Vasily Sadonin, the author of the youtube channel "There is a Way Out!", Encouraged me to write this article. In his video "Planned obsolescence", he gave some arguments refuting the existence of the eponymous global process. Vasily touched upon a topical topic in general, but I want to illuminate this problem from a different angle, as a person who, on the duty of his profession, repairs a wide variety of electronics.
Here are some examples from personal experience.
Example # 1
Apple iPad 5 A1823.
Apple is generally known for its "disposable" devices, but in this case I came across this copy, which came for repair with a broken touchscreen. It would seem that it was not such a terrible fall, with an angle on linoleum, from a height of human growth, although … even in a particular case, it is difficult to talk about average human height, because the owner of the tablet is a miniature girl.
The photo shows a tablet with a disassembled touchscreen and matrix. The first thing I ask you to pay attention to is the edges of the inner edge, they are all-metal without any insulation. Glass is glued with double-sided tape directly to the metal and comes into contact with it.
Promotional video:
You probably don't need to tell how metal is friends with glass with close contact?
Suppose the designers did this not on purpose, but the so-called "corner ears" are added to this, highlighted in red in the photo. This is a choice of metal from the case, it allows the tablet to wrinkle more easily when dropped to an angle, deforming the case, thereby breaking the glass with the edges.
Note that in terms of warranty obligations, the manufacturer does not bear any responsibility. You dropped your tablet yourself, causing it to crash.
By the way, if it were not for the cunning Chinese, spare parts for the devices of this company would not be on sale at all, which Apple (and not only) would be incredibly happy about. But the Chinese for us, ordinary workaholic, stamp, while the device is operated by at least someone.
Original screens for Apple equipment, as well as other components of our own production, do not exist on free sale. When you are told in the next underground SC with the sign of Apple-reperair that they will put the original display, this is a lie, possibly unconscious. Inexperienced craftsmen themselves often believe in the originality of what suppliers are selling them, but the element can be original only if it is removed from the same iPhone for disassembly, which is quite unlikely.
It is also worth noting that in the struggle to increase sales, Apple is introducing more and more so-called IDs into the element base of its devices. On these devices, it becomes more and more difficult to change any microcircuit on the motherboard, because when you replace it, its internal ID will not coincide with that recorded in the firmware of this phone or tablet, and when synchronizing with Icloud, it is now more difficult to get around this limitation.
You can listen for a long time to the excuses of the Apple press service that these notches in the hardware are made in order to reduce weight, that their "ultra" designs of touchscreens are easier to contact with the glass (as if it was impossible to make an edge out of plastic, as was done on previous models) and that the ID of the element base was done solely in order to prevent devices from falling into the hands of fraudsters. The fact remains: all this leads to a deterioration in the overall reliability of the structure, its less maintainability.
Example No. 2
AMD RS880M Northbridge, chip 216-0752001.
This chip has already gone down in history as one of the most widespread north bridges in laptops found in the CIS, and at the same time the most unreliable.
However, speaking about this, it should be noted that in my practice I saw only a few cases of its failure for no apparent reason. More often than not, overheating contributed to the breakdown.
It was one of the few chips that craftsmen bought for future use. You order 10 pieces from China, having the same amount on hand, and before they arrive, these have already ended. That was how massive it was, and just as unreliable. Installed in a huge number of laptop models from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Samsung and many others.
Why did this chip die from overheating so often?
The reasons for the phenomenon lie in the device itself. The fact is that, unlike a personal computer, where heating microcircuits are cooled by direct cooling of the radiators installed on them with coolers, there is much less space in a laptop, therefore it works on the principle of "heat removal", that is, as a rule, it contains 1-2 dependent heat-dissipating copper pipes, which, when heated, receive heat from a fan at the radiator end, thereby removing excess temperature outside. You can see this in the photo below.
The photo also shows the so-called "felt boot". This is a dust-clogged laptop heat sink heatsink. As a result of such a blockage of the air outlet by the fan (cooler), the radiator begins to heat up more strongly, it is worse to remove heat and, as a result, the overheating protection is triggered.
Yes, in the processor, in the graphics adapter, there are thermal sensors that monitor their temperature, and when a mark that is dangerous for the device's performance is reached, they take the laptop into overheating protection.
All heated BGA chips are capable of doing this, except for this north bridge. This is the busiest device in a laptop. Through it there are data exchange streams between the processor, RAM, graphics adapter, and the south bridge, that is, the main "trunk" data stream. It would seem that you need to monitor the temperature of this device almost more carefully than the processor, but no. For some inexplicable reason, the manufacturer did not include a temperature sensor in the design. Neither in him, nor in subsequent models of chips of this line, until its very end.
Again, was this technical solution accidental? I, as a specialist, think not. This is a rather subtle calculation. According to my observations, the laptop cooling system gets clogged with dust on average for 1 - 1.5 years. The fact that it is necessary to carry out its prevention is not said in my memory in any (!) Instruction manual for the laptop.
Having worked out the warranty resource, the laptop often collects enough dust, due to the missing thermal sensor on one of the key microcircuits, it starts to heat up more than it should be, and eventually fails if it does not carry out preventive maintenance of the cooling system, with cleaning from dust, replacing thermal pastes and thermoresins.
Now let's look at a typical example with TVs.
Example No. 3
Gamma color correctors AS15-G and AS15-F, they are also EC5575 and AS19-HG, they are also EC5579.
This is a device found in several generations of LCD TVs. Similarly to the previous situation, the 216-0752001 microcircuit was purchased in batches until these laptops went out of mass use.
On any TV, there is a board (or area of the common motherboard) called T-CON, or, in the language of techies, just "HORSE".
T-CON is such a buffer, a signal converter called LVDS (low-voltage differential signaling) or, in our opinion, "low-voltage differential signaling bus" into electrical signals that control the pixel group of the matrix.
To put it simply, a modern LCD TV, like a computer, has a power supply and a motherboard. This motherboard outputs signals to the screen digitally. These signals are called LVDS. But for the screen to understand these signals, there is a T-CON that converts these digital signals to … well …. let's conditionally call them "analog", which already assign color to each pixel on the screen at a time.
On the T-CON board, this same GAMMA CORRECTOR, which you saw in the picture above, is used to correct the pixel color.
Despite its modest size, this microcircuit performs a very important function in the TV: it processes a large stream of signals, and therefore, it heats up, not much, but heats up. And over time, it can partially fail. Then you can see on the screen something like the one in the photo below.
Why is this happening?
There are two main reasons, and both are due to the fact that the TV manufacturer himself introduced these flaws in the design. I will try to prove it.
In the photo of the microcircuit (which is at the beginning of the example), you can see it "below". There is a metallized "belly" on it. It is tied to the ground of the microcircuit, or, technically speaking, to "GND" (from the word Ground - ground, ground). It serves to dissipate heat onto a wide copper path on the board, it is soldered there. For this class of microcircuits, passive cooling is usually sufficient so that the microcircuit does not degrade due to overheating over time. But as you can see in the photo with the board, where the microcircuit is dismantled, often this site does not have the ability to contact the heat sink at all.
I think it is clear that such a solution cannot be a simple flaw. On a huge number of different T-CON boards, in this line I have met only a few models in which this microcircuit was installed as it should.
The treatment is very simple: the "earthen" area is cleaned from the green (in this case) mask on the board, it is tinned with solder and the microcircuit is soldered with a soldering hairdryer. I don’t remember a case when, after such procedures, the TV returned to me under warranty with this problem again, even years later.
The second reason for the failure of this microcircuit is less common, but it also occurs: this is a "violation of the switching circuit".
Let me explain what it is.
A switching circuit is a set of schematically included element base of components necessary for the operation of a microcircuit under specified conditions.
In general, a switching circuit is usually a set of those electronic components that, due to objective circumstances (most often), could not be installed inside the microcircuit, therefore they are installed outside, and the further technical progress goes, the more and more new models of the same microcircuits take in their own scheme of inclusion, and less and less need the so-called "body kit" around them.
For the operation of any microcircuit, there is technical documentation, or, otherwise, "datasheet" (eng. DataSheet), in which, as a rule, it is clearly described how the microcircuit should work, what is its permissible switching circuit, in what modes and how it can work …
For the microcircuit to work correctly, it needs a "high-quality" power supply. stable, without jumps, which means that it should be well smoothed by capacitors. It is already obvious that power capacitors are deliberately installed in the switching circuit at the limit of admissibility for operation in this device. Naturally, after some time they will go beyond this limit for one reason or another, and begin to create malfunctions in the operation of the microcircuit.
This is treated by partial replacement of the microcircuit switching circuit.
And this is also done on purpose, but in such a way that even legally there is nothing to complain about. The microcircuit manufacturer's recommendations are not violated, the microcircuits still work within the extreme limits of their characteristics. But the TV manufacturer did not need to install capacitors in the board, the voltage of their operation has a sufficient margin to resist interference from outside the operation of the microcircuit itself.
This list can be continued for a long time, but I don't want to tire the reader. Therefore, we smoothly move on.
Software restrictions
The most common way to move the device beyond the boundaries of its work resource is software intervention.
For example, Apple releases a new line of its devices every year. During this time, the models sold a year ago are already beginning to face a number of problems, both described above and software. Apple and other firms have repeatedly been caught pumping software algorithms into older device models, the purpose of which was to block some of the processor cores and put them under continuous load in order to reduce the speed of the device and increase battery wear.
This also caught not only Apple, but for example Sony, with the Xperia Z smartphone model, and not only.
"Z" is indicative of the fact that its example shows how the manufacturers went too far with the load, from which the phone often heated up in the pocket like a stove, sometimes even at rest. At the same time, serious darkening appeared on the matrix, the device started to work very slowly, reducing its functions to a "dialer".
Usually, the manufacturer justifies itself by the fact that since the release of the smartphone, the technologies and updates of the Android version have stepped further, new versions are becoming more demanding on hardware, have more pre-installed programs and therefore they simply do not pull it. At the same time, he is silent that even in this case, he himself forms the assembly of the operating system into an update package, and can reduce the number of pre-installed programs.
It is noteworthy that the next-generation smartphones in the cheaper class were practically equal (or sometimes even more modest in terms of characteristics than "Z"), even from another manufacturer, which had the same processor on board, and worked perfectly.
There are more unpleasant situations when the so-called "Timings" are introduced into the device's firmware. I first encountered this (at least I realized that the phenomenon is massive) in 2015. Then Samsung R60 devices were sent to service workshops. Clients unanimously said: "I turned it off last night, but today it just didn't turn on." Technically, the device was in perfect order, the problems were solely in the firmware: in its encrypted part of the code - as some colleagues suggest - contains an algorithm that, after a certain number of hours of laptop operation, prevents the "multicontroller" from sending a signal allowing it to start when this button is pressed …
The problem was solved quickly enough - by flashing the SPI memory chip with a programmer, which contains the laptop BIOS to the version downloaded by the programmer from a fresh similar device. After that, the laptop could work for several more years until its timing ends again.
This is not only Samsung's fault. There was a case when I took three laptops for repair from different clients with this problem in a day.
Built-in timings are found in a very large number of various equipment, from "smart" electric kettles and washing machines to all types of computers for household use and mass consumption.
conclusions
V. Sadonin in his video "Planned obsolescence" argued that a large work resource is not intentionally invested in technology, because new technologies will soon come to replace it. As an example, he cited VHS videotapes, which were replaced by the standards of optical media, CD and DVD, and they are already being replaced by pocket solid-state drives NAND, in other words, "flash drives".
Vasily forgets about several important details.
Now we have come to the conclusion that we watch movies online, on computer monitors, TVs, tablets and smartphones. We also listen to music, store information in the clouds, and what will happen next? What will be the next storage standard? You know? So I don’t know, and the manufacturers of VHS tape recorders, six months before the mass entry of “cheap” DVD players into the market, did not know that they would be swept off the market so abruptly. And the manufacturers of DVD players and media did not know that so quickly the Internet would become massive, high-speed, accessible to everyone, and they, too, would be pushed out of the market almost completely.
Today, some of the global network users watch movies on an official paid subscription on some service, and those with lower incomes watch them a little later on torrents or pirated online resources with a bunch of advertisements.
And it would seem that both those and other content providers to the masses - in chocolate, are getting theirs, but what will happen tomorrow? Wouldn't they all be out of work? And won't all their storage servers go to the landfill, like the VHS players that Vasily spoke about?
The question is not at all from this plane. It is not delivered correctly. The answer to it will be ambiguous, because it means only a redistribution of the market in a constantly moving technical progress.
He does not explain why, for example, a motorcycle released in the 90s does not break, and a motorcycle of the same class, released several years ago, requires replacement of expensive units soon after the end of the warranty.
Vasily believes that the principle of planned obsolescence can only work if there is a collusion of all companies of all types of production (if I understood it correctly), but in fact there is no collusion. This is a trend and you will buy a new iPhone anyway if you are used to it. Buy it again.
After all, if you make, for example, a TV that will serve you faithfully for 15-20 years, you will not look closely at new models while this one works: it suits you, it shows the picture. It may not be as clear as this year's model, but it works. You can connect a set-top box or computer to it. And the manufacturer doesn't want to wait until your TV is out of date enough for you to buy a new one. He needs to produce millions of pieces of equipment every year, and all this needs to be sold, and the number of potential buyers on planet earth is finite.
Therefore, after the collapse of the USSR and the development of the entire globe by capital, it became impossible to expand the market further, it became necessary to exploit the abilities of a now limited number of buyers, which means that the goods that they need should have less and less resource of work: a person is more and more more should depend on the things it consumes.
This is called the "consumer society".
Can we say that everything that is now produced in capitalist countries has an extremely limited resource of work? Not. This applies only to consumer goods. Specialized equipment for production is much less susceptible to this phenomenon, although it also takes place in a number of areas and it is not only about machine tools and production lines.
For example, I use a laptop from a company that almost never breaks, but these laptops are very expensive, despite the fact that they are not fundamentally different from what you use.
You can also buy it (more often to order, they are not visible in retail chains) and use it, and even if you drop it, it is unlikely that it will break right there, despite the fact that drops are not included in its characteristics.
In my workshop, I saw this manufacturer and laptops of this series only twice, and in one case the laptop fell from the height of the 2nd floor, and was still restored by me, the second drowned in the bathroom and was also restored. Try throwing your MacBook out of the window.
This laptop is an equipment for professional work, which implies working in a cycle of production lines for something, both software, and in a factory production cycle, in which the person working on this laptop is embedded, and therefore disconnected from the production cycle of users of the consumer society …
Professional system administrators with experience also know very old servers that work around the clock even for decades and are turned off only for routine maintenance, because these devices are made for enterprises, and their task is to maintain the enterprise cycle at the level to which one or another is configured. server. For example, file storages in which specialized SAS hard drives can last 15 years (sometimes more), and the hard drive in your computer will start to be covered with BADs after 1 to 3 years.
Where is it going?
In my opinion, the principle of planned aging in the capitalist world is necessary in order to delay the next round of the crisis of overproduction.
Industrial production in a capitalist economy requires a constantly growing sales market, but when this principle was born, the authors of the idea did not realize that the world is finite. It never occurred to them that a high-quality and vital product would appear in quantities that would be impossible to sell: either because everyone has it, or because the consumer cannot afford it.
Since every year technologies increase labor productivity around the world, consumer goods are becoming more and more, according to the prevailing logic of capitalism, they should work less and less, and you have to buy them more and more often.
But this cannot go on forever. At the moment, if once a year a hard worker can afford to buy a new mobile phone, then once a month he will not be able to do this, since his earnings are not designed for this.
This means that the global crisis of overproduction is not far off.
Author DigiSoHa