OT: Kodak AC adaptor failure

The ones I have seen in Tek scopes only connected to the +5 volt Vd supply. They were not visible from outside the case.

Perception is everything. I've never worked for Tektronix, so I have no clue what goes on in the hallowed halls of Beaverton. I also haven't done much with large companies. You might be correct that there was no devious motive behind the installation of an hour meter in an instrument, but being both cynical and suspicious, I tend to favor conspiratorial explanations. There may have been a perfectly logical reason for including the timer, such as the deterioration and limited life of some component on the PCB, but it's not apparent. It could also have been required by someone at Tek with a financial interest in the timer manufacturer or an example of a truly effective sales pitch.

I also have the irritating habit of asking awkward questions. For example, why would Tektronix use an electrochemical timer, when the common motor driven variety would have been far better, more accurate, and less affected by temperature inside the scope? Aircraft have timers to signal when to rebuild the engine and do other maintenance. Ummm... note the name: Was Tek thinking of the scope rental business, which may have wanted to charge by operating hours?

I suppose we'll never know the exact reason, although it's fun to speculate. Meanwhile, it will make a suitable analog warranty timer for enforcing the currently shrinking product lifetimes.

Drivel: Several years ago, I faced the daunting challenge of selecting a replacement electric water heater at Home Depot. They carried GE water heaters, which offer a 6, 9, or 12 year warranty, with roughly proportional pricing. I asked what was the difference and received several imaginative but useless answers. The weights were the same, so there was no added material. Googling for the answer, produced an impressive variety of bad guesses. So, I decided to research the failure mechanisms of water heaters. Mostly, it's corrosion of the steel tank by electrolytic action. To prevent this, the water heater is supplied with a sacrificial anode. When the anode is depleted, the tank takes it place and eventually leaks. Looking at the 3 models, I found that the 6 year model had a really small aluminum sacrificial anode, the 9 year tank had a bigger magnesium anode, and the 12 year tank had two magnesium anodes. Otherwise, the water heaters were identical. I bought the cheaper 6 year tank, and two replacement magnesium anodes, which I installed in the water heater. Net savings was about $200: It's been about 8 years. Maybe I should check the anodes in my tank.

The lesson here is that companies really do make an effort to limit the lifetime of their products. The same can be done with electronics. Wouldn't it be great to have the simultaneous failure of all the previous products coincide with the introduction of a replacement model?

Is there a difference?

$7

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Well, I was referring to the adapters, not the wallet. ;-)

Smartass.

lol

On a sunny day (Sat, 25 Jan 2014 08:36:59 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Well with internet connection to cars that would be no problem. in the end that may result in an 'subscrption' to the next model. You did not pay your subsription, and you are stuck....

Not so much limit their lifetime, rather product differentiation. The market wants a choice, so it's given.

Differentiation isn't not done with "product lifetime", rather features. Some will pay more for features. I'll pay more for a better display or perhaps because it "feels" better. Some buy by price, so many models with minor tweaks are sold.

Differentiation by "lifetime" isn't needed today. Moore takes care of that.

That's already here. OnStar can locate and unlock the car for the repo man.

I beg to differ. What we have today are choices that differentiate only in the trivial aspects of a product. For example, it you take the selection of TV sets in a given price category, most of the TV's will have identical specs, if not identical offshore manufactured electronics, differentiated only by cosmetics and services. When a new technology is introduced, such as LED backlighting, after a few years, all the TV's use almost identical technologies. The inevitable result is competition based mostly on price and services.

A side effect of this the destruction of product differentiation by quality of manufacture. In the past, companies would charge a premium price to deliver a better than average product. They were supported by a minority of customers who are willing to pay for quality. However, the consolidation of these companies into giant conglomerates has destroyed this market segment. All that's left is the name, usually attached to mediocre junk. In some industries (i.e. appliances) it's very difficult to find quality at any price.

In other industries, it's difficult to provide features that offer product differentiation because the customers are not sufficiently sophisticated to understand the specifications. For example, in the cell phone business, trying to differentiate an Android based phone from perhaps 1,500 similar models is a heroic task. Motorola (Google) has somehow decided that a choice of colors in the Moto X constitutes a choice. Right.

I would normally say something about the perception of quality at this point (i.e. Apple), but I don't want to lose my lunch.

I beg to differ again. I used the 6, 9, 12 year warranty differentiation on GE (Rheem) water heaters. The only difference is the type and number of sacrificial anodes. My guess is the cost difference between each model is perhaps $10 (retail) in replacement anodes. Yet, that is somehow perceived by the buyer as justification for a $100 price difference. Note the difference in price between the

Certainly, if the company offers those features and the buyer actually understands those features. For example, I am constantly dealing with customers that want to buy a $250 laptop and ask "is it a good laptop". My usual answer is yes, if you're willing to tolerate a hard to read display with 1366x768 dots. If you want to actually see what you're doing, it really should have more pixels, such as 1920x1080. However, that costs about $250 more. With a better CPU, more RAM, and decent HD, the price can easily climb to about $750. Yet, every vendor sells perhaps 25 cheapo laptops for every quality model. At any price point, whatever product differentiation is available to the consumer is only which brand or color of many nearly identical bottom end laptops are available.

Exactly. However, spending extra on alleged quality isn't a guarantee that you'll actually get quality. Several laptop vendors have gotten tricky and simply raised the price of low end junk to premium levels, and offered them alongside much better machines. I've also seen fairly high end laptops have all the right features, but are lacking in some area necessitated by cost constraints. For example, it's not unusual to find a slow hard disk drive in a high end computer. Who looks at the size of the HD cache when buying a new machine (assuming you can even find it on the spec sheet)?

True in areas where disposable products are popular. Computers are slowly becoming disposable. For example, if you buy an Apple computer, you get 5 years of supported lifetime, 2 years more as a vintage machine and then it's obsolete. Would you pay approximately twice as much for a computer, if you knew that it only had a 5 or 7 year useful life? Most of my various PC's are 8 years old, running a 12 year old operating system, and show no signs of becoming useless or obsolete. Meanwhile, Apple is producing unrepairable products, with glued in batteries, mostly to insure that if one component fails, it's not economical to repair. Excuse me, but I think I'm going to lose my lunch.

Other products are expected to last a lifetime. Appliances used to be like that, but are now heading towards throw away status. Start reading here and see how many examples of badly designed or built products involve appliances:

You don't really need an internet connection to buy a car on a subscription basis. That's effectively what leasing does. If you get a new car before the lease expires, you're ahead. If you let the lease run out, you've overpaid. Roughly 30% of new car purchases are leases, so using leasing to inspire a higher turnover seems to be common.

What are you begging about?

Trivial, perhaps, to you, but differentiation nevertheless. the market clearly demands this. Good? Bad? What's it to you?

Hardly identical but nonetheless price and services are hardly trivial.

The market doesn't want it. So...

Still do, until they go out of business because the market doesn't demand what you think it does.

Not at all. If they were "supported" they would not go out of business.

Utter nonsense. The market has spoken.

There it is, plain and simple. Unadorned "I'm smarter than everyone else".

It is. I just went through this. I decided on 2x Moto Droid MAXX because of the battery capacity, feel, and display (in roughly that priority). There *IS* a difference.

More unabashed snobbery, again. I'm not a fan of Apple, either, but did buy an iPod last month because I couldn't find another MP3 player that was worth a damn. The market doesn't want it, apparently.

Of course. I'm not a snob.

...and the cost. The market wants these choices so the manufacturers respond as best they can.

That $10 equates to at least $50, by the time you get to retail. That's irrelevant, though. The market wants the different warranties. To respond, the manufacturer builds what is cheapest to meet those requirements.

Again, you simply show your snobbery.

Snobbery.

Most don't care. If they do, they'll educate themselves. That's no reason to look down your nose at the unwashed.

Of course not. Who do you think should guarantee this? Government? How about the buyer? Nah, then you'd have to admit that you're not the smartest person on the planet.

If they can survive on this model, fine. The prices will rise across the board. They won't though. People won't buy junk if there is an alternative.

That's what we were talking about, here.

Nope. That's exactly what we're talking about. If it goes past three years, I'm happy. I buy a three year service contract for that reason (laptops really aren't serviceable).

More snobbery noted. I have different needs/wants. I like my current laptop much more than the predecessor. It has a smaller screen (12.6" vs. 15") but it's a touch screen. Smaller isn't better but when used on the lap, the touch screen is really nice. It's a lot more stable and docking actually works. Yes, I do want the new features every couple of years.

Been there. You *can* find quality appliances but most don't want to pay for them. The exception seems to be washing machines. :-(

That wasn't the point. The point was disabling the car if the subscription expires.

I'm just practicing being polite. One of my New Years resolutions was to be more tactful and diplomatic. However, you're correct. I should be begging to differ. For you, I demand to differ. Is that better?

I don't have time to reply to all your comments. In the interest of not dealing with another late dinner, I'll only comment on the one's I find interesting.

I would rather not answer that in a public forum. Suffice to say that I have some involvement with product marketing. Issues, such as product differentiation, whether by cost, features, services, or cosmetics are a topic of constant discussion and experimentation.

It is possible to create a situation where it doesn't matter what the market wants. Once the basic needs are satisfied, everything else is essentially a luxury. You don't really NEED a smartphone.

What's been happening is the conglomeration of small companies and retail outlets into giant entities has created a situation where these vendors decide that the consumer wants, not the other way around. For example, Walmart and others set the price for what they want to buy and sell something, and then demand that the vendor either offer their products at the price, or they'll buy from someone else. It's common in other industry. That leave the manufacturer with the problem of cutting costs. Features are the first to go followed by quality.

The interesting part is what it has done to product differentiation. The manufacturer can cut costs if they build more of some particular item. So, they reduce the number of variations and options. Instead of small, medium, and large, there is only medium. Instead of quality varying from cheap, mediocre, and superior, there is only mediocre. The consumer, faced with a purchase decision, will only see the mediocre and assume that mediocre is all that's available.

Of course, the manufacturer knows that the lack of choice is a bad thing, so they conjure some minor feature that allegedly constitutes a choice. What color would you like your smartphone? Do you want it with 8, 16, 32, or 64GB of RAM? (Incidentally, adding an external micro-SD card slot offers more choice than the built in flash offerings, but if you've noticed, external micro-SD slots are on their way out).

If they were successful, they were bought by the conglomerates. If they were not successful, they disappeared, leaving only the conglomerates.

Guilty as charged with a small amendment. I'm not smarter than everyone else, just a smarter than some, and then only in specific areas. In effect, I sell or rent my smarts to my consulting customers, who gladly pay my exorbitant fees for my advice and labor. If I was smarter or better informed than them, they would have no need to hire me.

That's what they all say. Ask anyone who has just made a major purchase decision and they will defend to the death their logic for making that decision. I'm guilty of that myself as I temporarily became a Subaru evangelist after purchasing one.

I really doubt that battery capacity and the display were the deciding factors in your purchase. On the other hand, feel was probably a key factor. There's a reason that the iPad is derisively called a "fondle slab". If you watch an iPad owner hold and use their iPad, you'll see why. Yes, feel is important.

These days, smartphones are a grafted extension to the body, to be taken everywhere, including places where they don't really belong. Selecting one is much like the exercise of purchasing clothes, where appearances are more important than function. It's not how well the phone fits your hand, it's how you look to others that's important. Well, if you're older, probably not as important to the average teenager, but still a major consideration.

The illusion of a smart shopper making an informed decision is also fiction. One would expect buyers to read the specifications, evaluate the features in terms of usage, read the reviews, price shop, and buy accordingly. That doesn't happen. With smartphones, it's almost always an impulse decision based upon dubious criteria. My friend has one, it looks cool, my guru recommended it, etc. The bad reasons are almost endless. In many cases, they have no idea even what to do with a smartphone, but seem to feel that they can't live without one. I know of iPhone users that only use the address book and no other apps. They're also at least one IOS version behind.

By this time, you probably suspect that I'm deranged. Fine, I'm used to it. If you want to dig deeper into why you buy things, I recommend any of the early (1970's) books by Wilson Bryan Key on subliminals. Definitely get Subliminal Seduction. They should be about $1/ea.

Yep. They respond by reducing the variations, options, and choices to reduce costs. It's much easier to produce a mediocre standard product, than to deliver it in various configurations in order to deliver a choice.

The $10 is the RETAIL price difference based on the cost of the rods as spare parts, which I noted above. The difference between the warranties for the water heaters is essentially the weight of the magnesium rod. Using the shipping weight, that's about 1.5 lb difference which in raw magnesium is about $2.50/lb. So, for $3.75 difference in manufacturing cost (not retail), the end user pays $100 more. Otherwise, the water heaters are identical. You're correct that the manufacturer builds the cheapest to meet the market requirements, but then supplies a phony device to give the perception of choice.

I guess I really am a snob for knowing how water heaters are priced and telling the world about it. The feeling of superiority is so nice.

What if there's no alternative? Would you buy a Sears water heater or refrigerator if you knew that there's only 1 inch of insulation instead of the usual 2 inches? The problem isn't that some products are junk. It's that the GUM (great unwashed masses) can't tell the difference.

If I recommended a laptop to one of my customers that only has a 3 year life, they would panic. They expect such purchases to last far longer than 3 years. I can usually guarantee 5 years and usually get about 8 years or more. I still use two Panasonic CF-25 Toughbooks (with touchscreen) which are now about 15 years old.

Incidentally, PC laptops are generally serviceable. I can't say the same about the current Apple offerings. The MacBook Pro typically gets the lowest repairability score from iFixit.

Agreed. Add dishwashers to the list of impossible to find quality products. One of the local appliance repairmen has a thriving business repairing old appliances mostly because the owners know that buying a current production appliance will result in premature failures, repair bills, and warranty hassles.

Whether the car is "disabled" by the internet, by the repo man, or by contractual agreement via a lease, the car is still not going anywhere. I mentioned leasing because it encourages returning the car before the lease is over because the purchase rebates on a new (leased) vehicle usually exceeds the remaining costs on the previous (leased) vehicle.

"The term also refers to a person who believes that some people are inherently inferior to him or her for any one of a variety of reasons, including real or supposed intellect, wealth, education, ancestry, power, physical strength, class, taste, beauty, nationality, fame, extreme success of a family member or friend, etc." Yeah, I guess I'm guilty of a form of intellectual snobbery. A little knowledge is dangerous. More knowledge is snobbery. Can't win.

Short answer for now. Busy with work for a few days. I usually have more time for long rants on weekends.

Have you ever looked at cheap TV dinners? Basically, heat and serve. Yet, many of them require the user to add butter, or mix the contents. There's no culinary or technical reason for doing that as the machinery that assembled the TV dinner could easily have performed the same task. So, why the added work? It's because the typical user does not feel that they are "cooking" a dinner if they don't add something or perform some manner of simulated preparation.

Selecting colors for a smartphone is much the same thing. Buyers are usually totally lost when it comes time to selecting a suitable smartphone. As I previously mentioned, they will tend to favor reviews, advertising, the opinion of their guru, what their neighbors bought, whatever is on sale, the salesman's recommendation, reviews on the vendors web page, rumor, ad nauseam. In short, it was not their decision. Yet, the perception of choice must be maintained to allow the buyer to think that they have actually made a genuine decision. So, they get a choice of colors, accessories, or gadgets. Deciding on a color scheme also keeps the customer diverted so that the salesman can sneak in other options and accessories while the buyer is not paying attention.

Note that the older 4S model is only offered in 8GB. When it was the current model, you could get it in 16 and 32GB. However, to insure that it doesn't compete against current offerings, it's only offered in limited memory configuration.

Android is different. Most phones have the minimum amount of internal memory necessary to be useful (usually 8 or 16GB). The owner is expected to add any additional RAM via a micro-SD card. At least, that was the plan. About 3 years ago, vendors started releasing phones with an "internal SD card" which was offered in various memory increments. The problem was too much confusion over "usable" memory. It proved to be a bad idea and current phones again offer removable micro-SD cards, although a few vendors keep try to sell the "internal SD card" concept on the assumption that if Apple can get away with it, so can they.

More later (if you want it).

You, on the other hand, will tell any lie just to get a shot in. Typical.

You said that last time, then went on forever.

Nope. I've never had to do anything other than follow tear this off and not that sort of instructions. Admittedly, I don't make a habit of eating that crap (but I did live, mostly, on my own for six months fairly recently).

Now it's third person. Did you give up telling me what I do?

Geez, you really are changing your tune. Before you said that they just did whatever the manufacturer told them to.

Utter nonsense. They've gone to someone knowledgeable, like you (one assumes) to get advice and take that advice. Now you rag on them for not going it alone. You are some mixed up dude.

It's not the same phone. There *are* other differences. Geez.

So, once again, you lied.

Keep it up. Your wiggling is entertaining.

If I was in the US (or any 100-120 volt country) and I wanted to use a cheap adapter, I'd feel a bit better with one spec'd for "universal voltage" 100 - 240v. I think it would need slightly better/safer design to deal with the 240v

At that price, I thought I'd buy one and take a look inside.

I haven't tried running it - but I can't see any reason it wouldn't work. It appears to consist of switch-mode design where the oscillator is turned off by the simple expedient of connecting the output side of an optocoupler across the base-emitter junction of the oscillator transistor. The input side of the optocoupler is put in series with a zener diode across the USB output voltage. The voltage reference is thus just a zener diode.

The bad news is that the isolation is compromised both by having tracks between the optocoupler's pins, and by having the live and low voltage sides separated by only about 1mm on adjacent soldered connections.

There is also a clear possibility that a wire connecting to one of the mains plug pins could beak loose, and then short against one of the pins of the low-votage side of the optocoupler.

Oh, and the case is only clipped on. Although it's reasonably well attached, I can imagine instances where it would pull away, leaving the unprotected circuitry still plugged in and live.

In summary, and I'm sure no one's surprised by this, the thing is dangerous and should not be used.

Sylvia.

On a sunny day (Fri, 14 Feb 2014 19:53:48 +1100) it happened Sylvia Else wrote in :

Yes, seems dangerous, still waiting for mine to arrive.

On a sunny day (Fri, 14 Feb 2014 19:53:48 +1100) it happened Sylvia Else wrote in :

PS, mine just arrived, it is even smaller than I expected, the european plug adaptor is almost bigger.

Put it in a socket hat had no important things running (PC, etc), and indeed I get 5.25 V DC on a multimeter, and the mains fuse holds... have not done any stress tests yet. How did you open it? Destructive?