Photo: newlyplantedOur family recently camped for a week in a nearby state forest where our most trusted item was a cast-iron frying pan. Its thickness distributes heat evenly. Nothing can harm it. The wrong kind of spatula won’t scratch some special non-stick coating.With simple care, it will last for a thousand years. Which reminded me how rare that combination of high quality and durability is today.
Most everything else I own is junk and seems to be designed that way. Here are several anecdotal examples:
In the old days, most Americans rented phones from the phone company (“Ma Bell”). My parents still own one, now over 30 years old, that survived raising three boys. These phones lasted forever. Meanwhile, Ma Bell was broken up in the 1980s. One engineer who worked for the phone company before and after the breakup told me of how the engineers were gathered together and given new ground rules: “It was all well and good in the old days to make phones with gold-plated contacts. But now it’s different. Here’s how to make the newer phones…” I think back on this comment as I watch one phone after another die, often after a few months.
I once helped my uncle select a new laser printer for his small business. The printer was a Laserjet 5 made by Hewlett-Packard. That was 15 years ago; the printer still works beautifully. It is made of metal and feels robust. In contrast, current printers, whether from HP or anyone else, feel like plastic junk. Whenever I open a compartment on my current printer, I worry that I will snap off a piece of the case and break it beyond repair.
Many iPhone models cannot have their battery replaced.
My less anecdotal example is textbooks. A standard introductory college physics textbook is Young and Freedman’s University Physics. Why is it in its 12th edition? In the 55 years since it was first published, has introductory college physics changed so significantly and so frequently? Hardly. Almost every idea taught in introductory physics has remained unchanged since the 1930s when quantum mechanics was developed. Indeed, the masterwork in this genre, Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics was published in 1964 and is still mostly in its original form (there are two newer editions incorporating corrections provided by readers worldwide).
The reason for the 12 editions of Young and Freedman’s University Physics, as for most textbooks today, is planned obsolescence. Textbook publication contracts usually have a clause roughly along the following lines:
You agree to revise the book upon written request from us (the publisher). If you do not agree, we may select an author and pay them from your royalties. The payment will not exceed 25 percent of the royalties for the first revision, 50 percent for the second revision, and 75 for the third revision (and all the royalties for fourth and subsequent revisions).
The original author may be unwilling to do a revision, either because he or she has died or otherwise has no time. The publisher invites another author to make the revision, and voila, a new edition with a longer author list is created.
Best of all, the new edition is not available on the used-book market! Therein lies the publisher’s reason for the new edition: to force students to buy a new book rather than to “recycle” by buying a used copy. Often the newer edition will be nearly identical to the previous edition, except for reordering and renumbering the end-of-chapter problems. Therefore, homework assignments with lists of problems based on one edition cannot be used for a different edition. Conscientious professors will provide multiple problem numbers based on edition. However, after a few editions even the most conscientious will give up tracking the changes and simply require students to buy the current edition.
This deliberate generation of waste might have amazed and shocked our scholarly colleagues from medieval times. In medieval England, a book cost about $10,000 (in 2011 dollars) [H. E. Bell, The Price of Books in Medieval England, Library s4-XVII (3):312-332 (1936)]. This cost makes sense: Copying a book by hand might take a skilled workman about half a year. That one day books would be so cheap and publishers’ profit so important that people would design books to be thrown out—this would simply have been incomprehensible.
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If only these taught this stuff in school…
Ah, but why would Ma Bell stop making such robust phones? Becuase they were no longer getting the revenues streams they received from them earlier. The reason the phones lasted so long is that they had a rule/right that only they could approve the hardware used on their lines. and since you had no choice but to rent your phone from them, and it only made good sense to provide a strong durable product that required minimal replacement to lower repair calls, and thus minimal rehab/repair to reuse at another location after being replaced at the original(this is how back in the 50s,60s, and early 70s ATT was making 300b a quarter, You thought the Oil companies were ‘greedy’). Provide a company with a steady revenue stream that has high profit margins and you’ll find yourself a durable product. iPhones would be bulletproof if you ‘leased’ them for $40 month directly from Apple, everything about it would be better than it is now, the ‘magic’ sales-pitch would be gone, it would be a redux of the Timex slogan “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking”
Every designer reads Oliver Holmes’ “The Deacon’s Masterpiece or The Wonderful “One-Hoss Shay”: A Logical Story.” It tells the story of just such a perfectly designed product.
I remember when my mother sewed Levis in a small Kentucky factory. They were indestructible and they fit. I no longer buy them, they’re cut wrong, they’re thin, cheap fabric and two babies can pull them apart, mules no longer needed. Even macro design processes such as TRIZ emphasize you should plan for and create obsolescence for your own products. I suppose this helps the bottom line but it certainly helps create swirling gyres of plastic crap the size of Texas in both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Design for Upgradability is not that hard but it doesn’t make a lot of money. Replacement does, hence I have a drawer full of cell phone chargers, each with a marginally different connection for no apparent reason, none of which fit my current phone.
Textbooks are the perfect example of one of the glaring inefficiencies of free markets and psychology. Textbooks are used for less than a year but need to be purchased in full. Essentially the publisher attempts to receive the lifelong value of the product in it’s first 6 months of use. These are obvious rental assets which are essentially being “rented” under the guise of a purchase. This allows for a higher perceived value. This is essentially true of the majority of copyrighted works. Lifelong “purchase” for a a couple weeks to a year of use.
The student gets more debt. The bank gets more interest. The publisher gets more money. The authors get more money. The book binders get more money. The paper company gets more money. The logger gets more money.
And the forest gets leveled. The trucks use more gas. And everyone wastes a bunch of time and energy producing something for a paycheck and not to fulfill a need. hmmm… wait a minute, this sounds like that other economic system they told me about.
More on planned obsolescence….
I have a 20-year old portable CD player that I have lugged all over the country and the world. It says “Sony” on it. My two big screen TVs are Sonys. Many other electronics devices in our home are Sony. They don’t build devices that breakdown for some mythical “revenue stream”.
If you want the cheapest possible product to satisfy a short-term need–where quality is not an issue– go cheap. Otherwise go “name-brand”, and spend a few more bucks.
If your cheapo purchase dies an untimely death, do as my daddy said and consider it, “..the cost of an education.” Next time buy Sony, Panasonic, Nikon, Leica, Samsung, Craftsman, Toyota, Caterpillar, Boeing, GE, IBM, Apple, Harley-Davidson, whatever. Yes, many consumer good are made in Asia, but that where all the people are. The US makes lots of really great stuff.
To believe as a matter of faith that industry is out to screw you is foolish. (Okay, it’s true but that only applies to the financial and political sector).
Perhaps if the professor was merely a late adopter, using not the most recent edition but the one before the latest then the cost would be more palatable. I am a proud late adopter for most of my electronics, TVs Cameras etc. and get along with slightly slower shutter speed and slightly fuzzier TV picture just fine.
For a momentary complaint I just paid near $300 for a latest edition Seeley’s Anatomy Physiology Special college pack). Now granted it is linked to a wealth of online information but I found the cost was repugnant in the following. With my full course load I will rarely have time to use the scattered web content and frankly I can get the same answers faster from Google. The text is a soft cover, and the school emblazoned their name across the bottom in a big white strip making it more difficult for online resale. The final annoyance was the professor was a reviewer for the text so undoubtedly some kickbacks are provided. Also the edition was so new no one could get it till two weeks after class began. Obviously I feel no sorrow for the publishers.
In addition I hate shopping precisely for what this article is about. So often you are misled on a product or the most minor amount of additional thought in engineering would have made it perfect. Instead you suffer some useless pile of plastic or give it to a friend. Exe. You couldn’t even give me a cordless drill off of QVC, barely enough torque to take off a light switch panel. Its not made for use, its made to dupe.
The true shame in college textbooks is that departments/professors even acknowledge the newer editions. You cover the fact that professors try to help convert problem sets to the older editions, but why are they even basing the course on the newest edition in the first place?