-Demand for cheaper products: Consumers tend to prefer cheaper products. This means cheaper materials and a product that doesn't last as long. Common household appliances cost much less than they did in the earlier half of the 20th century, and people act surprised when they don't last as long as an appliance from the 1950s that cost more than twice as much

-Survivor bias: Only durable products from the past survived, broken and unrepairable products were sent to the landfill. Therefore people only see the most durable products of the past and assume everything made back then was just as durable.

-Technical obsolescence: Old products become less useful as technology progresses. Why use a 100 year old still functional device when it is inefficient and technologically obsolete?

The article even mentions some of these factors with regards to the so-called planned obsolescence of light bulbs. Longer lasting bulbs are dimmer and less efficient, so it makes sense to design them in such a way to maximize light output over a certain timespan.

Yes, nobody says "we'll make sure this product breaks in 5 years."

Instead, they say, "We're going to have to support this for 5 years. Design it so that almost all of them survive that long, and don't bother trying to make them last longer. It's too expensive."

In the end, it's the same thing, just without the tint of evil.

A good Makita, Hitachi or DeWalt hammer drill costs anywhere from £500 to £800. It'll provide utterly reliable service over years of daily use and is fully repairable. A store-brand hammer drill costs less than £50, but you'll be lucky if it lasts for more than 10 hours of light use. Most DIYers buy the £50 store-brand drill, because they'll likely only use it a handful of times.

Rapid technological progress makes the semi-disposable option even more attractive. We have the technology to build a laptop that will survive 20 years of heavy use, but who wants to use a 20 year old laptop? Most people get a "free" cellphone upgrade every two years, so what do they care if the non-replaceable battery dies after three years?

Bad for the environment, good for the consumer.

"It's too expensive" is not a valid excuse if customers would be willing to pay for it.

Losing money is not a viable long term solution for a business, an economy, or mankind.

That condition resolves to false though ;). Most don't care and prefers to pay less.

Check anyone in a shop and ask him if he compares the internal components of both TV when he is shopping, he isn't...

In 1984, a 20-inch colour TV cost £329 versus an average weekly wage of £115. In 2017, a 40-inch HDTV costs £300 versus an average weekly wage of £530. TVs are now vastly cheaper relative to the cost of labour.

TV repair used to be very common. There were half a dozen TV repair shops in my town when I was a child. A lot of people preferred to rent, partly because the up-front cost was prohibitive and partly because the rental price included repairs.

Today, even simple repairs like a capacitor replacement are prohibitively expensive. Even if the parts cost pennies and it's a quick replacement, there's a minimum of two hours of labour just to get the back off the TV, find the fault and test the repair. Why pay £150 to fix your old set when you could get a new, better set for £300?

It's not great for the environment, but it's good for the consumer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

  Planned Obsolescence is largely a myth

MAD magazine had a great feature in the 1970s called "Planned Obsolescence in Everyday Products", parodying design fails in household appliances and such.

Over course, I doubted him, but he went into great detail about how he had to drive in post-war Germany, as they couldn't afford replacing anything back then, so everything had to last. He was extremely careful with his down shifting, and only barely touched the breaks at the very end. Accelerated very slowly, etc...

I wonder how much WWII played in Germans making solid stuff still to this day. (and the rest of Europe)

[0]: https://jalopnik.com/5852681/man-shows-remarkable-stamina-dr...

His point is that what you have is a nice anecdote, and survivor bias means that you only hear about the products that ended up lasting, but not all the Mercedeses that bit the dust along the way.

And now that everyone makes dependable cars, they simply change the headlight/taillight configuration every year to make one's car seem out-of-date much sooner.

Those infotainment centers don't help at all, either.

  they simply change the headlight/taillight configuration

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_tailfin

Try finding a washing machine these days, that will last for more than 5 years or so before something breaks and renders the machine useless.

You may be able to find an industrial machine, made for hotels or laundries. But it will be very expensive and likely be huge and it will need 3-phase power. It will also likely not have a spin cycle, so you'll have to either air dry your clothes for ages or buy a separate clothes spinner (most driers need the clothes to have been spin dried first).

Whether I buy a cheap Whirlpool or an expensive Miele/AEG/Bosch or whatever, the quality and longevity is universally shit.

These aren't comparable; Miele is on a different level. In particular, Miele washing machines are properly repairable. Of course, they're also far more expensive.

EDIT: Missed AEG. These are essentially three tiers of product.

AEG is Electrolux's "premium" branding. In most cases, the same washing machine with different plastic will be available as Electrolux and Zanussi. Very much mid-range; better than Whirlpool/Hotpoint/Indesit, but that's not saying much. Should not be expected to be super-long-lasting.

Bosch (and Siemens, Neff; again, just different branding for the same thing) are definitely a step up. Some though not all machines are very repairable.

And Miele is a huge step up again. All machines should be properly repairable.

I've had my Bosch washing machine now for over ten years and there have been no repairs whatsoever, so far.

For every vocal person with a broken unit, there are multiple people with working ones. These planned obsolescence debates are mostly pointless without actual data (case in point: arguing about WD vs Seagate before BackBlaze started publishing their data)

My 13 year old Miele washer and 9 year old ASKO dryer are still going strong without any signs of their age - and they are being run hard, what with three small kids in the house an'all.

And this is coming from an acquaintance of mine, who has installed and serviced white goods for over 30 years.

Consumer gear of all kinds is crap. You have to go where the pros go, and that isn't even a sure thing.

“They Used To Last 50 Years”

https://medium.com/@ryanfinlay/they-used-to-last-50-years-c3...

I had a Maytag ( owned by Whirlpool ) dishwasher, range and refrigerator all need repairs costing over $300 a device within the first 3 years. All of them failed within 2 -3 months of the warranty expiration.

Citation for this (accounting for inflation)?

When clearing out my grandmother's house a few years ago, my uncle and I almost broke our backs trying to get the freezer out. It felt like it weighed a ton, even empty.

My grandmother told us it had been a wedding present, and that they had been totally awestruck at the time at the generous present from her parents-in-law. After all, a decent freezer cost at least 2,000 kroner! (At this time, the average yearly gross pay was just in excess of 7,000 kroner.)

My grandparents married in 1950. Since then, monetary value has been reduced twenty-fold.

You can still buy a top-loading freezer for 2,000 kroner; I just checked.

So - in 1950, you had to work for five months to earn money for a freezer (after taxes.)

In 2017, I have to work one day for a freezer (after taxes.)

1953 Washer and dryer, $494.90.

I think it is just very hard to impossible to judge the quality of an appliance just by looking at it. All external signals a seriously gamed by manufacturers. Even consumer reports does not do a total breakdown by electrical and mechanical engineers to let you know how good something is. Then, at most, 1% of people would care enough to read a quality guide. Price is easy to look at and compare.

Want to by a copper tank water heater that will last a century for your home. Good luck. I've got one from the 50's but I had to know to replace the thermocouple when that breaks once a decade and not just throw it out when it stops working.

[1]https://retrorenovation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/60s-G...

Personally I use an ammonia absorption fridge, the kind of thing you usually only see in hotel minis and camping vans, because of the noise.

https://www.dometic.com/en-us/us/products/food-and-beverage/...

On this note, I respectfully beg to differ. It's probably a lot more recognizable by its modern permutation: the manufacturer warranty.

I suspect you are decent person, likely you have never been lied to or about in public to shame you (in court, city council, etc...), or been mugged or attacked, or suffered any major crimes. Or least, had many year battle with people that try to destroy your life.

I have, and know many other people who have, and I am no longer in any doubt that large businesses collude for money, a far lesser crime than what I have experienced first hand.

Edit: current reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16526749

" Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Pheobus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Combination). Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace for a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.

But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlottenburg, almost within sight of the statue of Wernher Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs witness the more languorous forms of Republican decadence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an escape, Bernie down the hall in the toilet, who has all kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his mother Brenda in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum floors after days without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural state… "

full excerpts here:

http://lukedanger.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/story-of-byron-bulb...

It was based in Switzerland, how was the average American going to find out about it? Even if they wanted to, where would they look?

It is actually quite simple: incandescent lightbulbs are blackbody radiators. Efficiency depends only on the temperature of the filament, the hotter the better, but lifespan decreases drastically as temperature increases.

There isn't much that can be done in an incandescent light bulb. The filament is tungsten, voltage is fixed by the grid, power is the rated power. So, the only choice is to make the filament longer/thinker or shorter/thinner. The former will be dimmer and longer lasting compared to the latter.

Requiring a set lifespan also ensures consistent brightness and color temperature (a real temperature in this case), it also requires reasonably precise manufacturing. These are generally good things.

Well obviously, a lot of it is motivated by profit, but there are also very good technical reasons behind it too.

The situation today with LED lighting is actually much worse. LEDs could last a lifetime, unlike with incandescent light bulbs, there is no reason for them to burn. However, a lot of them fail because they are under-engineered.

1 failed within 6 months, the other is still used daily as a bedside lamp 11 years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

Or you could run a heat pump, that wins about a factor of 5.

I learned this from this excellent resource: https://www.withouthotair.com/

There's an argument that

Part of the reason for asking in the first place is because I'm quite sensitive to the light quality as produced by an incandescent bulb, preferring it vastly over even the most 'modern' 'energy saver' bulbs.

Anyhow, I agree about incandescent bulbs being nice. I never found a CFL I was happy with. The Philips LED bulbs are very good though: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-Bayonet-Light-Bulb-Frosted/...

They don't flicker (and I'm someone infuriated by PWM'd lights on modern cars). They achieve full brightness instantly. The colour temperature and spectral rendering index is good. They are much more reliable than some similar unbranded bulbs I've seen (about 15 such bulbs were installed in my kitchen area at work. They fail at a rate of about one per month, in a manor consistent with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Pemtc3Uhw).

They do cost £9 for two though. They'll need to run for about 500 hours to pay for themselves (vs incandescent). I reckon the first one I bought has run for about 2500 hours by now.

Nowadays Philips seem to be selling both a higher quality and a lower quality bulb in each wattage.

To me the purchase price isn't an issue. I have a few places where I run bulbs 15 or 20 hrs a day. So moving from 60 W to 10 W in those locations made an incredible cost savings. Where I am in the USA, a 1 W load on continuously costs $1/yr. So saving 50 W in a location that's on about 80% of the time saves me $40/yr in electricity. For just one bulb.

If the only alternative usage is putting the energy into a different hot metal filament, then it might be more of a tossup, depending on how focused the light-bulb's emanations are onto the things you actually want warmed.

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4006

"Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate. There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached. "

Other than warmth, my home LEDs (all of them - Cree) have lasted 7 years and look to last about 10-15 more. They've already paid for themselves as before that I was replacing 4-5 bulbs a year and wasting 10x the wattage.

There’s such a large market now it’s hard to identify quality product. Good news is that the prices have fell to the point that the ROI in energy savings is very short.

Just got defunded.

http://edisonreport.com/goodbye-lighting-facts/

If the LED bulb needs a power supply, it's much lower voltage (and there are an abundance of component choices for those voltages - at least more so than fluorescent bulbs), and there's been lots of work for efficient power supplies in that range. Also there's new no-power supply LED filament bulbs expanding in the market now, and I would think those would tend to last even longer with much fewer components to fail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_filament

On the other hand, some cheap no-name chinese LED lamps I got off Amazon started failing after less than a year.

There definitely are some bad, short-life LED bulbs out there -- especially on the lower end of the market.

I think it was about $45 when I bought it. A similar model is down to $21 for a 100W equivalent now.

I've got several other Philips bulbs of that type that have been in use for a long time, though not quite that long.

I've never had one go out.

As with you, I've had numerous cheapies go out over the same interval.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Prize#/media/File:Philips_LE...

It produces good-quality light, too, despite what you'd think from the yellow shell color.

One of the more amusing ways the cheap bulbs failed is by neglecting to use UV stabilisers, so just leaving the bulb on would cause them to degrade their own housing until they fell apart. (The other main failure mode I saw was the transformers giving out.)

From my experience, about 1/5th of LED bulbs fail within the first year.

However, all lamps that survived the first year haven't broken in 3 years total yet.

I think it might be related to the internal powersupply, some had visible stress damage from thermal cycles (molten, cracks, etc.).

I also had a few LEDs in an RGBW strip fail that I use for lighting though I soldered around that.

energy / power. Both work in this situation.

CF bulbs were sold as having long life compared to the incandescent bulbs they were drop-in replacements for, not compared to flourescent tubes.

Though I always purchased name-brand bulbs, never the cheap generic brands.

I left them all behind when I moved so those are the longest lived ones I have experience with, in my new house, I have mostly LED's with a few CFL's and they're up to around 5 years old... I like the light from LED's better or I'd have more CFL's around.

Failures have been rare, but I have pretty clean power, few power outages and practically no thunderstorms in the area.

Ballast + starter is completely outdated and the only reason you still see them is in places where they don't care about energy costs and because hardware stores still sell them (along all the other junk products found in hardware stores) — they are marginally cheaper.

Combine a fluorescent tube with a hot-start electronic ballast and you get lights that are cheaper than LEDs with similar efficiency and light quality (depending on the tubes), but lower eco-footprint and lower running costs (tubes are ~1-1.5 € each). Electronic ballasts are extremely reliable and have been on the market long enough to back such claims up.

Hot-start EVG doesn't turn on quite as fast as LEDs; they take about 0.5 seconds. They never flicker.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369136

https://youtu.be/EC_6urfu5UI?t=7m40s

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonet_mount

But a couple of years ago I moved to Finland, and it seems here that the Edison-screw won. I've not seen a single bayonet mount since I've moved here. (And I've moved flat a few times. When you rent a flat they are typically unfurnished, and the Finns take this to an extreme, removing all their light-bulbs along with the furniture.)

Every German who has moved flats a couple of times thus owns a few barebone lamp socket assemblies which are affectionately called "Russian chandeliers" (with apologies to Russians). When moving in these are usually the first things to go up until proper lamps are installed.

EDIT: I think I've seen bayonet mounts in some antique furniture at my grand parents' house as a child. But it certainly strikes me as a bit of an anachronism, much like American farmhouse style windows (the kind you slide up) compared to tilt turn windows (which are the norm in my country).

Some industrial applications use the bayonet mount, usually when the lamp itself doesn't use standard 230V AC to prevent mixups (IIRC mercury lamps use bayonets for this reason, you don't want it in normal sockets)

The light bulb manufacturers got those outlawed via the national electrical code. It's illegal to have any wiring in a residence over 1000. Except for radio's televisions and microwaves. Which means cold cathode lighting is outlawed. Cold cathode is basically just neon, which is similar to fluorescent except unlike fluorescent you don't have a hot filament to burn out. Both requires higher voltage to operate and results somewhat lower efficiency, but with 100,000 hour life span.

Later in the 1970's they also made sure that fluorescent lamps efficiency standards mandated high color temperature (blue) phosphors. In low light residential use high color temp makes everything looks like ass.

Haven't needed a ladder in 5 years.

edit: also, I do know a lot of developers that would not be happy to work on the maintenance of some old software.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

One can learn from the light bulb conspiracy that planned obsolescence is real. It is profitable unless they are caught for companies to make products with a limited life thus they can sell replacement products and bad for the environment.

In developed nations, labor is too expensive to make a repair worthwhile for things people can regularly afford. It's only as things become expensive that repairing something makes economic sense (a $100 replacement screen for a phone is economically viable vs buying a new $600 phone). Conversely very few people in the US for example would think of repairing an old Microwave when buying a new one is only marginally more expensive than getting a new one.

Upside, I now have a much bigger and nicer TV that was 40% of what the old one cost.

You know, remember the tobacco industry, when they were claiming it made your teeth cleaner, your breath fresher and and that jazz? It's not that long ago.