this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Solarpunk technology

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Technology for a Solar-Punk future.

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Cool. Very cool. But this nothing to do with planned obsolescence.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not this particular example, maybe, but the concept of a device remaining usable in failure runs counter to planned obsolescence.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

ahh. just like cars

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, and this isn’t even really degradation, it’s just supporting different requirements / use cases.