Outdated outlooks
23 November 2010
This may well be a throwaway society, but what about things that need to last?
This thought came to the forefront of my mind when I read that Sony is ceasing production of its iconic Walkman.
Frankly, and I don’t think I’m in the minority here, but I thought that the Walkman had been axed many moons ago. I’d just assumed that with the rise and rise of the auspicious iPod, its metaphorical forefather had slipped into obsolesce. I haven’t seen audio cassettes in High Street shops for a good number of years and thought that everyone had made the cassette to CD to digital steps.
But the thing with consumer goods is that by and large, they’re consumables. If it goes wrong, you dig out the warranty, realise that the ‘lifetime guarantee’ was based on the lifetime of a fruitfly, and so you weigh up the period of ownership against the original cost, and decide that a new one would be cheaper than repairing the ageing model. So the old one is thrown out and forgotten. The internals don’t necessarily have to have a long life.
However, electronics for military and medical applications need to be reliable for a much longer length of time, so manufacturers need to stock and supply parts beyond a period expected for similar components in consumer units.
When I was recently speaking to Gordon Hands, Director of Marketing at Lattice Semiconductor, about the launch of the MachXO2 PLD family (Setting new standards for low-cost, low power designs), he explained to me that it will be manufactured for around 20 years so as to support customers that integrate it into their designs. In fact, I learned that the company still supplies 25 year-old products to some of its customers.
This seems a very sensible move. Designers that appreciate the relative simplicity of a tried and tested component can still order them more than two decades later.
But failure will eventually come and it’ll be necessary to find a replacement solution, and in a perfect world of so-called ‘obsolescence management’, replacements will come before failures.
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