Life is riddled with a procession of minor impediments

[radiator]

Special Game of Thrones event at IMAX cinemas.....!


Nearest showing is in Seattle, 3+hr drive away.

Boo.

[Rog69]

My PS3 died last night and won't stay on long enough to back my stuff up. Sony encrypt the hard drive so I can't stick it in a caddy and use my PC to rescue my saves and if I put the drive in another PS3 it will format it. Nice work Sony.

[The Legendary Shark]

It's called Planned obsolescence and Sony are far from the only ones to play that game.
.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
.
It should be banned, in my opinion.

[Zenith 666]

Rog69 have you tried the hair dryer solution.worked for me.it might not fix your ps3 but it might keep it on long enough to transfer your files.

[Theblazeuk]

I think it has more to do with limiting the scope of hacking the PS3 than planned obsolescence.

[Rog69]

Thanks, I'm going to try the hair dryer trick over the weekend and see if I can rescue anything.

I already went out and bought a second hand PS3 to replace mine, I would have taken the opportunity to upgrade to a PS4 but Sony went a little too far with the Planned obsolescence by making it obsolete from the outset this time by producing a mediocre machine with no DLNA support or backwards compatibility  .

[radiator]

I know this might sound crazy, but maybe it's just that sometimes things break...?

Apple get accused of this sort of thing all the time, and in my many years of getting heavy use out of a multitude of their products I've only had one fault - a hard drive failure that was relatively inexpensive to fix, and that they actually tried to warn me about in advance but I neglected to get it sorted.

Not everything's a conspiracy.

[The Legendary Shark]

The p.o. will be in individual components manufactured by suppliers. Couple this with hacking and piracy paranoia and you've got something that is virtually certain to fail. For the ones that don't fail, obsolescence is ensured be evolving software and tech. Probably.

[Rog69]

I can't really complain too much, the PS3 is probably the most un-Sony product that Sony ever made, it's media centre capabilities are pretty great with it supporting DNLA and many different video and audio formats instead of being tied to some bullshit proprietary Sony crap like so many of their products before it.

Mine actually lived for seven years before it died from the yellow light of death last night, so I have definitely had my moneys worth from it. Just a shame that they don't give you a way of salvaging your data from it after it breaks.

[TordelBack]

I'm a fan of Apple computers generally, although I can no longer afford new ones so I mainly assemble what I need to run legacy software out of parts that I get at recycling centers and on online small-ads. They have always caused me significantly less trouble than PCs during their respective lifespans.  However, there is something rather odd about those lifespans: around the time my last company was winding up, we had 8 of the angle-poise G4 iMacs which had served us as our primary work computers for nearly a decade with hardly a single issue. All but one had been bought at the same time.   Within 2 months all but one of them were dead, the universal culprit being the fiendishly complicated kidneys-like power supply unit.   Similarly, of our 6 2007 MacBooks, the logic board on all but one died within 6 months in 2011-2. 

Now 5 years for a laptop or 9-10 years for a desktop is a damn good innings for work machines handled by unloving and uncaring staff, but the synchronisation of identical failures does make you think something is going on. Alas for the conspiracy theory, a decade seems like a foolishly long deadline to deliberately build in.

[radiator]

Likewise I've had a PS3 for 6 years that has been used a hell of a lot, being our primary media player as well as for games, and has been accidentally left powered on overnight on several occasions. Still going strong.

I had the RROD problem with the 360, but Microsoft were very reasonable about getting it sorted, and given what it ended up costing them, both financially and in PR terms, you'd have to be insane to suggest they knowingly shipped consoles that had a fail rate that high.

As for Apple, yes, they're very good at getting customers to upgrade, but that's the result of savvy marketing and superb product design, and older machines not keeping up with newer software? That's technological progress for you.

Was I bummed out that upgrading to iOS 7 significantly slowed down my old iPhone 4? Yeah, but no one forced me to download it, and it was eventually rectified anyway. Even so, I still got four full years of use out of that phone, using it every single day, and it survived getting rained on and dropped dozens of times, and that's a bargain as far as I'm concerned.

Not saying that 'planned obsolescence' doesn't or hasn't ever existed in some form or other, but it's naive to think businesses - especially tech firms in this day and age who are locked in cutthroat competition with each other - would deliberately hobble their products and risk driving customers away.

I remember someone earnestly telling me once that technology exists that is lightyears more advanced what the consumers actually get, but that corporations conspire to deliberately conceal the latest stuff from consumers and drip-feed them old stuff so that can maximise profits. He obviously didn't have a clue about how business works.

[ZenArcade]

Planned obsolescence would seem to be an ultimate necessity and therefore requirement of current business models. Z

[The Legendary Shark]

Sounds like he knows how the military works, though.
.
Pioneer 10 lasted 31 years, achieved the first mission to Jupiter, became the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity from the Solar System,  and travelled *12 billion kilometres* (80 AU) before the power to its antenna died.
.
Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space (INTERSTELLAR SPACE ffs!) in 2012 and Voyager 2 is expected to achieve the same feat in around 2016 and they're still sending back data. Their power systems are expected to last until 2025 - that's 48 years. In space.
.
And they can't build a phone/computer/console/telly that lasts longer than 7-10 years? Bullshit. And the worst part is that we just shrug our shoulders and accept it, chucking valuable materials into landfills and perpetuating the death, slavery and misery involved in digging up more rare earth elements to replace the ones we so meekly throw away. Bollocks.
.
Yes, yes, I know - I'm going...

[ZenArcade]

Don't why you would ever feel the need to go; nothing you say is at varience with what any rational individual would be led to believe in the circumstances. The world is pretty much run along what appear to be unregulated free market lines (the only provisio being if they fail; guess what...we bail). The model is based utterly on profit maximization with no place for any moral compass whatsoever. Z

[radiator]

Yes, yes, I know - I'm going...

Not sure where though. A spacecraft lasts longer than a smartphone? Talk about Apple and oranges.