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3 days agoThe Xbox 360 was designed to be as annoying to take apart as possible, possibly to hide the cheap components that lead to the red ring of death…
actually, this was probably to fit it into the very weird and particular form factor that microsoft wanted it to fit in.
The red ring of death issue was actually due to faulty chip manufacturing, rather than bad cooling, it was an inevitable flaw due to manufacturing defects, rather than design failures. The heating and cooling cycles just greatly exaggerated the effect of the problem, that’s why it’s so closely linked.
Also you could’ve mentioned the update fuses in the CPU, IIRC there are fuses that are blown when the system updates, to prevent you from going back, no matter what you do.
it’s complicated, a good example, actually probably the ideal example, of planned obsolescence is airpods. Designed to not be repaired, thrown away, and then replaced.
It can also apply to things like “lifetime” designed products, you may design something to mechanically wear out, before it needs to be maintained, or perhaps, require no maintenance, until you need to replace it. It’s harder to say whether this is strictly planned obsolescence, or just cost cutting engineering, which in the long run, probably doesn’t change much.
i think the most semantically accurate version of this would be releasing a product that is 100% good, and then a year later releasing a product that is 200% good, surpassing and replacing the previous product entirely, removing the previous product from the product line up, and only supporting the most recent product. I.E. it’s planned to become obsolete, shortly into the future.
Vehicles are also a weird market segment, they’ve gotten considerably more reliable since the early days of the automotive industry, they’ve gotten significantly more comfortable, they’ve gotten significantly more safe. They’ve also gotten several orders of magnitude more complicated since than as well. To deal with the aforementioned advances. Though there have been a lot of issues in recent manufacturing leading to parts that are just, bad.