Do manufacturers purposely make items to fail after a said amount of time?

Yes they do, but not as often as you think. Planned obsolescence has a history of lower returns so it’s usually a practice that is rare. We do see it in devices like phones, tablets and other things that are really mature industries but public perception still favors perpetual upgrades. Computers were like this for a while in the late 80’s and 90’s If your PC was just a few years old, you likely could not run current applications. That stopped being the case by ~2000. Many of us are probably running machines that are 10+ years old if we are not gaming. Honestly, it’s shocking how long most electronic devices will last. We just move on much more quickly to new technology than we once did. Making electronics cheaper, more capable and more reliable is driving them down paths that render them unrepairable or not economical to be repaired. The receiver I’m listening to right now is 45 years old. It works as well as it did back then and I have only needed to change two capacitors. The speakers connected to it are 55 years old. Just needed a few capacitors changed. We can’t do that with things now, everything is way too integrated so they’re made to last through their effective lifetimes. More often than not, they wildly exceed those expectations.

Everything manufactured from our buildings to our iPods is designed to last about five years. It’s as if the world is going to come to an end but no one wants to talk about it.

Look I get the electronics thing, but take something like a hot water heater it only lasts about 7 to ten years, they can’t or won’t build them to last longer than that?
Or how about vehicles most have sealed bearings so they can’t be serviced, when a simple shot of grease would extend it’s life greatly.

Back in the 50s and 60s, car makers figured people would buy a new car every two or three years, and cars would fall apart after 50,000 miles.

Nowadays cars will routinely last 10 years or 150,000 miles before people turn it in for a new one. My 1999 Honda CRV lasted 19 years before I donated it to charity My kids drive the 1998 Toyota Avalon they inherited from their grandmother, still running strong.

Well, appliances are different. Yes, modern appliances suck and are made to fail in 5–7 years. But the reasons are not what you would think either. Older is usually better with things like washing machines and HVAC units. These things are serviceable, but parts will be unavailable by the time they’re needed. Often, it’s a very fixable problem, but the entire thing gets replaced because the appliances are smarter than the technicians who are only skilled in replacing them. Owners are usually unaware. People have gotten used to just “getting a new one” Every piece of lawn equipment I own I picked up “free” in my neighborhood because it was being thrown out. In every single case, it was a $5–20 fix or just a quick adjustment.

Edit: All my vehicles have 150K+ miles and are still going strong. Just regular maintenance is all that is needed. I will say that this maintenance is becoming a PITA. I had to replace a sensor recently, and you have to be a damn contortionist to get to them. I gave up and took it to the dealer. Of course, they said it was something else, and then they said I gave them the wrong part after I corrected them. Once I corrected them again, they gave up trying to oversell and just put it in. Of course, that was all that was needed, a $20 part. Most people would have ended up with a $2000 tab for that. IMO, THIS is the problem.

Yes and no. Some parts in a thing are known to wear over time. For example, bearings have x number of rotations before needing to be replaced. A company making a drier will calculate that each drying cycle will rotate 5k times and the average American household runs 3.5 drier cycles per week x 52 weeks in a year x 5 years x 1.3 extra margin of error and you get 5,915,000 rotations needed. So they’ll order the bearings that have 6 million revolutions before replacement (all of these numbers are entirely fictional).

The manufacturer could use the ones that last for 20 million rotations, but the product will be more expensive and heavier. Most customers would never know (or care) they had a drier with very robust bearings in them, especially when they all fail due to the resistors in the circuit board failing after 6 years. That bearing isn’t serving any benefit and may actually decrease the efficiency costing the customer more to run and to buy due to the extra weight of beefier bearings.

It is “End of. Life”.
My security camera system “bricked” the control hub last yer because it was 7 years old and no longer supported.

Back in the 1970’s I was a university student doing a coop assignment at Troy-Bilt rototillers. I was asked to design the main worm screw and worm gear combination for the transmission. I knew what the loads would be but did not know the number of cycles. I could figure about how many cycles it would get per year but did not know how many years the CEO wanted to cover for the warranty. He said: “A lifetime” I asked how long is “a lifetime?” He replied: “1000 years!” It would have cost an additional $6 (~$30 today) to use ground gears vs cut gears. He said: “It doesn’t matter. I’ll charge $8 more for it.” So I did and he did, and the 1970’s Troy Bilt rototillers are still running out there.
Sadly, Troy-Bilt could not compete with the Chinese knockoffs and was eventually bought out by various companies over the years. Customers were not willing to pay the price for long life and superb quality.

My current refrigerator is about 13 years old, a white one (white is not trendy and was cheaper than the stainless ones). It’s still going strong but I dread the day I will need to replace it, because I hear that the new ones only last about 5 years and they will cost over 1k, whereas this one was only a few hundred dollars (plus the salesman was a friend’s husband who was the appliance salesman at a big home improvement chain store). I think it was about 400 dollars at the time, 13 years or so ago.

My current washing machine is about four or five years old. The new machines are all “High efficiency” aka “HE.” I was sorry once I bought it because the HE means it uses way less water, but also you can’t choose the water level, the machine door locks and the machine weighs the clothes and doles out the amount of water that it feels you need to wash your clothes. The clothes sometimes come out not totally rinsed, and they’re all twisted and wrinkly from the wringing combined with the less water. This machine already crapped out, and it was only because a friend is an appliance repair person that he replaced some part and it’s still working. Once I bought this new machine and realized how HE works, I really wished I bought a used machine that’s not HE, but it was too late.

My oven in my house is about 23 years old and the heating element failed twice but because I know someone who fixes things like that, he replaced the heating element(s) and the oven still works ok. If not for that, I would have had to replace the oven two times in the 23 years I’ve been here.

My car, I had a Honda Civic that had 210k miles on it and then something happened with the oil and I screwed up the engine. A friend bought it, replaced the engine and it’s still going strong. It was a 2007 model and I was driving about 500 miles per weekk when I was working. Now, since that Honda was such a workhorse, I have a Honda CRV and it has about 205k miles on it and it’s still going strong. Both the Civic and the CRV have not had any major problems (until the Civic had the oil problem at 210k). I change the oil and of course get new tires and brakes when necessary but that’s about it. I am loyal to Honda now.

This was brought up like 15 years ago.

@jca2 I fixed the water issue by standing there pouring water into the soap dispenser cup on top of my front loader at the beginning and selecting extra rinse and spin.

@YARNLADY This is a top loader and doesn’t have a soap dispenser cup but pouring water into the drum is an option I could try.

@Blackberry True. But never before has it been so easy for a manufacturer to control product life so precisely. Almost all of us give our devices constant access web access. and readily accept product updates without question.

And what does that mean
@ BlackBerry since it was brought up 15 years ago it can never be spoken of again??

@Blackberry If you mean it was brought up in Fluther 15 years ago, I’m guessing probably 95% of the people on here now were not here 15 years ago.

Hey sorry about that, I meant planned obsolescence has been exposed for awhile.

Basically at this point, no one should be surprised that huge companies are evil.

Have you guys seen the cobalt mines? Planned failure is the least of issues, all of our tech comes from slaves working in absolutely abhorrent conditions.

My son just bought me a new and quite expensive Shark vacuum cleaner. But as I was reading the owners manual and researching how to make repairs, I was dismayed.

You cannot repair the Shark. Not even to replace a cord or a belt, nor will they let you remove screws to disassemble it to remove a clog.

That’s nuts, @Snowberry. Vacuums get clogged all the time. I’m not saying I don’t believe it, I’m saying it makes no sense but I’m happy for the information because now I’ll never buy a Shark vacuum.

It’s just the nature of capitalism. Profits must increase. You can either increase market share or reduce costs. Increasing market share only works for a time, leaving you with reducing costs as your only option. If you find a robust product that you like, buy a bunch of them, because next year’s model will be worse.

@jca2 Apparently Shark did not start out this way, but over time, bit by bit they removed right to repair. they did this by gluing things instead of screwing them, by using screws that cannot be removed, and so on.

I noticed that many of the newer reviews say just exactly what you said, and they will not buy a replacement vacuum made by Shark. It’s a very expensive item to just send to the landfill if there’s a problem.

NY Times has an article about this very topic, today. The article is about how all this crap is killing our planet, ending up in landfills, precious metals being mined so everyone can have the latest cell phone or gadget – planned obsolecence which results in all these things ending up in landfills, obsolete and not worth fixing.

Here’s an excerpt:
This hurts low-income buyers most of all. The rich can pay a premium for craftsmanship, but as the saying goes, the poor can’t afford cheap goods. The novelist Terry Pratchett captured the problem in his “boots theory” of socioeconomics: “A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

From that same article, here’s a link to a Greenpeace article about the wasteful world we live in (in reference to all this throwaway crap)

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/23747/its-a-waste-world/

So in the great capitalist world the consumer is just a commodity to be bled and taxed to death, then thrown away like everything else in today’s world.

@snowberry Shark vacuum video. Horrible. I’m glad to know this.

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=are+you+allowed+to+fix+a+shark+vacuum&mid=C5370E087B1E0F1E059EC5370E087B1E0F1E059E&FORM=VIRE

Just stop buying this cheap stuff. I have had several of these shark vacs in the video. Let me start by saying these are garbage. I kept fixing ours because my wife liked it even though I hated it. They would last two years before something unrepairable would happen. I’d have to take them apart and clean them thoroughly every six months or so. I was able to make the first last like three years. The second one we got snapped together like mentioned, and I said no more Sharks. F this. I still have it but there will not be a third. I would not buy stock in Shark. This is a short-term profit thing.

It’s amazing that anybody buys them at all, @Blackwater_Park. If you can’t even replace a belt, it’s really a bad thing for a vacuum, because that’s the most basic thing.

Maximum Profits, from cheaply made off shore consumer items ,that for the most part don’t even employ North Americans ,ain’t Capitalism great?
Another thing that @zenvelo pointed out vehicles from decades past fell apart after 50,000 miles unlike todays vehicles that will go around 150,000 miles before needing a lot of repairs,older vehicles with a little maintenance that for the most part can be done in the garage or back yard can go years past today’s vehicles, that have to be worked on in shops that have the proper computer diagnostic equipment to even look at them.

@jca2 I did find I could replace the belt, it was not easy and the replacement part was for something else but just happened to be correct enough to work. Most of these new ones will fail long before needing a belt now though.

@SQUEEKY2 A good bit of vehicle maintenance is still easy enough. More complicated sure, but still relatively easy on many cars. Things are certainly harder to get to but then again, an OBDII reader is like $10, youtubers have outlined exactly what to do for most things and you may not need to do much at all for half the life of the car other than change oil, brakes etc. Based on my experiences, I’ll be buying Toyota exclusively.

It’s all about lasting long enough for the customer to be happy, while costing as little as possible. Electronics go obsolete very quickly, so design life is not very long. OTOH, you can buy expensive tools that will last years and years.

@LuckyGuy I love this story! I have two Troy-Bilt Rototillers that were given to me by my father and my Uncle. They used them during their life and I have been doing annual usage on both of them for years. I swear by them and the name of Troy-Bilt.
Thank you and that CEO for understanding quality and designing a MTBF of 1000 years. From now on I will be thinking of you every time i use my (not so bright red) Tillers.

@Forever_Free Thank your father and uncle for noticing an paying for great quality.
Put those tillers in your will. They will be around for a looong last time.

Here’s another tiller tidbit. I worked on the angle that the roller engages when you push the lever down to engage the belts. (It is a 4 bar mechanism.) The tiller is designed to release automatically if it ever hits a large rock buried in the soil. We had a “standard rock” (a brick) that was used for testing. The tines were built to take and respond to hitting a buried concrete block with no damage. Fantastic.

@LuckyGuy That feature has saved my machines and arms many times. Boulders and old brick in New England soil is common. Not to mention tilling too close to large trees and encountering their roots.
I drive through the Troy area often on the way back to the Berkshires from a days skiing in Southern Vermont. Hats off to you.

@LuckyGuy What happened with your lawn mower? The new one that keeps crapping out?

@jca2 They fixed it again. The expert came to my house and took care of it. It turns out the person who installed the PTO electromagnetic clutch installed it incorrectly. (That was the first time it broke.) That caused other problems later. Now it should be good to go.
Of course it is packed away for winter. We’ll see what happens in the spring.