Dacor Stove
In 2006 my wife and I moved into a new house and bought a Dacor RSD30S stove.
Dacor made parts for the thing for TWO YEARS and that’s it. I owned it for 12 years and it went through three igniters and the door handle broke. The first igniter broke within 18 months and I was able to replace it with a new one. The second one went out at around 5 years and the part was already discontinued. Fortunately, the parts guy I was ordering from was very familiar with Dacor and said that the igniter from the new model would work, the bracket would just need to be drilled to mount it. It took me all of 5 minutes. The third one went out and I was screwed. So I spent about 2 years manually igniting my “modern” duel fuel range. Even when it did work, Dacor used one igniter coil for all four igniters. If they were not all perfectly clean the current would only go to one with the least impedance and the rest wouldn’t work.
I was never able to fix the broken handle.
Dacor… Never again.
Contrast that with the stove I replaced the Dacor with, a Wolf DF304. Granted, we’re talking about a very high end range vs a middle of the road POS. However, Wolf has not changed the design of the DF304 in 25 years. I actually bought my Wolf 2nd hand, hence why I could afford it. It was 8 years old when I bought it. Wolf not only still has all the parts for it in stock, the stove is still in production. It currently is 14 years old and works like new, compared to the Dacor being 12 years old and completely clapped out. Also Wolf uses independent coils for each igniter, so the current doesn’t flow to the igniter with the least impedance like the Dacor.
I know this sounds like a case of “you get what you paid for”, but that Dacor new was $2500, so not exactly cheap.
And don’t even get me started on General Electric appliances…
Windows and ios
School just got 30 new laptops because of the tpm requirement on windows 11 just like Microsoft planned.
I would not mind helping them with Linux of any distro even after Im done learning there because it’s so much better
Viagra
Microsoft Windows10
My body. Shits getting worse by the day.
Phones. Windows.
My Chevy Volt 2013, which still runs great, no longer has OnStar because they never planned for a way to upgrade the connectivity when 3G networks were retired. So I am concretely less safe when driving and lose other useful features like remote start, milage tracking, etc.
you are better off without remote control systems like that
I would say you’re better off just because they can’t auto-brick your car remotely because your account isn’t up to date.
To add insult to injury, they are fully capable of adding the 4g module because Canadian Volts were able to be upgraded. GM decided to not let US owners pay for the upgrade, because fuck us that’s why.
Not sure if this qualifies as planned obsolescence but Acer stopped supporting a tablet I bought in less than two years. I have been avoiding Acer products ever since.
Dishwashers, the 3 most recent dishwashers that I have had experience using across 3 very different households and use levels, from 3 different manufacturers, have all had minor to major faults in the 4-5 years since installation, just after the warranty period ended.
Mostly drawer and roller related, but also a pump failure.
Samsung washing machine. I watched a YouTube video about how they deliberately chose a material that wears out after like 4 or 5 years for a critical component. Real cool, thanks Samsung.
Not just Samsung, all manufacturers.
Sum spider and drum with two dissimilar metals that react and eats the drum spider away with use?
They’ve been doing it for decades at this point. No idea why people buy Samsung appliances.
Then again even Bosch and Miele have started using plastic welded drums which prevent repair of simple parts like bearings and motors so… Fuck us all I guess.
That’s the one. It was my mom’s. I told her to get a speed queen if she wanted to spend money like that, but she didn’t listen, and the POS broke like 5 minutes after the warranty was up.
Is it easy to repair, or also deliberately made difficult?
They are hoping for people to get a new one. One of the drain pipe is made of plastic that is brittle after 4 years! There are Tupperwares that last 5 times than that without breaking. I refuse to believe its not a conscious decision for it to break. And no aftermarket alternative. You need $110 parts from Samsung supplier!
Ah yes, proprietary parts also get you.
And they make them so tricky to repair that appliance repair people will either have to charge too much or outright refuse to work on them.
New appliances. A matter of time until the fridge chokes itself since the coils are covered in dust and impossible to reach without tipping the whole fridge over. Also sorely regret replacing the old electromechanical washer instead of repairing it. New one fills with too little water at random and apparently it’s a controller board issue with no easy fix in sight.
Also Apple mobile devices, I understand they can’t keep supporting them forever, but the bootloader’s locked so I can’t even put something less demanding on it.
Wow you totally reminded me of this building I managed several years back now, and they all had washing machines with that only filled a few inches, maybe 8 at most.
It was explained to me by my appliance tech, perhaps he’s not entirely correct on somebody may inform me better… But he said they were built to some water savings standard from california, and rather than making different models for different markets, they just foisted the low water ones on people.
I remember endless grieving from residents. I also remember a very common complaint of the person above them using their washing machine for 9 hours a day. Well fucking yeah, try having two working parents and three kids and seeing how much laundry you can get done in those pieces of shit!
For sure. Mine did fill higher when it was new, but the low water level issue developed a few years in.
Mine is like that, but it has a “deep water” mode that I select almost every time.
CPAP, comes with a cell chip in it to relay data for the Dr to monitor/access. Cell chip stops working after 5 years.
Interesting! FYI, not all Doctors require the constant monitoring, so some people can keep using the same machine longer.
I got mine from a Canadian reseller, shipped to the us that doesn’t have the Sim + I own. If I would have went with the official insurance way, it would have cost 2x ish AND the machine itself can magically last for 10 years since it’s a Canadian model…and all the parts are the same.
Had a chrome book that worked just fine but unbeknownst to me had an expiration date that started counting down at its date of manufacture, not the date of purchase.
The thing worked great, but no more security updates after 3 years.
it can be relatively easy to get linux in chromebooks, i love them
i bought an Acer CB311 intel (x86) second hand for half the price and put linux on it like 4 years ago, it was my main computer until last year my dog knocked a glass of water next to it (it’s alive but i messed up the screen and keyboar using the blow drier)
after that i bought a new acer CB314 (arm cpu) and have been really happy with it
longest baterry lives ive seen and they are perfect for some light development
Apple, are we on CPU architecture 3 now ?
4
Macs started out on Motorola 68k processors, then made the switch to PowerPC, then to x86, and now ARM.
To be fair to Apple those changes were done pretty cleanly and for good reason.
68k was cheap and plentiful. It had lots of competitors using it. They could learn from each others successes and failures too.
PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term. But then it wasn’t built for the mobile era. Apple tried to reel it in but the other titans behind POWER overruled them so Apple had to migrate away.
By this point, x86 had caught up with many of the advantages power had and had a better path for the mobile market ahead of it so Apple went that route.
Finally, intel’s x86 was just not going to keep up with the efficiency demands of mobile. It consumed too much power. It was expensive. It ran hot. Intel was not delivering on their promises. And Apple could see what was coming for Intel years before others admitted it.
Meanwhile they already had incredible ARM chips in their phones. The PAsemi boys they bought up were put to the task of making a more general purpose ARM chip and they pulled it off.
So now Apple is on ARM and it’s serving them very well.
Apple isn’t playing planned obsolescence here. They are evil in plenty of other ways but in terms of planned obsolescence Apple is one of the more reasonable companies. These migrations solved a problem for Apple each time. They are very expensive. They are incredibly risky. Honestly it was miraculous they pulled off the jump to ARM successfully.
PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term.
There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.
Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.
PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.
Exactly. There’s a reason power isn’t going away.
Sealed in batteries on smartphones and Surface tablets.
The device will eventually reach a point where it won’t even boot when plugged in because the charger connection isn’t actually wired to power the main board without going through the battery first (most smartphones) or the device consumes more power than the port is designed to deliver (Surface).
Dealing with this right now. Battery is 4 years old and going weak, decided to no longer recognize any charger below a certain battery percentage (like 72%) unless it’s wireless. Thought it bricked itself when it first happened until seeing it’s an issue with the batteries used for this model just straight up rejecting to charge for many heavy users. Getting a new phone soon since its so inconvenient while working outside.
I had an LG phone for a few years until one night it literally just died on me. I was messing around on it one night, just scrolling randomly, then I set it down for a few minutes to play a game. When I went to check my phone again, it wouldn’t turn on or anything.
I’ve been successful in replacing built-in batteries in 2 different phones. Granted my families phones are all > 4 years old so maybe it’s gotten much harder lately.
Got to be Apple slowing down older iPhones to mask battery degradation, and hoping no one would notice.
I’ve refused to buy another Apple product after the slow down basically disabled my iPhone 4. I was even looking at a new iPhone, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth I’ve been android ever since.
Android does this by just bloating the software out and reinstalling games I uninstalled. It’s gotten to the point that I’m not sure if its actually dialing out or not.
Not only that, but also silently removing contacts when you didn’t update and connected it up to iTunes. That same day I bought my first android.
Not come across that one, maybe it didn’t affect iOS 16, so us iPhone X users are safe?
It is funny that all the responses so far have been about phones.
This was around ios 6 or 7. The Iphone 4 was my last iPhone.
This is one of the worst companies. They are about saving the planet with recycling their products. They don’t. Its all ends in landfills. Its all a grift.
It’s funny, because if they just made this a “battery preserve” option, it would probably be hailed as genius and put in every single phone on the planet by now.
It is an option though.
I love to shit on companies for doing evil shit (like Apple removing Targeted Display Mode from their iMacs), but Apple did the right thing here, but communicated it in the worst way possible.
I had an old iPhone that would randomly shut down when it drew too much power for the old battery to provide. If they hadn’t done the fix, I would have had to get a new phone; it just wasn’t reliable anymore. With the fix, things were slow, but they worked. Honestly, this is the opposite of planned obsolescence.
I’m going to respectfully disagree; had the phone kept shutting down you would have gone to Apple or a 3rd party repairer and got a new battery for 30-80£€$.
By masking the real issue and just giving you a poor experience, you wonder if it was always like that, or if there is something wrong at all, maybe you compare it with a snappy new phone and decide to upgrade for 1000£€$
$30 to $80 is half the price of a new (used) phone.
Half the price isn’t bad to get more longevity out of a phone. And a different used phone will probably have to have its battery replaced fairly soon enough, too
At that point my phone is usually cracked and worth upgrading, but with each phone I go through I try to take better care of it. But so far I’ve never liked a phone so much that it was worth replacing the battery. But I have bought the exact same model of phone 2-3 times as replacements (esp when I broke one by dropping it)
This may be the difference here, I have never broken a phone, my iPhone 6 became my dads and is still going, and my current phone is the iPX I bought over 8 years ago.
You probably need to take better care of your stuff. 😀
Story of my life lol. I have butterfingers, and am distractable in ways that end up with not taking good care of things :(
Where are you getting an iPhone for less than $160 that still gets security updates??
I can replace my iPX for about $200 for a refurbished one, but not get an 11 which will only have 9 more months of updates. I can probably get a used 11 with an already trashed (<70%) battery for $160.
I don’t know. I usually buy used pixel devices, but that’s a good point. If you are trying to plan the replacement costs for an iPhone and you can repair the battery for $30-80, that’s a steal.
Apple pisses me off. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro that could have continued to be supported, Apple just decided it wasn’t in their best interest to continue supporting it and if I want to continue I’ll just have to buy a new one!
My MacBook is on MacOS 13 thanks to open core legacy.
Mine is on Debian 13; I love my little 13" 2012 MBP!
My 15” 2012 is on Debian 13 also.
Linux learning experience of a lifetime trying to fully get the graphics working properly, but got there in the end!
