Too_Many_Tools said:
Logan, I respect your opinion but ...
That seems a pet phrase, doesn't it? It would ring a lot less
hollow if you would show some sign that you're paying any attention or
thinking before spouting your rhetoric back, however...
...using a special case (DVD player) of
manufactured goods to prove your argument does not mean it applies to
other manufactured goods. The current DVD player situation is also an
example of market dumping.
What's special of a DVD player vis a vis any other relatively high or
high volume product? Absolutely nothing. And what "market dumping"?
It's nothing but a case of mass production is now so automated that
once a design is complete, the incremental cost of production is
minimal. The extreme is in something like CD's -- there's virtually no
actual value in the material item itself, the only value is the
"creative effort/talent".
Consumer electronics are considered to be "throw away"
electronics....and the continuing problems with their disposal is just
one of the symptoms of a larger problem with that industry segment.
Let's try saddling the manufacturers with the true cost to society and
see what the true price becomes.
What "true" cost? The cost of putting the Korean or Chinese factory
workers back on the collective, for example? There are locales which
have (in some cases, pretty stringent) requirements on the end user for
disposal of certain products. There are requirements (great or lesser,
depending on location and geopolitical forces) on manufacturing for
various compliances. These will gradually become more uniform globally
as time progresses. There is no way to even determine some mythical
"true" cost, what more impose it uniformly.
You are right that "throw away" electronics are optimized for low cost
of manufacture...and those savings are not passed on to the consumer.
It is like the low cost of labor that goes into the product....it is
used to maximize profit margin....while placing the burden on society.
No, no, no, and no.
For the most part, to say that any product is "optimized" for low cost
of manufacture is missing the actual target--what is attempted to be
optimized in almost all cases is an _overall_ cost-effective design,
manufacture and life-cycle cost. As others have noted, it is
counter-productive for most products to be so poorly designed and built
as to have a exceedingly short lifetime. Sony, for example, didn't get
to it's current position by making lousy stuff.
The savings that are passed on to the consumer are usually realized by
volume...the more you make the cheaper they get....when a number of
companies compete for your dollar.
But the only get cheaper in bulk by the very automation and
implementation of the design features you seem to decry. If every one
were still being built completely by hand and individual wiring
harnesses soldered by a zillion hands w/ hand irons, the incremental
cost wouldn't drop a nickel. It's only by investing -Billions- (with a
B) in large fab plants and automation combined w/ the manual labor that
these miracles of mass-production arise. See the history of Ford for
how that worked originally -- the same principles still apply, they've
just been move to the fab plants, etc., in the case of electronics. Or
consider the advance from discrete wiring to one-sided PCBs, to
multi-layer, to surface-wave, etc., ... Every one of those
developments to investments in engineering and capital to build the
production facilities and the end result was the overall reduction in
per-level-of complexity cost and increased reliability.
One telling symptom is when you look at those who get in financial
trouble by overextending their credit, one of the common areas where
they have overspent is in consumer electronics.
And how is that anybody else's fault but their own? Did somebody line
them up at Best Buy or Circuit City and force them to sign the sales
slip at gunpoint?
