Cool. Very cool. But this nothing to do with planned obsolescence.
Not this particular example, maybe, but the concept of a device remaining usable in failure runs counter to planned obsolescence.
Not necessarily, Apple for example makes interacting outside its ecosystem difficult on purpose for “calculated misery” iirc. It’s like when your boss cuts most of your hours instead of firing you. You don’t get optimal output or the benefit of transparency.
I see what you mean. I suppose the difference is the intent and the effect on the customer.
- Obsolescence: the device is poorly maintained, or designed to make using it past the desired (for shareholders) support date miserable.
- Grace: the product is designed to keep functioning past the point where normally it would cease to be of use to the customer.
Not necessarily, if the point of failure is the battery connect then this is able to continue until complete failure. It’s the opposite of one way planned obsolescence is done of putting the expected point of failure in a position where it is no longer operable at all or repairable
This concept is infact compatible with planned obsolescence. You can design things that break overtime on purpose, have that thing still work, just work not as well over time.
What do you mean “nothing to do with”? The title literally says “the opposite of planned obsolescence”, which is planning the failure of a device. This is showing the planned continued use of a device when parts of it fails.
Planned obsolescence is taking steps to ensure the device fails.
But if I have a device that requires four batteries to function and one of them fails and this causes the device to stop working, that’s not planned obsolescence, it’s just not graceful degradation. It isn’t planned obsolescence because the device isn’t useless, I just need to put some new batteries in.
Yeah, and this isn’t even really degradation, it’s just supporting different requirements / use cases.
While I see the point they’re trying to make, what this person is actually saying is complete nonsense.
Graceful degradation is not the opposite of planned obsolescence they’re two completely different concepts with nothing to do with each other.
Graceful degradation is where a product degrades in such a way as to maintain at least some functionality for as long as possible.
Planned obsolescence is where an item is intentionally designed to fail in order to get you to buy the next version.
Completely different concepts.
The actual opposite of graceful degradation, is progressive enhancement.
Yes, you could have both ideas in the same product: it retains some functionality as it fails, but it fails in a planned way to ensure it’s lifespan is short enough.
And oddly, the example of the flashlight isn’t even an example of either. Support for heterogeneous batteries is a feature, but it’s a stretch to call it “degradation”. It’s not like batteries fail randomly before they run out of juice.
The degradation in this case happens in the brain when you’re trying to remember which type of batteries you need
I feel like the opposite is your multifunction refusing to scan because it needs ink.
vulgar degradation
Malicious degredation.
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It hits slightly different though.
For example graceful degradation could be considered when a device can have different components fail but the rest still work.
Progressive enhancement can be considered to be a device with basic functionality with optional add-ons.
It’s basically about the base getting less functional, versus the baseline being upgraded. From a certain point of view they are the same thing but realistically they’re not.
If I have a device with an optional add-on and I don’t actually have that add-on installed, I wouldn’t say the device is “degraded”, even though technologically it probably doesn’t make much difference.
As opposed to progressive enhancement as the product ages (features added with firmware updates etc.)
I don’t get how working with less than optimal power sources that can be replaced has anything to do with planned obsolescence. It does not extend the life of the device, it just makes it work when you are short on batteries.
Working with less power available is what Apple got grief for when it throttled processing power based on battery life as a workaround for the planned obsolescence method of not making it easy to replace the battery.
I’d argue that planned obsolescence is about designing something to break early and shorten its useful life, while graceful degradation is about designing things that are resilient, that work even after being broken, to give them as long a useful life as possible.
In that vein, the flashlight is a useful analogy even if you could argue it’s not an exact example - it works when it power source is at full, it works when it has fewer power sources, it works when it has less energetic power sources, it just tones down its output to match the power it has available.
Apple, on the other hand, went out and said “if you don’t buy a new phone we’re going to make your old phone run slower”. I think the battery life was just an excuse - did Apple really think its customers would rather have a slower phone than a phone with shorter battery life? Sounds ridiculous.
If you want a better example of graceful degradation in technology, think about solar panels. Solar panels gradually become less efficient with age - a 20-year-old solar panel is working at about 80% of its original efficiency. And for high efficiency needs, like powering a house where you have limited space to put solar panels, 80% might not be good enough anymore. But a solar panel that works at 80% is totally functional for other uses where less power is needed, so you can repurpose it and swap it out. And as long as somebody doesn’t drop a rock on the panel and break it, it can keep going for decades more.
Less efficient panels can be repurposed for systems that need less power. Older computers can get new operating systems and be repurposed for less demanding uses. Some things can be repaired indefinitely, and some can’t, but even things that gradually and inevitably decline in efficiency can be repurposed instead of being discarded. That’s the sort of resilient design we need for a sustainable future.
TIL my middle-aged ass isn’t obsolete, it’s just gracefully degrading.
Eats chips
Gracefully degrading or just degrading?
Both? both. Both is good.
I appreciate the thought, but I think you’re giving the concept too much credit, and also misunderstanding exactly what Apple did or why it was bad.
“Graceful degradation” is simply the existence of a wider range of failure modes. The flashlight is nice because there are more conditions where you can do something with it, but the life cycle of such a product is obviously not limited by the replaceable batteries.
Apple’s hidden power management hacks were also, in fact, an example of “graceful degradation”. As a lithium-ion battery degrades, high-amperage loads (i.e., the the processor when executing an intensive workload) will cause an increasingly large voltage drop. If the voltage supplied to the processor drops too low, the latches inside the processor will destabilize and begin to produce incorrect results (a 1 that should have been a 0, or vice versa). This is immediately catastrophic for obvious reasons.
Given this, you have two choices: either the device shuts down when the voltage drop becomes too large (at, e.g., 40% charge, depending on the specific properties of the battery), or you reduce the maximum current draw of the processor by reducing its clock frequency.
Apple chose the latter, which probably makes sense in the grand scheme of things. However, this was still pretty bad for two reasons: they didn’t inform the user that they were doing it, and first-party battery replacements were prohibitively expensive until recently. Because of this, most users would assume that their phone was slowing down because it was old, not because their battery could no longer supply adequate power to sustain the maximum clock frequency. Worse yet, even if they did somehow figure this out, it was rarely worthwhile to shell out the $130+ Apple was charging to replace the battery (which basically just involves removing two screws and a ribbon cable).
The other problem is they didn’t give a choice to users. If I recognise I’m only going to keep my phone for another 6 months then I might prefer to just run the risk of a failure while maintaining high CPU function when the battery has sufficient charge.
And of course it wasn’t really a safety issue it wasn’t dangerous for the device to fail it was minorly irritating you just start the device again. So they basically made a unilateral decision on everyone’s behalf without asking anybody or telling them what they had done.
Apple got sued for lack of communication essentially.
Given this, you have two choices: either the device shuts down when the voltage drop becomes too large (at, e.g., 40% charge, depending on the specific properties of the battery), or you reduce the maximum current draw of the processor by reducing its clock frequency.
Yep, Apple took one route and Google took the other. There wasn’t a great solution short of replacing users batteries which no company is going to do without being forced.
Apple, on the other hand, went out and said “if you don’t buy a new phone we’re going to make your old phone run slower”. I think the battery life was just an excuse - did Apple really think its customers would rather have a slower phone than a phone with shorter battery life? Sounds ridiculous.
This isn’t how that happened at all and is an example of why this was such a bad marketing fail. Apple simply reduced the turbo just enough that the phone wouldn’t hitch or power off when the battery degraded. It was such a slight change it was literally only noticable by a very small shift in benchmark scores before and after a battery swap. They literally did a good thing for device longevity and got raked over the coals for it
It does extend the life of the device though. If your connectors/wiring/bulb fail anywhere on a single circuit flashlight (which most are) then your flashlight is dead. This flashlight has separate bulbs and a separate connection/port for each battery due to the non-sequential layout, so over time if any of them fail the others still function and the flashlight isn’t a total loss.
It rendered devices almost unusable, rather than just dim the backlight. And as you said, that was a consequence of other fuckery, so they rightly got flak for it.
It’s not about the planned obsolescence of the flashlight, but of the batteries.
Suddenly, I don’t need to buy a new pack of batteries if just one stops working.
No it’s definitely about the flashlight more than the batteries. Most flashlights just have one connection/channel from battery power to bulb, and if this single circuit fails at any point then the flashlight is useless. This flashlight has four separate ones due to the layout of the batteries, and they each operate individually, so if one fails anywhere you still have 3 that function just fine.
I stand corrected
How do you know if a battery has died? If three batteries have died and the flashlight keeps working as normal, then one day the fourth battery finally dies and the user is surprised to find the flashlight suddenly won’t turn on. This sounds like using a normal flashlight?
You can see the light getting weaker
I don’t get how working with less than optimal power sources that can be replaced has anything to do with planned obsolescence. It does not extend the life of the device, it just makes it work when you are short on batteries.
One way battery powered devices can fail is that one or more of the contacts becomes corroded or otherwise unable to conduct electricity, so this could extend the life of the device.
Apple got grief because the processor can work at full speed even without a battery and works very well on Linux, but Apple chose to throttle back on OSX.
Apple got grief because the processor can work at full speed even without a battery
You mean when it’s plugged into the wall? I mean sure yeah, but Apple would probably argue that that would degrade the function of your mobile phone. I don’t think that line of reasoning would really work in court.
Also OS X is desktop/laptop, iOS is smartphone.
another way of looking at it is, the system is designed with human needs of the customer in mind first, and the economic needs of shareholders are somewhere farther down the line
Graceful degradation is cool, but progressive enhancement is where it’s really at. The difference is that instead of working around the lack of capabilities, you design simple and robust core system, and then improve around it based on available capabilities.
The proper term isn’t graceful degradation, but fault tolerance.
It just describes how many core systems or components can fail before the device itself stops working.
For example, a jet will have multiple redundancies for almost all major systems which allows many of them to fail in the air without causing the plane to crash or force an emergency landing.
That’s how you end up with Frankenstein scope creep.
No! Frankenstein is the name of the designer!
You say scope creep, the client says added value
You say scope creep, the client says the product is 10x over budget and the deadlines have long passed
They can call it whatever the fuck they want…show me the signed change order and I’ll implement it.
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As someone trained in this field, not everything is a bulb or an LED which can take less power.
Where exactly you want this behavior?
Ha! Apple makes your phone completely inoperable if your microphone breaks. Is not just about less power is about keep everything else working as much as possible.
They do what now?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=44DEgUXREUQ
TL;DW: the iPhone resets if the microphone is damaged or not present.
I don’t particularly like Louis Rossmann but I do support his stance.
Jesus Christ.
I can’t find a ton of information on this, which makes me think they fixed it in a software update, but I also can’t find any evidence that they fixed it. I’m interested to find out where this went.
Ah got it, yes Apple is a good example in this field.
But it comes to a point where the additional cost for parts and engineering aren’t worth it.
$100 for a flashlight with 10% the lumens for being on a single AAA would hardly beat out one that puts out the same max lumens for $5.
Walking a trail at night that functionality would be absolutely worthless and be dangerous even to attempt. Oh it’s okay it works on this extra AAA I have….
I don’t own iPhone and don’t know how it does not work with microphone broken, but I would hope that everything supposed to work as long as it doesn’t require microphone.
I’d hope my scanner works when I’m out of ink, but here we are.
That’s not planned obsolescence though. Your printer/scanner isn’t made obsolete because you run out of a consumable portion. I mean yes, it’s purposely disabled to force you to buy more ink, but buying ink instantly restores the functionality. It’s super anti-consumer behavior for sure.
If your printer was made to perform worse over time to force you to replace the entire device, that would be planned obsolescence. Like devices with non-replaceable batteries that degrade over time.
Think you’re on the wrong comment chain, we’re talking about iphone mics
You would hope, yes. Unfortunately that’s exactly the kind of thing they do
Sure, they can also make the camera a microphone for when microphone A stops.
Where is the line and and at what cost point? I like how the conversation went from batteries on a light to iPhones lmfao.
How does one turn a camera into a microphone? Also the thing being discussed is that one part of the whole not working shouldn’t cause the whole to stop working.
But in doing so increases costs and can create even more dangerous situations they could be putting them up for liability wise.
But yes make everything about iPhones because they “bad” lmfao.
It was giving an example of a general principle, not suggesting that everything ought to dim lights specifically.
Other examples of similar principles might be:
- Taking a little extra care when designing a new building so that adaptive reuse is easier later. That doesn’t mean adding up-front cost, but rather things like erring on the side of less specialization when deciding how to lay out the space.
- The way they used to print pretty patterns on the cotton sacks animal feed used to come in a century ago, because they knew farmers’ wives would make feed sack dresses out of them.
- Laying out a new subdivision with its streets on a grid instead of curvy cul-de-sacs, so that it’s easier to rebuild individual parcels to higher density or non-residential use in the future without having to raze the entire thing.
- Designing a piece of furniture with removable cushions instead of attached padding, so that they can be replaced when they wear out instead of having to reupholster the whole thing.
I learnt about graceful degradation in relation to escalators and how they compare to elevators/lifts. Basically escalators become stairs, whereas lifts become cages.
It’s been one of my favourite design concepts, alongside hidden design (design which improves things without being apparent/in your face about it)
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it’s unrelated to planned obsolescence as in it’s not about designing things to last, but for a design to be functional even if there’s some issue outside the control of the product design. You can get graceful degradation along with planned obsolescence, they’re not mutually exclusive.
Reminds me of the differences in design cultures in different companies, though I heard it in relation to countries but idk if that was a stereotype or not. What I heard was about differences in design philosophies towards a similar goal of a good product: one company over engineered their stuff to last a long time, whereas the other company relied on redundancy by putting in a second of anything that was likely to fail in parallel to the original.
Sometimes escalators also become meat grinders though. Less graceful.
Just put your choice of meat on it, still graceful /s
Meat grinding is still functionality
Escalators are usually not safe to use when broken. So this is a good example of the idea in a spherical cow sort of way, but not practically.
I forgot to mention this was in relation to the lack of electricity, not breaking down
That does change things lol.
It’s too bad that modern websites don’t do graceful degradation anymore, let alone progressive enhancement.
My fleshlight works with a single AAA too 🙁
Don’t put yourself down describing your D-Cell as a AAA
Thank you for the convenience
Thanks, Mitch.
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Consider the term Wabi-Sabi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
https://www.omaritani.com/blog/wabi-sabi-philosophy-teachings
TL;DR: Beauty in imperfection. Not too relevant.
Things will degrade, it’s natural. Is this not about designing things that degrade functionally? Seemed related to me.
The philosophy is tangentially relevant but there’s nothing wonky or antique about this flashlight so it’s not wabi-sabi.
LoL, not yet. ;-) I guarantee it will be an antique in someone’s junk drawer in record time. I like good design, and this one strikes me as specious.
