front has already been made. This month a series
of regulations that apply to manufacturers that make appliances like
washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, I think computer monitors too. It
(44:31):
goes into effect and those regulations state that companies need
to offer products that have replaceable components, and moreover, that
anyone would be able to make these replacements using common tools.
You shouldn't need anything special in order to do this
repair work. So, in other words, companies are not supposed
to solder stuff together or otherwise make it impossible or
(44:54):
difficult to access components without causing further damage. And you
shouldn't need a you know, number seventy three spanner up
to iconological wrench or something in order to work on it.
The EU has yet to pass regulations that would cover
stuff like cell phones, computers, and tablets, though and that
is a big problem because these are some of the
(45:15):
most common and harmful forms of consumer waste. People go
through these types of devices on a pretty regular basis,
and some of the member nations of the EU have
gone on to move ahead and pass their own regulations
since the EU as a whole has been a little
slow on this. So, for example, in France, a new
piece of information will be included with consumer electronics. It's
(45:39):
essentially a repair index, is a score that ranges between
one and ten. The index gives consumers the idea of
how easy or difficult it is to disassemble a device,
whether or not you can find information on how to
repair the device, you know, if it's readily available or not,
whether or not you can find spare parts of that
(46:00):
kind of device, how expensive those spare parts are, So
you know, the the more difficult it is to repair something,
the lower that score is going to be for that
particular item. Now, where we go from here will depend
upon how governments either past legislation or they opt not to,
plus how they intend to enforce legislation. Companies have very
(46:24):
little incentive to offer up, you know, repair options to
the end user because those can end up hitting revenue
down the line. Now, personally, I would love to see
a lot more options for repair. I'd like to see
an approach similar to what it was like to buy
a car twenty years ago, because yeah, you could bring
your car back to the dealership for maintenance, but chances
(46:46):
are you might find a great mechanic who is more
convenient to where you live, or maybe they have more
competitive rates and that might end up being your first
choice instead of bringing it back to the dealership, or
maybe you invest the time and energy to learn how
to do the repairs yourself. I think the options should
(47:06):
all be there, and I definitely think that's an improvement
over the status quo we have now. Well, that wraps
up this episode. I hope you enjoyed learning about planned
obsolescence and the right to repair. If you have suggestions
for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff,
let me know. The best way to reach out is
over on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff h s
(47:29):
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Ye.
Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
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Karah Preiss
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