Prev: Toshiba 42HP66 plasma help please
Next: Two phases to house - loss of neutral
From: Michael A. Terrell on 30 Nov 2009 15:41

Daniel Prince wrote:
>
> Jeff Liebermann <jeffl(a)cruzio.com> wrote:
>
> >The problems start when there are competing products. I call it the
> >Walmart effect. Walmart, Kmart, and many online vendors specialize in
> >selling solely on the basis of price. If there are two competing
> >products, differing only a few pennies in selling price, *ALL* their
> >orders will go to the lower priced product, with nothing to the higher
> >priced equivalent. Walmart aggravates the effect by setting the price
> >at some artificial low level, and challenging their vendors to meet
> >their price goal.
>
> It seems to me that there is a good opportunity here for other
> retailers. If a retailer sold only electronic goods that were well
> made and well designed, they could sell them for ten to thirty
> percent more than the junk sold at Walmart and Kmart.


Maybe ten times as much, if you are selling real quality.


> I think many consumers would be willing to pay a little extra for
> devices that would probably last four to ten times as long. This
> would be especially true if they had two (or more) cheap-junk brand
> devices fail.


Have you ever designed consumer electronics, or worked in electronics
manufacturing? have you ever tried to buy top quality components, or
run 100% incoming inspection. It isn't cheap.


> The retailer could require vendors to only use non-junk capacitors
> with voltage ratings at least three times the voltage the capacitors
> would be exposed to.


You don't understand much about electrolytics, do you? The ESR goes
up with the voltage rating, along with the physical size. That requires
a different board layout, which raises the resistance & inductance of
the copper traces, which causes more problems. It becomes harder to
filter the ripple current from the CPU power supply, causing more
erratic behavior.

It is the ripple current through the electrolytic that degrades it,
to the point of failure. All of this is the reason that the
electrolytics for the CPU are so close to the CPU socket. Your method
would cost more, and have a shorter life.


> They could also require that no part of the device ever get more
> than 30 degrees warmer than the temperature of the room it is
> used in.


That's a joke? Even mainframe computers with dedicated air
conditioning ran hotter than that.


> The devices could have much longer warranties and the store could
> advertise itself as "The quality store". I do not think this would
> require excessive advertising, especially after the first few years.


You can call yourself whatever you want, but you are not going to get
much quality improvement for a 30% (retail) cost increase.


--
The movie 'Deliverance' isn't a documentary!
From: Allodoxaphobia on 30 Nov 2009 17:12
On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:09:10 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
>>
<-snip->
>
> The good part about all this is that problem products just don't last
> very long. Soon after the problems are found, the replacements appear
> in the stores. The replacements have all the latest features, use all
> the latest designs, and follow all the latest fashion trends.

... and are cursed with brand new problems.
From: Arfa Daily on 30 Nov 2009 21:03

"Daniel Prince" <neutrino1(a)ca.rr.com> wrote in message
news:vqq7h5h80ejbt70qiopt07daqucb6958oe(a)4ax.com...
> Jeff Liebermann <jeffl(a)cruzio.com> wrote:
>
>>The problems start when there are competing products. I call it the
>>Walmart effect. Walmart, Kmart, and many online vendors specialize in
>>selling solely on the basis of price. If there are two competing
>>products, differing only a few pennies in selling price, *ALL* their
>>orders will go to the lower priced product, with nothing to the higher
>>priced equivalent. Walmart aggravates the effect by setting the price
>>at some artificial low level, and challenging their vendors to meet
>>their price goal.
>
> It seems to me that there is a good opportunity here for other
> retailers. If a retailer sold only electronic goods that were well
> made and well designed, they could sell them for ten to thirty
> percent more than the junk sold at Walmart and Kmart.
>
> I think many consumers would be willing to pay a little extra for
> devices that would probably last four to ten times as long. This
> would be especially true if they had two (or more) cheap-junk brand
> devices fail.
>
> The retailer could require vendors to only use non-junk capacitors
> with voltage ratings at least three times the voltage the capacitors
> would be exposed to. They could also require that no part of the
> device ever get more than 30 degrees warmer than the temperature of
> the room it is used in.
>
> The devices could have much longer warranties and the store could
> advertise itself as "The quality store". I do not think this would
> require excessive advertising, especially after the first few years.
> --
> I don't understand why they make gourmet cat foods. I have
> known many cats in my life and none of them were gourmets.
> They were all gourmands!

I do service work for several retailers of 'quality' consumer electronics,
and all are having a hard time of it. Their only customers now are those who
can genuinely afford the stuff. The others who aspired to being owners, and
saved their hard-earned for however long in order to enable them to become
owners, are long gone, with whatever spare money they have, going to keeping
a roof over their heads, and putting food on the table. Times is 'ard, my
friend ...

As I repair the stuff for a living, you would think that I would know
better, but even I buy what I know to ultimately be junk. Just a few weeks
ago, I bought a DVD player to replace the 'good' Tosh that I had owned for
some time. It came from the local food supermarket, and was some kind of
unknown junk name. But you know what ? It plays any disc region that you put
in it, any home burn disc type and format both CD and DVD, came with a
complete set of connecting cables, and even a full function credit card
remote handset. And what did it cost ? Fifteen quid, that's what. And it has
a year's full warranty. Even if it failed within the warranty period, it's
just a throw away item. Go buy another. Half a dozen pints of beer ...

Arfa


From: Jeff Liebermann on 1 Dec 2009 00:06
On 30 Nov 2009 22:12:19 GMT, Allodoxaphobia <bit-bucket(a)config.com>
wrote:

>On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:09:10 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
>>>
> <-snip->
>>
>> The good part about all this is that problem products just don't last
>> very long. Soon after the problems are found, the replacements appear
>> in the stores. The replacements have all the latest features, use all
>> the latest designs, and follow all the latest fashion trends.
>
> ... and are cursed with brand new problems.

If you find yourself cursed, hire an exorcist.

Yep, we're all doomed. I'm looking at Rev 1.0 of a just released
consumer electronics product. All of the ASIC's inside are custom.
Most of the glue chips didn't exist 6 months ago. The date code on
some of the parts are about 2 months ago. The plastic doesn't quite
fit. The firmware is a bugfest with the latest update scheduled to
hit their web pile real-soon-now. The user interface resembles a
student effort which will fail any usability test. No, I won't
disclose the product. My point is that if you want the absolute
latest, you're going to have to tolerate a certain level of rush to
market, complete with bugs.

Most products are NOT revolutionary. They evolve based on previous
products or are stolen from the competition. The problem is that as
one product is manufactured, there anywhere from one to three future
replacement versions of the same product somewhere in the design
cycle. With such a derangement, even if the problems were known on
the original product, the fixes will not appear in the updates or
replacements until after one to three hardware revisions.

However, there's hope. With hardware bugs, it's not unusual to use
software and firmware updates to work around the bugs. Where this
goes awry is when vendors decide that it's not worth supporting
products that they no longer sell, making old bugs permanent. I give
great credit to some manufacturers (such as Linksys) for producing
firmware updates for products or versions that haven't been sold for
many years.

The point is that bugs and glitches are inevitable with rush to
market, but can be dealt with given sufficient time. It's the
sufficient time that's really the problem. Many suppliers of retail
products are sufficiently isolated from the retail sale that they have
no real interest in supporting end users, much less even identifying
themselves. By the time a complaint dribbles back down the supply
chain, it's usually lost. If it does arrive, it usually lands on the
very bottom of the priority pile, or is so late that the next release
or model of the product is in production making it too late to do
anything about the old product.

Even if the factory has a long term delivery and release contract,
there's still a problem. Features and functions get added faster
than bugs get fixed. The result is a feature infested but seriously
buggy product that never seems to get fixed. Most manufacturers
recognize this and compensate by slowing down the development cycle
enough to do minimal testing, debugging, and damage control.

Unfortunately, not much can be done if defective or counterfeit parts
are used. Incidentally, counterfeit components and products are a
serious problem and involve far more than just low-ESR capacitors. I
had a series of motherboards fail due to bulging capacitors. There
were about 15 machines involved. Only 5 of them had bad caps. I
removed some caps from both the good and bad boards and tried
determine if there was a measurable difference. Yep. The ESR was
radically different. Yet, the package, labeling, color, coining, and
everything about the caps were identical. I could not tell the
difference visually. What this tells me is that there are still some
bad caps mixed in with good caps in the manufacturers inventory. It
may only be one bad reel of caps among hundreds, but it only takes a
few caps to trash a product. It's also possible that the capacitor
manufacturers are shipping old inventory in order to make a fast
dollar. Hard to tell from here.

What I find amusing is asking friends and customers how long they
expect some consumer electronics device to last (with some repair).
The older ones expect their TV to last as long as their hand wired
1960's Zenith TV. 20 to 30 years would be typical. Younger buyers,
that have had some experience with contemporary product lifetimes will
usually say 5 to 10 years at best, as if this was considered normal.

Quality, features, price. Pick any two.



--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl(a)cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
First  |  Prev  | 
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Prev: Toshiba 42HP66 plasma help please
Next: Two phases to house - loss of neutral