Cool. Very cool. But this nothing to do with planned obsolescence.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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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.
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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
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.
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While I see the point they're trying to make, what this person is actually saying is complete nonsense.
Graceful degradation is not the opposite of planned obsolescence they're two completely different concepts with nothing to do with each other.
Graceful degradation is where a product degrades in such a way as to maintain at least some functionality for as long as possible.
Planned obsolescence is where an item is intentionally designed to fail in order to get you to buy the next version.
Completely different concepts.
The actual opposite of graceful degradation, is progressive enhancement.
Yes, you could have both ideas in the same product: it retains some functionality as it fails, but it fails in a planned way to ensure it's lifespan is short enough.
And oddly, the example of the flashlight isn’t even an example of either. Support for heterogeneous batteries is a feature, but it’s a stretch to call it “degradation”. It’s not like batteries fail randomly before they run out of juice.
The degradation in this case happens in the brain when you're trying to remember which type of batteries you need
I feel like the opposite is your multifunction refusing to scan because it needs ink.
vulgar degradation
Malicious degredation.
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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.
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.
TIL my middle-aged ass isn't obsolete, it's just gracefully degrading.
Eats chips
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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).
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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.
It rendered devices almost unusable, rather than just dim the backlight. And as you said, that was a consequence of other fuckery, so they rightly got flak for it.
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.
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another way of looking at it is, the system is designed with human needs of the customer in mind first, and the economic needs of shareholders are somewhere farther down the line
Graceful degradation is cool, but progressive enhancement is where it's really at. The difference is that instead of working around the lack of capabilities, you design simple and robust core system, and then improve around it based on available capabilities.
The proper term isn't graceful degradation, but fault tolerance.
It just describes how many core systems or components can fail before the device itself stops working.
For example, a jet will have multiple redundancies for almost all major systems which allows many of them to fail in the air without causing the plane to crash or force an emergency landing.
That's how you end up with Frankenstein scope creep.
No! Frankenstein is the name of the designer!
You say scope creep, the client says added value
They can call it whatever the fuck they want...show me the signed change order and I'll implement it.
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I learnt about graceful degradation in relation to escalators and how they compare to elevators/lifts. Basically escalators become stairs, whereas lifts become cages.
It's been one of my favourite design concepts, alongside hidden design (design which improves things without being apparent/in your face about it)
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's unrelated to planned obsolescence as in it's not about designing things to last, but for a design to be functional even if there's some issue outside the control of the product design. You can get graceful degradation along with planned obsolescence, they're not mutually exclusive.
Reminds me of the differences in design cultures in different companies, though I heard it in relation to countries but idk if that was a stereotype or not. What I heard was about differences in design philosophies towards a similar goal of a good product: one company over engineered their stuff to last a long time, whereas the other company relied on redundancy by putting in a second of anything that was likely to fail in parallel to the original.
Sometimes escalators also become meat grinders though. Less graceful.
Just put your choice of meat on it, still graceful /s
Meat grinding is still functionality
Escalators are usually not safe to use when broken. So this is a good example of the idea in a spherical cow sort of way, but not practically.
I forgot to mention this was in relation to the lack of electricity, not breaking down
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It's too bad that modern websites don't do graceful degradation anymore, let alone progressive enhancement.
My fleshlight works with a single AAA too 🙁
Don't put yourself down describing your D-Cell as a AAA
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