from Hacker News

Durable Design (2017)

by vog on 6/26/19, 10:00 PM with 42 comments

• by Ecco on 6/27/19, 6:36 AM

  Honestly, there’s another explanation that I think makes a lot more sense even though it’s less beautiful : the product team wasn’t sure they wanted to ship a battery with the device in the first place. Or at least they wanted to keep the option of shipping the device without a battery.

  Removing the battery makes the device cheaper (you can also remove the power brick if any) and removes a supplier from the chain. Keeping this options makes a lot of sense from a purely economical standpoint.

• by mattlondon on 6/27/19, 2:52 PM

  I don't quite buy this romantic image of an engineer trying to fight for the people still using the device in 10 years time - I really doubt this was designed so that it could be used after the lithium battery completely died.

  More likely it was designed so you could use some batteries that you can buy anywhere in the world when you are out and about traveling/vacationing and the battery is flat.

  I work at a fairly major place you've all heard of with a reputation for software engineering excellence etc. One of the engineering managers said something to me the other day: "You know, we engineers here at <Big Co> write our software with this idea that it needs to be extensible and flexible enough to handle anything, like it's going to be around forever. In reality a project only lasts 3 or 4 years, maybe 5 before it is deprecated, replaced, or shutdown. Imagine how much more we'd get done if we were more pragmatic and not obsessed with future-proofing something we know will be replaced soon"? Food for thought.

• by AJRF on 6/27/19, 9:49 AM

  "When an escalator breaks down, it becomes a set of stairs"

  I heard this a while back from somewhere and it's something i've taken forward when trying to design complex systems in code.

  Where possible fallbacks and fail safes should be part of the design, not after thoughts.

  Nice article.

• by kingbirdy on 6/27/19, 3:03 AM

  Are there any established companies that design products like this? Every story I see about consumer friendly design is either the first product from a company that stopped being consumer friendly down the line, or the only product from a company that's now dead.

• by roland35 on 6/27/19, 2:20 PM

  That is a clever solution to a common problem with battery powered devices. Another benefit to the engineering side is that designing a custom battery is hard - you need to work closely with the battery vendor on the mechanical package and the electrical interface. The final battery may not have been available when the first prototypes were out! So having a AA option made it easy to test.

  With the battery products I have been part of developing we had a wire lead from the battery which made the mechanical interface more modular. This was not a handheld device however, so the trade-offs are different. Blade or similar contacts are more user-friendly and reliable for many insert cycles.

• by thevagrant on 6/27/19, 3:52 AM

  The last 'flagship' mobile phone with removable battery - the LG V20 did ok and had a diehard fanbase, but still mobile phone manufacturers dropped replaceable batteries as a feature. It certainly is done to force more sales and consumption in the market.

  In LG's case though, it backfired as their mobile marketshare dropped with each successor to the V20. I suspect they could have carved a large niche by evolving the V20 design and fixing the problems that plagued it. LG's repairable phones were a point of difference. The V30 and beyond were glued shut and offered very little differentiate themselves.

  Canon used to ship various models of pocket camera which offered a similar feature as shown by the original post (ability to use AA or AAA batteries depending on model). This to me was a practical feature but the market must have shown otherwise.

• by marapuru on 6/27/19, 7:56 AM

  This reminds me of the book "Ends." by Joe Mcleod. It manages to very well describe what the implications are of not taking the end of your product into account.

  Give it a read if you are interested in topics like planned obsolence or product design in general.

  http://www.andend.co/book

• by lpasselin on 6/27/19, 3:33 AM

  Any other durable design ideas like this?

• by keyle on 6/27/19, 3:14 AM

  Durable isn't timeless, that's for sure, for that product looks pretty average.

  What I'm more looking out for are companies that create sustainable products, with replaceable batteries and/or a return program that involves the recycling and proper disposal of those batteries/products.

• by gedassan on 6/27/19, 5:00 AM

  Gaming console hardware needs to support software from way back. That's one other example at least.

• by Invictus0 on 6/27/19, 11:24 AM

  The mobile phone was never a great place for durable design; the market was evolving extremely quickly. Durable design is for single function devices; things like axes and musical instruments and toasters and so on. Why would anyone want this product in 2019?