It’s the obsolescence fundamental that keeps products being manufactured, whether it be air filters or model trains.
[quote user=“Mr Ron”]
speedybee
Enzoamps
Imagine how great it would be if car wheels all fit the same. Right now we have four-bolt, five-bolt, six-bolt, etcAnd air filters! There must be literally hundreds of different sizes of engine air filter being produced right now, even though IMO 99% of automobiles could easily have been designed to fit one of only like 4 standardized sizes.
This one hits close to home for me because the other day I was given an engine air filter for the 2017 version of my car, which is a 2018. Apparently in 2018 they decided to change the air filter; it is now approx 1/8th of inch wider and 1/8th of an inch taller. I cannot fathom why they decided it makes sense to redesign and retool the air filter plus the case it is housed in for such minor differences.
I suppose it boils down to the fact that companies don’t decide to do what’s really best for their customers. “Companies” don’t decide anything at all. They’re not sentient beings. People working in the companies make these decisions and they may not be deciding on what’s best for customers. Heck, they might not even be deciding on what’s best for the company… could be just looking out for #1.
The world in general would work a lot eaiser and more efficiently if people would try to cooperate, but it is the way it is
It’s the obsolescence fundamental that keeps products being manufactured, whether it be air filters or model trains.
AND, Athearn is still building some of its plastic freight cars to the EXACT same designs it introduced in the early 50’s.
Sheldon
There most certainly has been planned obsolescence in consumer product design; it is not the driving factor it was in the Insolent Chariots/Vance Packard days but it is still present.
GM ‘improved’ the side-mirror design on Suburbans and pickups sometime between 1994 and 1997. The original has a simple cruciform pivot and a couple of plastic screws running in motor-driven ‘nuts’ to tilt it. This got ‘improved’ to a snap-in frame… that was incompatible with the older shell. It is what GM then did that ‘showed the true colors’: they stopped making the replacement glass for the older style completely, requiring the entire housing be replaced (at a NOS cost of several hundred dollars plus painting) if the mirror was broken… or stolen.
It is impossible to discuss the ‘evolution’ of power connectors on crApple laptop computers without it being fairly obvious that repeated gaming of consumers is part of the exercise.
Seems like there is more “proprietary” O-guage like thinking amongst HO manufacturers than what we are led to believe. As if there is a big difference in performance or some grand design component that makes their way just that much better than the other guys’ LOL.
It reminds me of plumbing fixtures, and every company seemingly having their own fitting designs, etc.
Government correctly steps in and causes standardizations when it matters, usually for monopolistic practices or just plain safety considerations. Nobody wants to live in true economic anarchy. If regulation means communism, then no regulation means anarchy. Nobody wants that.
There is no governing body, or ever will be, that gets involved with model trains
First we keel muse ent skwirrel!
Dave “Allow me to introduce myself” Nelson
Comrades–
Do the folks asking for standardization actually expect our Comrades in China to police the factories to make sure they all use the same screws? Seriously?
This is why the better HO brass models came from South Korea or Japan with a bag containing extra screws, springs, even hex head driver screws.
My buddies who played with brass bought all kinds of extra parts from Overland Models including all the different tiny metric screws that Ajin used. Overland Models was happy to supply those parts for a fee (as long as they still had them). My one friend had seemingly every metric screw they ever used in stock in his personal inventory so he didn’t have to worry about losing one.
Some model train companies still commonly use a 2-56 screw.
Otherwise, this is exactly the reason I tend to standardize my loco roster around one manufacturer’s product. It’s nothing against the other manufacturers, but if I have multiple units from the same product runs, I know they will run together well. Good speed matching in dcc is not as easy as some claim it to be.
Right now all my motive power on hand or coming is from one manufacturer, except one pre-ordered unit is from another, a sample if you will–something I had to have (an ATSF Kodachrome B36-7).
John
What I hate is planned failure, think lightbulbs or water tanks. When people used to use incandesent bulbs the companys got together and decided to make a standard for bulb life, they pick a middle even though a company at the time made one with twice the life. You used to be able to get copper hot water tanks, these could last 50 years or more. All the companys stoped making them so they could sell new tanks ever 12 years or less.
I’m kind of the same way. I have made comments that I am done wasting my time fiddling with stuff and figuring stuff out, so I buy products mainly from two manufacturers.
Sure, they may not produce an exact car or loco, but they produce enough different products that I can do without that one special item.
I like the consistency and the familiarity amongst the fleet.
As we head down an off-topic rabbit hole…
There is no planned failure rate that is acceptable.
There is a balancing act between what people will pay for and what they will consider acceptable. No one is making you buy “builders grade” or “consumer quality” products. You do not need to shop at Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, or Lowes. You can go to an industrial/commercial/restaurant supply store and buy actual high quality products.
You can buy a food disposal that will last a lifetime and eat a hardwood 2 by 2. You can buy a hot water heater with a fail-proof tank that will last 50 years. You can buy lightbulbs made under such strict quality control that they will be perfectly consistent and last 50 years. You can buy a Peterbilt 330 converted into a large pickup that will last 1,000,000 miles.
I’ll bet that when you see the prices for these items, you won’t buy.
Marketing to consumers is difficult. When you give them what they say they want, you end up with Solo: A Star Wars Story, and they hate it.
I bought a Maytag “sub-commercial” washer and dryer for my house that cost as much as a fancy pair of front loaders with dozens of bells and whistles. My W/D is ugly, but they should last the rest of my life. Most other people would have spent the same money on a fancy candy-apple-red set up with a steam drying tray. Mine are bare-bones, but very heavy and well built.
-Kevin
There’s videos on youtube showing incandescent light bulbs built from the 1900s-1910s (before planned obsolescence (PO) in the 1924) that are still lit to this day. Proof that PO is a thing.
Even modern day LED bulbs have PO in mind. BigClive on youtube did an excellent video comparing it to Dubai lamps. 2W LED bulbs by Panasonic made for the US have 2 filaments runnings at 1 W each. 1W bulbs have 1 filament.
In Dubai, PO (atleast in light bulbs) is banned. Phillips has a contract with their government agreeing to make blubs that will last a lifetime, in exchange for being the exclusive manufacturer of bulbs sold in Dubai. And guess what? A 2W Phillips bulb in Dubai has EIGHT filaments, running at 1/4 W each. Similarly, a 1 W bulb has 4 filaments and 3W has 12. Running these filaments at a quarter of their power means a significantly longer life span, reduced heat, and doubled efficiency.
Guess what? These lamps can ONLY be found in Dubai. They are not sold in any other country.
Full video talking about these lamps and PO can be found here: https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4
Anyways, back on topic. But PO is never going away. It’s seen everywhere in this hobby, from old trainset locos designed to fail within a month from Bachmann*, to the plastic wheels and couplers, to the thin insulation on cables for handheld throttles or fragile JST plugs on steam loco tender to locos designed to break apart within a few years.
Charles
*they are getting better to be fair, with the removal of plastic axles and such.
In Dubai the electrical standard is 230VAC/50Htz.
These will probably not work in the USA, and that probably has a lot to do with their unobtainability.
Just guessing here.
Did some quick checking… there are Philips branded bulbs available in the USA that are $70.00 for a pack of two that look very similar to what you displayed as a Dubai Lamp. I don’t think too many consumers will be on-board for that when they can get an 8 pack of Eco-Smart LED bulbs at Home Depot for less than $12.00, and burnt out bulbs are very easy to replace.
When I remodeled the training center in Atlanta, the classroom LED light fixtures were about $400.00 each, but they were guaranteed for a 50 year lifespan. There was an assistance program from the State Of Georgia to get these installed.
-Kevin
I worked for almost 40 years making tungsten. At one time we had 1200+ varieties of tungsten wire for lamp making. Years of research went in to making no-sag wire, adding thorium, various doping methods, many types of annealing and treatment of the wire.
You can make a million-hour lamp:
GE_Lamp_A-40 by Edmund, on Flickr
Many of the lamps we made for “rough service” including dozens of transit lamps (the NY subway had special, left-hand threaded base lamps just for them) had heavier filaments but did not have the efficiency a typical consumer was willing to sacrifice.
In the 1970s energy awareness era, lumens-per-watt was especially examined.
GE_DD12_10fix by Edmund, on Flickr
In all my years there I never once heard any talk of designing planned failure of a filament in order to drive up sales. Conversely, a great deal of R&D was spent in trying to extend the life of a lamp. Sylvania, Philips, Osram and Westinghouse were customers o
At least, standardize the coupler mounting boxes!
When I started my career, advertised life cycle of our products was 250,000 to 300,000 miles. Our biggest fear was a Japanese company that made a similar product that cost 20% less and had an advertised life cycle of 200,000 miles. If we made our product more durable we would price it out of the market, and the less expensive option would be more economical for our customers in the long run.
Beginning in the late 1990s prices began to increase, and we increased them further to add durability. The market could absorb an additional increase in price to get a product that would last 500,000 miles. It made economic sense at that point.
Now our products have over a 60% survival rate to 1,000,000 miles, but costs have doubled again since the early 2000s.
Like Ed’s example, 25% of our gross sales came from components being sold to our competitors so they could build better products, and in many cases, we bought components from the same competitors. It is almost always less expensive to buy something than to develop it yourself.
Towards the end of my career I worked closely with engineering and development. Planned obsolecense is a term I never heard.
-Kevin
Ed, I’ll be clear here, I am one who knows very little about tungsten, or the manufacture and R&D process behind such lights. Nor am I an electrical engineer of any sorts. And obviously your 40 years of working with tungsten gives you far more experience in the field than me.
BUT, Id have to respectably disagree with you if you dont believe in planned obsolescence. Ignoring incandecents all together, why don’t all modern LED bulb makers adopt the Dubai lamp style? Under-running LEDs have proven to be far better, both in terms of efficiency and lifespan. Its why we use a 1k ohm resistor in line with our 3V LEDs in our locos when a 470ohm resistor is enough. As we know, the harder you push an LED, the less efficient it gets and the shorter the life span. Dubai lamps run twice as efficiently* and drastically improves life span, by simply distributing power over more light filaments. In this case, the power is distributed 4x the filaments in the same bulbs sold commercially by Phillips in other countries including US and UK. Why arent these bulbs sold commercially literally anywhere outside of UAE?
Yes, they are more expensive to produce, and the price reflects that(as it should), but why else would Phillips not even have the option for other countries to have this clearly superior bulb? I cant think of a valid reason why Phillips, a company who ALREADY designed and currently produces such bulbs, to not sell them else where.
Charles
*of course, all this info is assuming my source (big clive, an electrical engineer on youtube) is correct. If you want to double check his information, feel free.
This something that is brought up by underinformed YouTubers all the time…
My former employer worked with a Chinese company to develop a pick-up truck a little smaller than my Colorado that could haul 3,000 pounds, tow 5,000 pounds, and got 60 miles per gallon. This truck actually exists, and you cannot buy it in the USA or Canada.
There is no conspriracy as all the YouTubers would have you believe.
The truck would need to weigh 1,000 pounds more to meet North American impact survivability standards, that comes straight out of payload. The engine only has 60 horsepower, and a top speed of 65 miles per hour. A USA version would need 85 horsepower minimum, and would still be underpowered compared to similar vehicles.
The North American market would never accept such a vehicle. I would buy one, they would sell a few more, but it would be tanked by all reviewers and get a terrible reputation.
It would cost an additional $5,000.00 per vehicle to make it marketable in the USA, and then it is just $2,000 dollars less than a much nicer, larger, faster, and more powerful Colorado.
Yugo?
It is 100% market driven realities, and not any other reason.
-Kevin
Amen to that. At least make the space compatible with Kadee coupler boxes. It’s not hard. Kadee makes at least three different sizes that accept the standard Whisker couplers.
Just use genuine Kadee coupler boxes and you will never have a problem.
The solution is that easy.
-Kevin
Oh, I agree that there is a degree of “PO” in many everyday consumer goods. It’s the primary reasons the automakers were changing “styles” every model year.
Sometimes technology gets more involved than “inventing a better mouse trap”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
At GE there were many “joint ventures” where a potential customer would make a big investment, similar to what Dubai has done with Philips, and a “new” product would be developed but the right to share this proprietary technology would be very controlled. Many municipalities worked with GE for better street lighting. Much of it was tested on the streets near where I grew up. I distinctly remember a mile stretch of “new” high-pressure sodium lamps along US 322 here that were quite amazing to behold at the time.
I was an early adopter of LEDs around the house. I’ve had quite a few fail, especially some of the 1.0 models. Heat dissipation was a problem for many of these.
Most often, by far, it wasn’t the LED package that failed but the electronics supporting it. I pried open the power supplies just out of curiosity.
I remember all the stories relating to auto manufacturers that were rumored to be “sitting” on a carburetor (this was in the '70s, too) that would give 200 MPG (or numbers similar) and the oil companies were paying the automakers to keep them off the market. It must have been true because there was an article about it in Mother Earth News.