I have a De Walt DC600KA electric battery powered screw driver.
This came originally with two DE9054 lithium batteries both of which have reached end of life.
I looked up the cheapest price for these batteries. £40 EACH so thats 80 quid.
I then looked up buying a whole new DeWalt DC600KA. Cheapest I can find is £66.......
WTF????
Stephen.
well there you go. The cost of replacing all the toner cartridges in my HP color laserjet is more than the cost of the printer.
There is piss all IN a cordless screwdriver apart from a 50c housing and a 75c motor..
..except the substandard out of spec batteries they bought cheap and in bulk, with the short service life.
Supply and demand. The new units are probably bought several at a time by the retailer and shifted quite quickly. Spare batteries not.
They learned this idea from Clive Sinclair, who used to buy up faulty ram chips and then only use the good bits. Sadly faulty ram chips tend to go more faulty. Brian
Is this a fact, or speculation? I must say I was disappointed at the short life of the batteries that came with my Worx drill.
Welcome to Planned Obsolescence.
It's a veritable industry, working out how to make things break just after the guarantee expires. With my Panasonic upright vacuum cleaner it was a small thermal fuse on the motor. I replaced it with a slightly higher rated one and the machine has been working for over two years now. It's the topmost component in this pic:
*Twilight Zone theme music* ....
Weird. I was only last night talking about making silicon ships to my lad ... dunno if the failure rate is still >50%, but I vaguely recalled Sinclair working on an idea to have IC fabs with some logic between the chips, so that on power on, they would shunt out any faulty ones .. the idea was to save money by removing the need for testing. Whatever happened to ... ???
Ditto the DeWalt 'leccy screwdriver I bought. It's a crap design, the batteries have lasted hardly any time & it was expensive. The B&D one it replaced was way better.
Something used today for flash to extend usable life, overused cells are taken out of the logical memory map and replaced with others.
Or the support.
There should be a rule written that after an item becomes 'inconvenient' for the manufacturer to sell and support, all design theory, instructions, firmware and schematics should be released to the public domain. If by doing that, a manufacturer would find themselves at a loss of intellectual property, then they should either bear a good part of the price in upgrading the item to the next version, or accept the item back for recycling refunding part of the purchase price.
That would in my mind be more green than other efforts, and with the hack interest given more information, we wouldn't need to manufacture Rasberry Pi's.
For instance, there are loads of redundant freeview set-top boxes out there. They run linux and have oodles of interfaces. Sadly they are locked up with encryption, and the manufacturer has either gone bust or a competitor has pounced to bury them and their product. :-(
I see your Panasonic and raise you my Mercedes. I bought it in 1993 and it's still going strong.
Seconded.
MM
Deutsche Qualität!
MM
I'll see your Mercedes and raise you my Kawasaki EX250. 1986 and going strong.
Not quite as good, but my PC keyboard. Bought in 1992, in daily use, and no perceptible signs of wear.
Hah, I'll raise you my Quad 303, bought in 1970.
My Quad 303 is of a similar vintage, but I didn't buy it originally!
You mean you nicked it? Bob, really!
MY SD1 is '85, and running better than new. ;-)
Revox A77, late '60s. Thorens TD 150 and SME arm likewise. All still used occasionally.
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