Apple and Sony economics lesson

September 18, 2006 5:13 AM

I boght a 40GB Ipod back in the day when they were relatively new and, as such, I payed full whack. It broke down during warranty and I was issued with a new Ipod and now the new Ipod has broken down outside of warranty. I was gobsmacked to discover that Apple require ~£160 merely to look at the Ipod without guaranteeing the fixing of it. All this has led me to ask the question, are consumable electronics of this nature designed to have a short shelf life with the cost of fixture used to make you purchase the next generation? Am I wrong to feel agrieved at this?

On a further note, I purchased the Sony version of an Ipod (the NWA-3000) and have been by and large happy with it. Recently I had a bag stolen that held the USB charging cable in it. Again I have been suprised to discover that Sony cannot supply a replacement as the Sony spare parts representative told me it is not available until later on in the year and then it shall cost £38. Given that this is for a 30cm cable (with the players own adapter on one end and a USB on the other). What possible reason would Sony have for denying its customers a cable that without I cannot change the music on the player and have had to purchase the speaker dock to charge.

If anyone has any suggestions as to how I could get the USB charging cable for the NWA-3000 it would be much appreciated. I know they are built in Malaysia and have tried Malaysia Ebay and similar websites to no avail.

posted by numberstation to technology (20 comments total)

All this has led me to ask the question, are consumable electronics of this nature designed to have a short shelf life with the cost of fixture used to make you purchase the next generation?

They'll stick with that business model as long as it works. It's being going ok for them so far. If someone else can set up a similar style of market supply, they will take advantage of it in the same way. If there's a lot of competition in a particular sector and 'fixability' of a product becomes a big feature then there's a possibility that another model will prevail.
posted by biffa at 5:32 AM on September 18, 2006

They do it for the same reason a dog licks its own genitals: because they can. Or at least Apple does; they’re notorious for this (the sketchy reliability and outrageous repair charges, that is, not the genital thing, though that's not impossible.) Your Sony situation also sounds like the consequences of the combination of supply-chain incompetence and the typical large markup applied to stocking and supplying low sales volume items.
posted by mojohand at 5:46 AM on September 18, 2006

You're sticking a miniature hard drive into a device that you can carry around in your hand. It's not a simple thing to repair. Apple will change batteries at a reasonable rate, but they're not intentionally designing the iPod to fail. All hard drive-based mp3 players die, especially after frequent use.
posted by onalark at 5:54 AM on September 18, 2006

Many electronic devices have an average failure rate described by the bathtub curve-- tending to fail either shortly after manufacturer or remaining usable for an extended period of time before failing due to component wear-out. Since the manufacturer has some control over component quality and replacements cost the manufacturer money, they are willing to increase manufacturing costs to move the right side of the bathtub outside the warranty, but do not have an ecomonic incentive to increase it much beyond that.
posted by justkevin at 5:58 AM on September 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

Even if it wasn't to the manufacturers' benefit for their products to become obsolete (or even break) after a while so that you buy a new one, I'm pretty sure things would still be cheap and nasty simply because, faced with the chance to pay $$$ for something durable and well-made or $$ for something that might fall apart just after the warranty finishes, most people pay $$.

Then the things costing $$ benefit from economy of scale and start costing $, while the things costing $$$ sell in smaller amounts, have trouble finding retailers and start costing $$$$$ to the purists or rich people who still want them. It's a race to the bottom and the loser either finds a viable niche market or goes out of business. Don't blame the companies (except about the Sony cable thing, which sounds like common or garden proprietary component bastardry), blame the way the market economy caters to human nature.

The cost of fixing it seems high because you live in the UK and so have to pay UK labour rates for repairs (plus maybe a bit of bastardry), while the thing was manufactured somewhere else where labour is cheap (or in the unlikely event that it was made in the first world, it was mass-produced in a way that vastly reduced the price while giving you a misleading idea of how much it might cost to get a skilled worker to deal with its individual parts). Plus it was made for compactness and cheapness, not easy repairability.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 5:59 AM on September 18, 2006

Here's a charging cradle for the NWA3000 for £24.
posted by gfrobe at 6:07 AM on September 18, 2006

Thanks for the interesting responses. The bathtub curve makes sense and I can understand the Apple economics. Though I think I would have to take exception to the idea that an Ipod is designed for cheapness (then again it is a relative term I know). Anyway, gfrobe thanks for the link but I'm not sure if I can use the charging cradle to alter the music or just to charge through the USB. I'll get in touch with Sony to confirm but you may just have solved my problem.
posted by numberstation at 6:24 AM on September 18, 2006

Sorry, I didn't read the question full and thought you just needed a way to charge.

Is this what you're looking for?
posted by gfrobe at 6:44 AM on September 18, 2006

Just to add to some other good answers here, one desirable aspect of the iPod is its size, which unavoidably makes it hard to service. £160-worth of hard? Probably not—that sounds usurious (and I wonder if there isn't an independent Apple-authorized shop that can do it for less). But to make an iPod that could be cheaply serviced, they'd have to make it the size of a trade paperback.
posted by adamrice at 6:46 AM on September 18, 2006

They want you to buy the AppleCare service plan. I think they quoted me $70 USD a year.

I recommend mp3 players with flash drives. I miss having the 40 gb, but I drop things way too often.
posted by agropyron at 7:50 AM on September 18, 2006

onlark said All hard drive-based mp3 players die, especially after frequent use.

That's funny, I haven'y had that problem. I have one of the first HD mp3 players ever made (the pjb100) and it still works just fine. I've had to resolder the headphone jack a couple of times, but other than that, it's held up great through the abuse - which includes being dropped (more than once) on cement from 3-4 feet. Of course, there is the difference that with the PJB100, when the battery died, I could simply open the battery compartment and replace it with a new one - without having to disassemble the entire unit.

It's been my observation that the HD isn't the point of failure on most of these items (including the iPod), but rather it's the rest of the components that are created with low tolerance for abuse.

adamrice said they'd have to make it the size of a trade paperback.

That's not exactly true, either. Instead of using obscure torx bits and one way fasteners or epoxy (or whatever) they could, in fact, design in the ability to easily disassemble the unit. Using the PJB100 again as an example of HD-Mp3 done right - four or five screws open up the case and a well designed circuit and cable layout makes it easy to repair (such things as headphone jacks). It's larger than the ipod, but back then drives weren't as small as they are these days (with the HD being the primary reason for it's size). And, as I mentioned before, the battery was *designed* to be user replaced.
posted by jaded at 8:19 AM on September 18, 2006

Re: the Sony cable. It's funny how most people think of the retail cost of something (like an MP3 player) = the retail cost of the MP3 player itself, and not the retail cost of the MP3 player + its cables + assorted doo-dads. Years ago when I worked in retail, people would come in looking to replace their charger for their camcorders that they just misplaced or accidentally threw away (bizarre but true), and were aghast to find it cost $200 to replace. "But I only paid $1000 for the camcorder!" they'd cry, not realizing the $200 for the charger was part of the $1000 price, and the camcorder was only worth $800 itself.

As for repair costs on electronic equipment, remember there has to be a real live person at the repair shop doing the work. That person tends to be highly trained, and electronics repairs are often of the "this doesn't work" or "it sometimes acts weird" variety, resulting in a lot of time wasted tracking down the problem. A lot of customers want free estimates on repairs, not realizing the time and detail it takes to track down a problem is about 90% of a repair. That, and there's not a lot of things that can be "repaired" in small electronics. There simply aren't a lot of "parts" in there to be replaced.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 8:19 AM on September 18, 2006

Manufacturers of DAPs are also always pushing the envelope in terms of how much stuff they can pack into how small a package -- that exacerbates the costs associated with trying to build for more reliability than the minimum they can get away with.

If one manufacturer decided to make one that would last five years, it would be bigger and more expensive than all the competition, and they'd be excoriated in the reviews... people wouldn't notice that maybe that was a better idea for more than a year, when their smaller, cheaper devices failed, by which time the big, more expensive one would have failed in the marketplace.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 8:22 AM on September 18, 2006

The economics lesson is to buy an mp3 player for $30, and just replace it when it breaks. That may exclude you from the cool kids club, but hey...is admission really worth the price tag?

If you get one that takes memory cards, it's even better, because you keep the memory when the device dies, unlike with an unrepaired ipod.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 8:30 AM on September 18, 2006

four or five screws open up the case and a well designed circuit and cable layout makes it easy to repair

And take up space, and add to the cost, and make the unit larger. The whole point of the iPod was size and interface. Period. The clip-and-friction mount makes assembly much faster, and take the cost of four or so screws out of it. You'd be surprised at how much screws cost -- it's really not the cost of the screw, it's the cost of the spots to screw into, and the loss of strength you get by putting holes into your cover (thus, more parts damaged in assembly) plus the cost of the labor to assemble the case, which is now "shove together, install screws" rather than "shove together.")

This is also why the iPod doesn't have easy to change batteries. Build a hatch to get to them in the current size would increase the price per unit by a large deal, and seriously weaken the case, and in To build a strong case, you'd need a case-within-a-case battery box, this is more space, and more plastic.

There are lots of design contraints, it is the job of the designer to take those into account. In the case of the iPod, ease of service wasn't held above size or structural strength, so the friction fit (or on the shuffle, sonically welded) case won out.

Personally, I've had no problems repairing my 3rd Gen, which has been swap batteries. But it does take a little more effort than a larger box would take. Given the amount of time I've spent on repairing the thing (say, 1 hour through the near three years I've had it) it would be silly for me to worry about the fifteen minutes I would have saved if the case was easier to open. I've not needed to resolder the jacks, which implies that they mounted the jack correctly. I haven't had a hard drive fail, but that's basically luck. An iPod is a pretty nasty place to carry an HDD, and I'm not surprised that they don't last. (Once again, design constraints. The big one on that drive is "small", there's a reason that reliable HDDs, like FC and SCSI server drives, cost the most.)

Flash is really the right answer, but flash is about a order of magintude behind HDDs in data density, so if you want useful amounts of video, you're spinning a platter. Me? The next iPod is an 8GB nano.
posted by eriko at 9:03 AM on September 18, 2006

Part of the reason comes down to customers demand for cheap products. Its possible to build something that will last for years but people won't buy it because it costs too much.

Cheaper parts mean a cheaper device, even though it's more likely to pack up.
posted by mr_silver at 9:41 AM on September 18, 2006

Many years ago, I stopped buying all sony products, because unlike the manufacturers of decent products, Sony always tries to lock you in with proprietary crap designed so that you can't get parts from any other vendor (eg your oddball USB connector). Even if they had them in stock, the price-gouging would probably blow your mind.

(My sony boycott has made life easier, cheaper, and more reliable. The cost of migrating was worth it. As such I commend you not taking Apple's shit and moving on, but you may have jumped to another bad ship. (Apple is not on my shit-list to quite the same extent as Sony, but they're still a manufacturer I prefer to avoid)).

The ipod has excellant manufacture quality, but is flimsy partly because case protective strength has been sacrificed to make it smaller, and has stupid shit like non-standard batteries with a fixed shelf-life whether they're used or not. Since there is such a large userbase however, you can likely find a repair place online that beats Apple's repair prices.

In future, products that use all standard batteries, all standard connectors, have no DRM, and interoperate freely with other devices regardless of brand, are the things to look for in a device not intended to expire. Of course, manufacture quality can be harder to assess, but you can get an idea from internet forums (a distorted idea, since the only people that post are those having difficulities)
posted by -harlequin- at 10:48 AM on September 18, 2006

If Apple's repair prices were ridiculously out of line (they do charge a premium, but that is expected) and if iPods broke all the time and were cheap to repair then there would be lots of third parties offering the service for less than Apple. I know there are some businesses in this niche, but if they were common you would probably have gone to one of them first.

No consumer electronics are sold on ease of servicing, and lifespan is not usually much of an issue either. Look at product comparison charts in magazines and it's very unlikely to be a listed -- size, cost, features, yes. If repairability is not high on the list of desirable feature for purchasers, don't expect manufacturers to value it highly either.

The durability and repairability of all consumer goods has gone down dramatically over the last 40 years. People expect to replace them rather than repair them, partly because that way they get all the "new features" of a newer model, and partly because repair/labor costs are a much higher percentage of replacement cost.

The only thing that was unrepairable on the first dishwasher my mother bought was if it rusted through, and it was made of fairly thick enameled steel. It also had a regular maintenance schedule. She sold it second hand because it was too small; its replacement lasted about 20 years, the one after that about 10, and the last one only survived five or so years. None of them was especially cheap.

iPods are not dishwashers, but the trend is the same. Is everybody happy about this? Probably not, but most people are sufficiently happy that purchase cost goes down (certainly in constant dollars) and features go up -- and you don't have to send it in for servicing every year.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 11:29 AM on September 18, 2006

Wow. Such misplaced anti-Apple bias in this thread. For each story you hear about someone being quoted an asinine price for an iPod repair, you hear one about Apple swapping the unit out for a new one with no questions asked.

To answer the question: No, I do not think that stuff is designed to just fall apart so you have to buy a new one. At least not the iPods/Apple stuff. I know several people that have the original 5gb iPods and they're still working just fine. Good battery life too, with none of the decaying battery problems that people were trying to sue Apple over.
I have 2 iPods, one of them is almost 3 years old. It's been dropped dozens of times and has had hundreds and hundreds of hours of use. Never had a single problem. My other iPod is a 2gb Nano that I bought refurbished. Again, not a single problem.

It's a piece of electronic equipment. Some are going to fail, some will last for ages. Very similar to cars. But no, I don't think it's a big conspiracy to keep cash flowing. Failing products = bad name for the product, which is something that companies usually try to avoid.

It has electric doohickeys in it. Your mileage may vary.
posted by drstein at 1:11 PM on September 18, 2006

Note that micro-sized devices almost demand LiIon or Li-poly batteries, which have a finite life.

Matter of fact, almost all batteries do. Some are better than others, but no battery lives forever.

Lithium Ion and Lithium Poly have very high energy density, and as a bonus, generate ~3V per cell, rather than the 1.5 of lead based, or 1.2V for nickle based cells. However, lithium based rechargables do lose capacity over time, starting from manufacture. (This differes from Lithium primary cells, which have the longest shelf life.)

LiIon's recharge problems, where improper charging leads to explosion and fire, means that making a standard cell with them is a really good way to start a lot of fires. The reason you shouldn't see a AA LiIon is that they put out twice the voltage, and if you stick one in a NiCd or NiMH charger, it will do nasty things.

Using NiMH batteries would cut the play time in half, or seriously increase the size of the cell.

Once again, design tradeoffs.
posted by eriko at 6:06 AM on September 19, 2006