I work in an operating room, and have been around long enough to see multiple pieces of perfectly good equipment get replaced just because it hit the manufacturer’s end-of-life date.
I’m talking things like a several-hundred-thousand dollar microscope for microsurgery.
Basically that date means if the microscope fucks up somehow, the vendor takes zero liability, and any legal expenses fall onto the hospital… so we trash it and buy another one. Rinse and repeat after another few years.
That end-of-life date is always crazy early, and is like that 100% because the manufacturer knows hospitals would rather just treat a quarter million dollar microscope as disposable than accept liability for an equipment fault.
The waste is unreal.
Does this make hospitals good for dumpster diving? I’m only half kidding, but really, how would you dispose of this stuff? Would you just donate something like that to something less immediately critical to life like a research or education facility?
No idea how they dispose of it. I’ve asked my immediate management chain if I can take damaged/pitted instruments that need to be replaced to donate to the local colleges - Anatomy & Physiology classes all have a lab component to dissect something, and the school I went to had instruments that were absolute garbage.
The answer was no… We just put instruments that need to be replaced in a red bin with other sharps like needles, and the bins are shipped off somewhere, probably to be incinerated.
Bigger stuff like equipment, we send to the biomedical engineering department for outprocessing. From there, no idea. Probably land fill.
I wouldn’t dumpster dive at a hospital though. It’ll be a sea of ruptured catheter bags, linens saturated with poop, and just all manner of pathogens. And probably sharps - that stuff is supposed to go in sealed red bins, but all it takes is one lazy employee and you’ve got yourself an HIV+ needle stick.
Not sure where you’re at, but the hospitals around here are pretty meticulous with sorting waste, especially segregating biowaste. I am near to Boston though, so they’re admittedly some of the best.
US deep south. The only sorting of trash I see in the hospital is sharps vs non-sharps. Outside the hospital, sorting is vitually nonexistent… there’s no recycling here, everything just goes in a landfill. It’s fucking stupid, but this is what we get for putting Nazis in charge of everything.
Zeiss famously ended support of a popular microscope, then destroyed all parts stored worldwide.
Got to be Apple slowing down older iPhones to mask battery degradation, and hoping no one would notice.
Not only that, but also silently removing contacts when you didn’t update and connected it up to iTunes. That same day I bought my first android.
Not come across that one, maybe it didn’t affect iOS 16, so us iPhone X users are safe?
It is funny that all the responses so far have been about phones.
This was around ios 6 or 7. The Iphone 4 was my last iPhone.
I love to shit on companies for doing evil shit (like Apple removing Targeted Display Mode from their iMacs), but Apple did the right thing here, but communicated it in the worst way possible.
I had an old iPhone that would randomly shut down when it drew too much power for the old battery to provide. If they hadn’t done the fix, I would have had to get a new phone; it just wasn’t reliable anymore. With the fix, things were slow, but they worked. Honestly, this is the opposite of planned obsolescence.
I’m going to respectfully disagree; had the phone kept shutting down you would have gone to Apple or a 3rd party repairer and got a new battery for 30-80£€$.
By masking the real issue and just giving you a poor experience, you wonder if it was always like that, or if there is something wrong at all, maybe you compare it with a snappy new phone and decide to upgrade for 1000£€$
Android does this by just bloating the software out and reinstalling games I uninstalled. It’s gotten to the point that I’m not sure if its actually dialing out or not when I make a call.
Apple pisses me off. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro that could have continued to be supported, Apple just decided it wasn’t in their best interest to continue supporting it and if I want to continue I’ll just have to buy a new one!
My MacBook is on MacOS 13 thanks to open core legacy.
Mine is on Debian 13; I love my little 13" 2012 MBP!
This is one of the worst companies. They are about saving the planet with recycling their products. They don’t. Its all ends in landfills. Its all a grift.
I’ve refused to buy another Apple product after the slow down basically disabled my iPhone 4. I was even looking at a new iPhone, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth I’ve been android ever since.
It’s funny, because if they just made this a “battery preserve” option, it would probably be hailed as genius and put in every single phone on the planet by now.
Sealed in batteries on smartphones and Surface tablets.
The device will eventually reach a point where it won’t even boot (or shuts down randomly) when plugged in because the charger connection isn’t actually wired to power the main board without going through the battery first (most smartphones) or the device consumes more power than the port is designed to deliver (Surface).
Dealing with this right now. Battery is 4 years old and going weak, decided to no longer recognize any charger below a certain battery percentage (like 72%) unless it’s wireless. Thought it bricked itself when it first happened until seeing it’s an issue with the batteries used for this model just straight up rejecting to charge for many heavy users. Getting a new phone soon since its so inconvenient while working outside.
I’ve been successful in replacing built-in batteries in 2 different phones. Granted my families phones are all > 4 years old so maybe it’s gotten much harder lately.
I had an LG phone for a few years until one night it literally just died on me. I was messing around on it one night, just scrolling randomly, then I set it down for a few minutes to play a game. When I went to check my phone again, it wouldn’t turn on or anything.
Washing machines. In the stores, you see a shiny stainless steel drum, but holding up the drum is a raw aluminum spindle. Those spindles corrode with typically caustic laundry detergents to last about 6 years. Replacement was possible, with a day of work. Now, manufacturers seal the drum unit with welded plastic so replacement is impossible.
Win11… The amount of perfectly good hardware that became ewaste in October is insane to me
The entire smartphone industry.
I use five year old smartphone (Pixel 4a). I can afford a new one, but I don’t need a new one, and it would be worse in ways I care about (bigger, probably without a headphone jack), without being better in any way that really matters to me, so I don’t want a new one.
Official software updates ended a couple years ago, but I’m running LineageOS and I got an update this week. Google has intentionally made it hard for most people to use LineageOS or any other Android distribution not blessed by Google as their primary phone by allowing app developers to check whether it’s Google-approved. For now, I can usually work around that, but it would be too big a hurdle for most people.
The kernel is getting pretty old though; it’s 4.14 when I’m up to 6.17 on my laptop. This is because SOC vendors don’t release open source drivers, nor maintain the proprietary ones for very long.
Finally, there’s the battery. Mine is in great shape because I use AccA to limit charge to 60% most of the time, but charging to 100% as most people do would have greatly reduced its capacity by this point. Replacing it requires melting glue and some risk of damage. Most phones are like that now (though that’s changing due to EU regulation).
What do you do on the phone? Browsing? Aren’t all the drivers out of date including the android version? My impression is that, the security primarily is completely lacking because of dated drivers and the android version
Messaging, web browser, podcasts, navigation, a couple services that require a phone to access. I tend to not install apps that could be websites.
Hardware drivers are surely dated. Android, on the other hand is 15, and I assume getting updated to 16 soon. I think I’m pretty good with regard to the sort of zero-click exploits I’ve heard of used for targeted attacks. If somebody slipped a trojan into a software update, I could have a problem, especially if it was a privileged app like AccA or Adaway. Of course, updated drivers wouldn’t protect me from that.
My GF had one. Battery was bad, normal consumer use OFC. Somewhere last year the play services security check changed. It was just invalidated by Google like 2 years after she bought it or something? Crazy.
But the thing that killed it was Google purposefully downgrading the battery so it was almost literally unusable. Would just die at 50%. She got 50 USD back. Not worth it at all.
I will take my bloated Samsung eith amazing hardware over Google’s piece of shit policy any day now. My phone is almost 5 years old and works without any issues. OS updates stopped but we have intermittent security updates this year.
EDIT: I forgot to mention I spent literal over a hundred hours trying to fix a charging issue on the 4a that came with it which was a software bug. Worst I have ever experienced in tech actually.
That sounds like a very negative experience, pretty much opposite to my experience with the same model.
She got 50 USD back. Not worth it at all.
50 USD was one of the compensation options Google offered; a battery replacement was another. The latter might have been wise if she wanted to keep using the phone.
Not where I live buddy. It was 50 USD or 100 USD discount voucher for another pixel phone upgrade. Not happy as you can understand.
I loved my Pixel 4a with LinageOS. It was the perfect form factor. Sadly, I had to give it up when my banking app decided that it was exclusively only for Android/IOS and deemed LinageOS to “unsafe” which was bull shit.
Be sure to give it a one-star review.
So far, Magisk and Play Integrity Fix have been sufficient for apps that don’t like it.
Laboratory instruments controlled by shitty software that’s somehow tied to a particular version of Windows, and won’t work with 11. And, of course, the manufacturer won’t update it, because they’d much rather you drop a quarter million on the new model.
You just reminded me I still have an inspection camera which can only work with software that requires Windows XP, last time I used it I had to run it on a virtual machine on my laptop, it’s been a few years, I probably don’t have the VM anymore. The camera works perfectly, I wish I’d paid the extra for the one with its own screen.
Loved having to search on freaking Wayback Machine for a driver that existed in the Windows XP era.
65" Hisense TV. Bought it new and 1.5 years later the motherboard died. Scoured the Internet for the part and it turned out Hisense didn’t even sell it, you had to buy secondhand used boards.
But it must have been a common problem b/c over ~6 months even the resellers were permanently sold out. Recycled it in the original packaging.
IMO companies like that should be forced to recycle every scrap of their e-waste themselves.
My body. Shits getting worse by the day.
Having to replace perfectly functional Pixel phones because GOS stopped making updates for them. I don’t blame GOS as they’re a FOSS project and their end of support coincides with Google’s end of support, but it still feels bad replacing perfectly functional hardware. Wish release cycles were much slower so support for existing devices could be focused on, instead of having to spend time porting to every new phone dropped like every year or whatever.
Had a chrome book that worked just fine but unbeknownst to me had an expiration date that started counting down at its date of manufacture, not the date of purchase.
The thing worked great, but no more security updates after 3 years.
Something I’ve personally noticed as someone who will perform a light disassemble before tossing an “broken” item.
The plug in oil heaters that look like radiators. Efficient, low cost. 3 now, total. The knob spins and I can no longer turn it on. Unplug. Unscrew. And a broken Dshaft knob falls out. They don’t make it obvious and easy to get to these knobs, you have to remove the large side panel without bothering the wires to get to a small panel to unscrew to get to the knobs. Then you have to find or make a Dshaft knob to fit, which isn’t easy.
Not familiar with exactly what you are talking about but Amazon sells universal Dknobs for $8. You put whatever size you need into the knob.
Also, 3d print services exist if you can find a model that works online… Or if you have a printer a knob if like. 05c worth of filament.
6mm aren’t necessarily 6mm on Amazon. And when they do fit, they’re not ideal. Typically a hazard for snapping off the rod at the base, so it’s used like a key instead of a perma knob. Presently have another one, but it is 7mm.
I think I’m going to mill one out of wood, drill a hole, place tape across part of that hole, and use resin to make the flat half. Which is ridiculous and tiresome.
Get a 3d printer! I have been printing non stop fixing things.
Smartwatches. Seriously, they are all working perfect one day, and next day they die. Wanna change the battery? Good luck keeping them out of the water, if you happen to find and replace the battery at all, which isn’t cheap anyway.
I’m perfectly happy with my Amazing Bip watch. It keeps track of my steps and sleep, and links to my phone so that it will buzz if I get a call or text.
It’s about 7 years old now, and still gets almost a month of regular use on a single charge.
I did own an Amazfit model, the battery was dead suddenly after less than two years. A full charge wouldn’t last a week.
I think that the Bip was the battery life champion. I checked sometime in the past year, and I think Amazfit watches typically lasted between 1 and 2 weeks.
Pebble seems to be headed in a good direction ever since it got bought back by the original founder.
I wish. It’s the only smartwatch I’d buy after some awful experiences. Well, the Pebble and little better version is the PineTime.
Don’t know if it’s planned obsolescence or just laziness but all of my Nintendo Switches have at least a little drift and I’ve bought at least two replacement sets of joy-cons AND replaced just the joystick on one unit (PITA and replacements didn’t work 100% so I stopped repairing).
I sent mine in to Nintendo to get fixed, I think they had to do it for free.
Xbox controllers are really bad about this too. I’ve had like three or four Xbox controllers get stick drift on me in the last 6 or 7 years.
Not sure if this qualifies as planned obsolescence but Acer stopped supporting a tablet I bought in less than two years. I have been avoiding Acer products ever since.
