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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
TIL my middle-aged ass isn’t obsolete, it’s just gracefully degrading.
Eats chips
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
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.
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.
Cool. Very cool. But this nothing to do with planned obsolescence.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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….
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.
Consider the term Wabi-Sabi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
https://www.omaritani.com/blog/wabi-sabi-philosophy-teachings
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.
This cannot work since both double and tripple As has the same voltage, and thus does not have a difference in light output. What we’d instead be looking at here is the battery/ies being drained faster the fewer there are of them. But yeah having it work no matter the amount of batteries installed is a neat idea
Batteries wired in series increase the voltage provided. The example in the OP us just a battery whose LEDs run at anything from 1.5V to 6V and accepts both AA and AAA batteries. It’s not a foil to planned obsolescence, it’s just smart design. It could still be made with the same design, but purposely use LEDs that die sooner, in which case it’s smart design and planned obsolescence.
It could be related to battery position, rather than purely electrical characteristics. The spaces for AA and AAA appear to be keyed for the cell diameter. Since everything is the same, electrically, except for the mAh, you can probably control the LED driver by using basic position sensing on the cell locations with minimal components and efficiency cost. An LTC3090, for example, could be used with relatively simple voltage dividers to adjust the ratio on the Vin and Vctl pins.
