What is planned obsolescence?
Planned obsolescence also know as scheduled or built-in obsolescence is any product who was designed intentionally to stop working or to reduce performance in sort amount of time.
Have you ever hear about the “Centennial Light bulb”? This light was installed in 1903 in a fire department station.
…and know what?
After 117 years still working perfect!
Is possible to check a online the status of that light in a webcam that show it direct refreshing every 30 seconds: http://www.centennialbulb.org/
Why that light can work for more than 100 year?
This light was manufactured by Shelby Electric Company with long lifetime but after some years the quality of the lights were reduced.
In this example of the centennial Bulb light, companies answer that this could be related with how many times you turn on/off the light, this probably could affect the lifetime. Anyway there are evidence of a collusion of top light bulbs manufacturers to reduce from 5,000 hours to 1,000 hours of lifetime in 1920.
In the 1920s, wherein representatives from top light bulb manufacturers worldwide, such as Germany’s Osram, the United Kingdom’s Associated Electrical Industries, and General Electric (GE) in the United States (via a British subsidiary), colluded to artificially reduce bulbs’ lifetimes to 1,000 hours. (bbc.com)
The light bulb is the iconic examples of planned obsolescence.
But what about other industries like Cars, home electronics and mobile phones?
In this article I’m going to focus on mobile phones.
If you already used an old phone like the Nokia brick, you will agree about the reduction of quality regarding shock resistant, if you compare with new phones.
If you never used Nokia brick, but you have a phone with more than 2 years and already updated to the last version of operative system, depending the version you could be with a considerable reduction of speed and performance.
The mobile phones accessory market worth more than $72.78 billion of USD and still growing. If companies build phones in a different way, they will reduce the market for protectors and screens and the replacement of broken pieces.
For example just in fixing screens:
Americans spent over $3 billion last year fixing their smartphone screens
Planned obsolescence in Mobile devices
The last years this topic was trend, the top smartphones companies have been fined for planned obsolescence, Samsung and Apple for more than $10M in total USD. You can read more about that in this link:
Samsung and Apple fined for over $5 M USD for intentionally slowing down older phones
These companies that was fined for slowing down phones represent more than 72% of the market of smartphones, so a considerable percent of phones could be with this reduction of speed.
They say that was not on purpose, and most of the case is fault of the condition of the battery. Make sense that the battery could affect in the performance, but There is a fact that certain software releases affected directly in the performance of old phones as well.
This is the response of Apple to the users:
Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.
“Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6S and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.”
Huawei took this opportunity to troll them..
What I can do with this?
How to check if Apple is slowing down your iPhone?
If you are using iPhone you can download Lirum Device Info Lite to check the CPU Clock speed of your phone. You should check the speed depending your model:
iPhone 6 and 6 Plus: 1.4 GHz
iPhone 6S and 6S Plus: 1.84 GHz
iPhone SE: 1.84 GHz
iPhone 7 and 7 Plus: 2.34 GHz
Source businessinsider.com and more info here.
How to prevent my phone become slow?
- Replace battery when start to get discharged in less than the half of the time.
- If you are using a phone with more than 2 years, check reviews of other users before updating an operative system release. You should check what other users says about the performance.
- You can change the power mode of your phone in case of Android, when is slow. Check the optimized or the medium power saving mode instead the hight performance.
Modular smartphones?
This is the next step, is much more sustainable and makes smartphones not disposable as they are now.
The Project Are from Google is now suspended but there are some phones of other brands with some modular pieces, hope this will be a trend as soon as posible.
Please feel free to comment what do you think about Planned obsolescence??
Thanks for reading :)
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