Oh, but there's so much
more to know. I'm dying to learn how those other claims made above will be explained.
To review, here's the list:
2. It's easy to show that inkjet-printer manufacturers derive no benefit from artificially shortening printer life. If ANYONE benefits, in fact, it's the consumer.
3. Consumers WANT their iPods and iPhones to have non-replaceable batteries.
4. There seems to be no actual evidence that DuPont scientists deliberately weakened nylon in order to sell more stockings, but it isn't hard to imagine how that rumor was started.
5. Owning East German refrigerators that last 25+ years is worse in every way than owning Western refrigerators.
I expect we'll hear that all appliances made in Communist countries are inefficient junk -- but the other ones are less obvious.
Glad you asked -- #2
The filmmakers make a big deal of the fact that cheap inkjet printers count the number of pages they've printed and are programmed to stop working after 5000 or so, even if there's nothing wrong with them.
They even tell you that the manufacturers explain why this happens: The printer has a waste tank that slowly fills with ink, and the programmed limit stops the printer before the tank fills with dried ink and either leaks ink or jams the printhead. But then the filmmakers imply that the REAL reason is that the greedy printer manufacturers want to make more money from sales of printers.
This is a RIDICULOUS idea, and anyone who's ever bought ink for one of those things knows it: The manufacturers don't make money on the printers, in fact they usually LOSE money on them. It's like razors and razor blades: They make all their money on the extraordinarily expensive ink, which sells at retail for many thousands of dollars per gallon.
So two things: One, the printer manufacturers don't make any money on printers, so they don't care whether you buy one every five years or one every ten years. And two, YOU shouldn't care, either. Those cheap inkjet printers cost less than a good meal; if you can afford to buy ink every few months, you can afford to buy a printer every five years.
I mentioned that if anyone benefits from the artificially short lives of those printers, it's the consumer. Here's why:
How do you suppose those printers got to be so cheap? It's a process of continuous improvement, a slow but steady optimization of every component and every process. That can only happen if there's a continuous demand for new printers; if the first printer anyone purchased were also the last one he ever needed, there would be no reason (or opportunity) for the manufacturers to make the sorts of incremental improvements that have driven the cost of an HP Deskjet from $1000 when it was introduced twenty years ago to $30 today.
Glad you asked -- #3 (continued)
Ok, so now look at the iPod. First, it's not the universal color of all consumer electronics -- already it's different and interesting. Next, what the hell IS it? It's got that big screen, a single no-moving-parts control wheel, and (almost) no labels. It's seamless and shiny, smooth with no sharp edges. Thin, elegant. Feels good to hold in your hand, like a stone out of the river. Turn it over and it's more of the same -- perfectly finished on the back side, with no ugly consumer-electronics crap hidden back there. Not only does it not proclaim "DIGITAL" or "STEREO", it barely even says "Apple".
You know how in those old science-fiction movies, some scientist picks up a space-alien artifact, examines it, and announces that whatever it is, it wasn't made by humans? That's what the iPod was like. Nothing gave away the fact that it was made by actual people in an actual factory in the Far East, from injection-molded plastic and (mostly) common off-the-shelf electronic components. You couldn't tell how it was put together, let alone what might be inside it; it just looked and felt like a monolithic slab of something really cool. It had to run on electricity, of course, but that wasn't actually obvious, right? No battery door, no LED labeled "BATT", no label with the battery specs and orientation diagram, etc.
The iPod was ALL mystery, ALL magic... But showing how it was put together, or that it worked just like every other electronic gadget, would have killed the illusion.
If the iPod had included something as clunky and awful as the Rio's parallel-port adapter, or had been built with visible screws, or had a thumbnail notch between the two halves of its case, OR EVEN HAD A BATTERY DOOR ON THE BACK, the magic would have been gone, along with the overwhelming desire to hold the thing and own it.
As I said, it's not Jony Ive's genius that made the iPod so successful. He wasn't the first to realize that people are attracted to mysterious shiny talismans with unseen complexity; watchmakers have known that for a long time.
His accomplishment was that he was maybe the first to have worked so hard to do EVERYTHING right in order to perfect and maintain the illusion that the thing just worked by magic.
And consumers want that magic WAY more than they want a user-replaceable battery.
Glad you asked -- #3
Jonathan Ive isn't a genius.
I mean, he IS, but that's not why everyone loves the iPod and iPhone.
Think back to what MP3 players looked like before the iPod: Mostly, they looked like portable radios, cassette players, pagers, digital clocks -- ordinary gizmos that you already knew and understood.
Take the Diamond Rio pictured below. The case was made of the same cheap black textured plastic as a Motorola pager; from 20 yards away, anyone would instantly recognize it as some sort of consumer-electronics gadget. And if you owned a Walkman, you'd know just by looking what the Rio was and what it did. All the cues were there: the familiar Play/Pause, Fast Forward, Rewind, and Stop symbols; "Vol", "Repeat", "Random", and "A-B"; and of course "Digital", the late-90s version of the 80s' meaningless-but-obligatory adjective "Turbo".
More importantly, you'd know HOW it worked. I don't mean in any great technical detail, but there were pushbutton switches and you knew how those worked, a little monochrome text LCD that displayed exactly what you'd expect (the track number), a sliding Hold switch that worked just like the one on your Walkman, two buttons under the "Vol" label, a rectangular AA-battery-sized door with the standard notch for opening, and familiar screws holding it together. Looking at the outside, you'd have a pretty good idea of what most of the inside looked like.
No mystery, in other words. No magic.
Looking at the Rio, it's easy to imagine losing the battery door, or breaking the little connector that the parallel-port adapter plugs into, or cracking the case or breaking one of the switches or something.
[continued in the next message]
thanks for the answer
fastfwd,
Thank you for your well thought out reply to my question.
Your technical knowledge is very good. And it is an issue here, as incandescents remain in production and will remain in production with new energy saving guidlines.
Perhaps it is better to "save reason and logic for the few and use emotions for the masses" on this site. This is an extremely effective communication tool.
Once again, thank you for your reply.
Glad you asked -- #4
Nylon.
Take a look at the page linked below, from the Smithsonian Institution. It's a long page, but the important bits are at the top and bottom. At the top:
"On October 27, 1938, Charles Stine, a vice president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours, Inc., announced that nylon had been invented. He unveiled the world's first synthetic fiber not to a scientific society but to three thousand women's club members gathered at the site of the 1939 New York World's Fair .... he proclaimed: 'I am making the first announcement of a brand new chemical textile fiber. .... nylon can be fashioned into filaments as strong as steel, as fine as a spider's web, yet more elastic than any of the common natural fibers.'"
And at the bottom:
"Although Du Pont intentionally made very guarded statements about nylon, public interest remained high for the eighteen months before the first nationwide sales. .... Finally, nylons went on sale nationally in May 1940"
So in 1938 they said that nylon was as strong as steel, but then they waited 18 months before making stockings from it. And when those nylon stockings WERE finally available, they turned out not to be as strong as steel AT ALL; in fact they snagged and ran just like silk stockings.
CLEARLY, nylon was originally so strong that stockings made from it would be everlasting and indestructible, and women wouldn't need to buy many pairs from Du Pont. OBVIOUSLY, those 18 months between announcement and production had been spent deliberately weakening nylon so that women would be forced to buy more from greedy, predatory Du Pont.
At least, that's what one woman interviewed by the filmmakers says. And she should know; her father worked at Du Pont when she was a child.
Do a web search and try to find real corroboration of that claim. It isn't out there. I couldn't even find anyone else making the same unfounded claim.
The truth, I think, is simply that Charles Stine's "strong as steel" comment was misunderstood. Nylon WAS as strong as steel in 1938, and it's STILL as strong as steel now, even after the alleged weakening; it's just that that's only true if you measure its strength in a particular way -- the way that a materials scientist might.
When nylon and steel are drawn into thin filaments, nylon is stronger than steel FOR THE SAME WEIGHT. Common A36 steel has an ultimate tensile strength of 400 MPa and a density of 7.8 grams/cc; nylon has an ultimate tensile strength of only 75 MPa, but it weighs only 1.15 grams/cc:
Steel: 400/7.8 = 51.28
Nylon: 75/1.15 = 65.22
See? Gram for gram, nylon IS stronger than steel [well, stronger than A36 steel; other alloys are stronger], but of course if you draw it into fine enough threads, nylon will still break as easily as silk (and fine steel threads will break that easily, too). That's not what people expected when they heard the claim, though, which is why I suspect the "deliberate weakening" rumor began.
http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u7sf/u7materia...
Glad you asked -- #5
In the film, a man shows us his Soviet-era East German refrigerator and boasts, "I bought this DDR fridge in 1985. It is 24 years old."
Yeah, that's wunderbar, Fritz... Except that there's been a lot of progress made in 25 years -- not just technological, but also philosophical and environmental -- and you've missed out on ALL of it. A modern refrigerator draws less than a quarter as much power as yours, AND it doesn't contain Freon, AND it's frost-free, etc., etc.
Plus, our evil capitalist overlords aren't deliberately withholding from us any secret communist refrigerator technology. On average, buyers in the US keep their refrigerators for 12 years, but they usually replace them because their family grows or shrinks, they move, they remodel their kitchen, they want to save money on electricity, they want some fancy new feature or look, etc. If none of those events occur, US buyers often keep their refrigerators much longer.
That's why there are government incentives to buy new energy-efficient appliances. If we always waited for old appliances to die before buying new ones, our nation's refrigerators and washer-dryers would be getting refreshed much more slowly, and changes that our society wants -- not just energy efficiency, but also elimination of CFCs, improved safety, recyclability, and better aesthetics and ergonomics (not to mention lower cost) -- would also happen very slowly.
It's like those lightbulbs: The cost of a 1985 fridge over 25 years is greater than the cost of that fridge for 12.5 years plus a 1998 fridge for 12.5 years, especially if you consider both financial and non-financial costs.
Plus -- just as with the inkjet printers -- the longer people hang onto their old refrigerators, the more slowly the manufacturer is able to make improvements. That fridge he bought in 1985 was probably no different from one he could have bought in the 1970s; when everyone keeps his refrigerator forever, no one ever gets a really nice refrigerator.
He's not doing himself, his society, or his environment any favors by hanging on to that relic.
Heath
A good compact fluorescent bulb costs around 8 times as much as an incandescent, but it also lasts about 8 times as long, right? So if we consider initial purchase cost only, CFLs and incandescents are equivalent.
However, a CFL that outputs 1600-1700 lumens (the same as a 100W incandescent) only draws around 30 watts. That's a 70% energy savings.
No question, the CFL costs less to buy and operate. Using the numbers from my lightbulb message above, it would cost $144 to run a series of 100W incandescents for 8000 hours, but it would only cost $43.20 to run a 30W CFL for that time. It's a significant difference, and it gets even better if you have air conditioning and a lot of high-power lights that you leave on for long periods: CFLs produce significantly less heat than incandescents, so they reduce the load on your AC system and thereby save you even MORE energy/money.
Ok, it's almost 6 am. I have a meeting in four hours, must go get a couple hours sleep now.
Appreciate you put all the...
Appreciate you put all the effort in to thinking about it. The fast track evolution of products via a quick turn over of goods is something I'm pretty skeptical about, I think quality of most goods has worsened but perhaps we could hear froma few 60+ DAers on that? I'm relatively young.
I suppose we stand at opposite ends of the spectrum, I've never owned much stuff, a tv or a printer and tend to live relatively simply. From your standpoint it seems cost and the benefits to the consumer are of importance, from mine living simply offers a better quality of life and I think the 'consumer' (citizen) has had too much choice for too long, it hasn't made us happier or healthier so whats the point of it all? More stuff will end up in landfill and its going to be incredibly difficult to get those resources back out again.
Anyway we'll see what happens, to quote the Scouts, be prepared.
Opposite ends?
Nah. I've just been making consumer products for 25 years, so I'm familiar with the dynamic. I mostly see it from the producer side, though; I'm definitely not one of those guys who needs to have the newest whatever as soon as it's available in stores... Or ever, usually.
"Too much choice for too long"? Maybe. I used to feel that that was true; now I'm not so sure. Have you read Future Shock?
I wouldn't dream of
disturbing the rest of a senior designer/producer of consumer products, to know what his take on all of this might be -- but in the past our friend Koen De Winter has been most helpful in providing an overview of the kinds of issues raised and passionately presented above by Fast Forward. I well recall his take on the best uses of petroleum, for instance -- a view that was enlightening, to say the least.
Perhaps, if Koen has the time, we could hear an internationally-informed take on the ideas brought forward here by a Silicon Valley worthy . . . ?
.
" If none of those events occur, US buyers often keep their refrigerators much longer.
That's why there are government incentives to buy new energy-efficient appliances. If we always waited for old appliances to die before buying new ones, our nation's refrigerators and washer-dryers would be getting refreshed much more slowly, and changes that our society wants - not just energy efficiency, but also elimination of CFCs, improved safety, recyclability, and better aesthetics and ergonomics (not to mention lower cost) -- would also happen very slowly."
So -- the government has an interest in seeing that consumers have the latest in fashion and convenience ? Really -- "the government" ? I would have thought that interest would be held by the manufacturers. But maybe I'm confused. The makers want public interest, in the form of government-mandated energy and environmental regulation, off their backs -- but here we see makers applauding government for promoting change and recycling. Wow. Now I don't know WHO to vote for. . .
Pretty much way off topic....
But just for SDR, Olive and fastfwd given recent posts and of course anyone else interested in patents, innovation and IP.
Method of swinging on a swing! Ha!
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/innovation/2011/0826/1224302795447.html
SDR
Regulation that affects all makers equally isn't so bad... But I see what you're saying.
Sorry for being unclear; I was tired when I wrote that, so I didn't adequately separate "the government wants us to buy energy-efficient appliances" from "our society wants [i.e., we consumers want] energy-efficient appliances and a whole bunch of other things including fashion and convenience".
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