Electronic Components

I believe the one of the issues here is the rapid changes in technology. Why build a product to last 20 years if in that time the technology is no longer there to support it.

So is the consumer willing to put out the extra cash for a product that will last 20 years then in 1 year find it's obsolete. And in 5 years find that it can't be used as intended.

I got industrial PLC's less the 10 years old that use A drives for inputting data. It's getting very difficult to find those floppies readily available in office supply houses.

I find the cost accountants now rule the roost. I worked for a company that bought out their competition. First thing they did was discontinue the products with better quality but higher manufacturing cost. Warranty was adjusted for a no question asked product exchange during the warranty period. What the buying public was not told was the replacement products was a remanufactured product not a new product and the original warranty period was not extended.

Manufacturing short cuts now mean a higher percentage of products fail within or shortly after the warranty period. Switching to tin and elmininating lead in the solder has caused increased problems with whiskering or dendrites in closely spaced circuit traces. = more product failures.

Because more products are offset to contract jobbers who bid on job lots there is no longer a ready inventory of 'spare parts' from which repair parts can be garnered. Such over stocking was not a problem in the old days since you expected to use it up during next production cycle. However when you bid on job lots with no guarantees that you will win the next contract bid; you no longer carry an overage. You only order enough to cover the statistical losses due to lower quality but much cheaper parts.

Lastly software. No one seems to write tight code anymore. Everyone seems to accept code bloat and attendant software glitches. My brand new smart phone has failed four times in the first month. The solution I was offered was to pull the battery for five minutes to reset to factory defaults.

This seems to be SOP for everything from automated coffee makers to cell phones to computer routers. At least this was the first line of defense when several of my products failed within the first few months of use. Friends report similar experiences.

Lastly intentional obsolescence. Warranty period plus a bit. I have met many people who swear their something or other product had a timer chip that caused a malfunction one week after the warranty lapsed. No one does board level component failure analysis on consumer products costing only a hundred $$ or so. It is cheaper to junk it than fix it.

I did once and found a mysterious short that killed the battery in a hour wheras before it was good for a day or more. Coincidence? Hmmmm!

Today's quality sucks. Expect no better. Assuime it will fail week after warranty expires. Extended warranty? that only means they give you a reman unit when the first one fails.

Good points. Extended warranties are available for everything, not just electronics. I frequently get phone calls from one of our national retailers offering extended coverage on my power tools. I paid a little more for them, so I expect them to last a little longer under normal use. But are they saying their tools are shyte?

I recently traded in my '09 vehicle for a brand new one, simply because of the bumper-to-bumper warranty. The thought of paying $130/hr shop labor plus the cost of the new component[s] scared me. Sure, I could have bought extended coverage but would I need it? Would I not? Too risky for me.

Well spoken. The sad thing is, as consumers, we have been conditioned to accept, generally, poor product quality just like we have automated phone systems, and all the other "crap" that we put up with. Others may like to bathe in all of our "technological advances," but I think they have brought more stress and frustration to our lives along with making things easier. It's become a throw away world. Only older folks remember the "good old days." And that's too bad. The last couple of generations that have been raised with all of the technology, even more readily accept whatever they are served. At least that's how it appears. I wish we could have accumulated wisdom from one generation to another. But if we could, history wouldn't be what it is.

What really annoys me about a lot of this stuff is the cost of replacement parts for white goods. This applies to mechanical as well as electronic parts.

My washing machine recently blew up (OK that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it did make a loud bang and some of the power tracking on the control board was vaporised). The control board is a single sided board with an ASIC and a handful of components on it. The spares suppliers want over £100 ($150) for a replacement for a board that costs them less than £15 ($22) to make.

The trouble is all the manufacturers are the same. If one of the big ones went out on a limb, and, started selling spares and providing servicing information at reasonable prices they would very quickly gain market share.

HW "planned" obsolescence is just a tangible version of MS's SW obsolescence where the customer "pays" to get "some" of the problems/bugs fixed...in the name of "up-grades."

One factor is the move to foreign suppliers and manufacturers with the 'build it cheap as possible so my company can have a price advantage in the marketplace' syndrome. Many foreign countries are not known for their ingenuity because of pay restraints and social restraints - there just isn't incentive for workers to be innovative. as a result they try and copy current technology - and many times they copy only the essentials for immediate results but we find that the product just doesn't have the longevity because key elements are missing that lead to product longevity and robustness. Part of this is also our requirements that they build it cheap. They are pragmatic- not proud artisans. If you want it cheap, they'll make it cheap. You get what you pay for. I once make a bumper sticker that said "Yu gait wat yu pei fu!" and combined that with a picture of a flag of a popular offshore manufacturing company. I realize that there are countries that own a lot of our country's debt and in return, secrets have been leaked to them, and their manufacturing facilities have been built up to the detriment of our country's workers and smaller industries. If the average citizen had done this , they would have been accused of espionage, or violation of the act against transporting high-tech devices to a foreign country. The American people aren't stupid. Once, Japanese products in the 1950s and up to the mid 1960's were known as garbage, until they embraced the concepts of quality control theory and the concept of new technology coming out in commonplace items, being field-tested, and the improved versions being put into their high-end products. Manufacturing techniques, miniaturization, and new ICs that were incorporated into the humble telephone answering machines of the day, were later to mature, and be found in auto industry and television, and medical equipment markets.