Durable Design (2017)(exple.tive.org) |
Durable Design (2017)(exple.tive.org) |
Removing the battery makes the device cheaper (you can also remove the power brick if any) and removes a supplier from the chain. Keeping this options makes a lot of sense from a purely economical standpoint.
Similarly, Windows Mixed Reality VR controllers run off AA batteries instead of the more traditional built-in LiIon battery. The downside is you have to buy batteries for it, the upside is you can swap battery packs and you're not beholden to a custom power source.
That said, it's still great they did that, and they deserve praise.
It's a good choice though led to us going through AA's at a horrible rate in our house.
More likely it was designed so you could use some batteries that you can buy anywhere in the world when you are out and about traveling/vacationing and the battery is flat.
I work at a fairly major place you've all heard of with a reputation for software engineering excellence etc. One of the engineering managers said something to me the other day: "You know, we engineers here at <Big Co> write our software with this idea that it needs to be extensible and flexible enough to handle anything, like it's going to be around forever. In reality a project only lasts 3 or 4 years, maybe 5 before it is deprecated, replaced, or shutdown. Imagine how much more we'd get done if we were more pragmatic and not obsessed with future-proofing something we know will be replaced soon"? Food for thought.
Your engineering manager is on to something. I feel like that romantic desire, ironically, gets in the way of making real progress 99% of the time; even the code I'm really proud of, given enough time, will probably end up irrelevant, if only because I'll have learned so much more in all that time. It's easy to think of the act of writing as the hardest part of "writing code." But, really, it's all the learning in all the years prior that's most difficult. So, really, "throwing away" code and starting over isn't actually all that costly. Throwing away engineers, their experience, or skills is what gets expensive.
With that said, one of these days I'll start writing my "The Art of Computer Programming" ...
I heard this a while back from somewhere and it's something i've taken forward when trying to design complex systems in code.
Where possible fallbacks and fail safes should be part of the design, not after thoughts.
Nice article.
That's one of Mitch Hedberg more famous "one-liner" jokes:
There's no reason for them to build high quality, long lasting things. So why would they? They don't care about the waste.
A slightly different thing is happening with Apple. When you bought your phone, you didn't receive full ownership. Instead, you bought a seat in a theater. Apple's incentive is to keep the phone working so they can sell you more apps/movies/songs.
Consumers have voted with their wallets and the markets have responded. If consumer behavior changes, the markets will to.
With the battery products I have been part of developing we had a wire lead from the battery which made the mechanical interface more modular. This was not a handheld device however, so the trade-offs are different. Blade or similar contacts are more user-friendly and reliable for many insert cycles.
In LG's case though, it backfired as their mobile marketshare dropped with each successor to the V20. I suspect they could have carved a large niche by evolving the V20 design and fixing the problems that plagued it. LG's repairable phones were a point of difference. The V30 and beyond were glued shut and offered very little differentiate themselves.
Canon used to ship various models of pocket camera which offered a similar feature as shown by the original post (ability to use AA or AAA batteries depending on model). This to me was a practical feature but the market must have shown otherwise.
Give it a read if you are interested in topics like planned obsolence or product design in general.
What I'm more looking out for are companies that create sustainable products, with replaceable batteries and/or a return program that involves the recycling and proper disposal of those batteries/products.
The design can be timeless without the design being beautiful. The design is more than its appearance.
This is my main issue with the locked-down, glued-shut nature of modern electronics: it's a lie. A phone is not one thing, it is composite. There are different components inside and their individual functions and relations can be understood - and yes, when they break, they can be individually replaced. But manufacturers have decided that is in their interest that consumers do not understand the things they consume, so they build things that lie to us.
You can buy rechargeable AA batteries[0,1] though. I only have those at home (toothbrush, remotes, etc.).
[0] https://www.energizer.com/batteries/energizer-rechargeable-b...
[1] https://www.duracell.fr/product/duracell-rechargeable-ultra-...
Still would like more resolution for flight sims (gauges dials are readable just not always sharp) but otherwise it’s very very good for the money.
It's a problem of the bottom the market raced to being placed too low.
What looks good to 5/10 people, might not look good to the other 5/10. For an instance, consider an iPhone 4S. It is a pretty average design "aesthetically" IMO. But the phone did extraordinarily well because it was a well engineered phone. Another example is this website that you're looking at. I would call this average aesthetics as well.
Of course good aesthetics is an awesome add-on, but it is not fair to disqualify a product based on just aesthetics.
(I'm joking because even so-called timeless designs might look pretty out of place if you send them back far enough)
And also, and I keep repeating this, if there even are options.
The problem with voting with your wallet is the same as the problem of voting in a typical western democracy. You never get to vote on a feature/issue in the abstract; you can only choose out of what's available on the market/ballot, and that's always a very large bundle of features/issues, so you have to make trade-offs when voting.
For instance, I very much want to have a replaceable battery in my smartphone, but my current one doesn't have this feature. That's because I had to choose a whole bundle and the replaceable battery lost with considerations like "won't turn into unsupported and underpowered garbage in 2 years", "still has audio jack", "support SIM cards" and "I trust the manufacturer". There's no way for the market to pick up on my preference for replaceable batteries here.