[Digitalis]

Manufacturers these days often intentionally build weak points into their to ensure regular product replacement.

Entropy is a big enough problem as things are, I doubt engineers are purposefully holding the door open for it.

[Rondec]

I'm really skeptical of that because it is very hard to engineer a weak point that doesn't turn into a huge warranty cost issue or a product quality reputation nightmare. The nature of engineering reliability is that that it's almost impossible to make a product that dies after a specific number of shots or years of use. Anything that decreases the expected lifetime of the product is going to increase the rate of failure before the warranty period and warranty repairs are horribly expensive for a company. Nor do product makers want any one specific weak point in the product because then the product gets a reputation for having a faulty XXX and people scream about product recalls. Sure, the company isn't going to engineer everything in the camera to last forever -- that makes the product too expensive -- but weakening some specific part to fail will kill both profits and sales.

For digital cameras, there really is no need to build a weak point into the device. The steady advancement of sensors, CPUs, and memory systems all but guarantees that you can make a digital camera that lasts 10-20 years but most users will replace the camera after a few years because the newer model has much better performance and features.

This issue with the iPod is that consumers want the impossible. Consumers love super compact, robust little devices for a low price. Replaceable batteries add bulk, increase the cost, and make the device less robust. A sealed unit is thinner, cheaper, and less likely to be damaged but it is also much harder to repair.

Batteries are an unavoidable weak spot in consumer devices. Worse, LiIon batteries have a really nasty trade-off between battery life per charge and battery lifespan. Charging the battery to a lower voltage can extend the lifespan of the battery from 400 cycles (a couple of years) to over 3,000 cycles (more that a decade of life) but it reduces the usage time per charge by 30%.

I agree.

That said, I do think companies build to a particular price point and when you do that, sometimes you have to use cheaper components which have shorter life spans. If you buy a K-1 it probably will last longer than a K-70 because Pentax used more expensive components in its creation. But that's very different from deliberately engineering weaknesses into your products to hope that they break and your consumers have to buy new.

(That would probably backfire anyway as if you became known as a company that made products that were prone to failure just out of warranty, people would tend to migrate to other brands. This really hurt American car brands and spurred the growth of Japanese car brands a couple of decades ago).

[photoptimist]

I agree.

That said, I do think companies build to a particular price point and when you do that, sometimes you have to use cheaper components which have shorter life spans. If you buy a K-1 it probably will last longer than a K-70 because Pentax used more expensive components in its creation. But that's very different from deliberately engineering weaknesses into your products to hope that they break and your consumers have to buy new.

(That would probably backfire anyway as if you became known as a company that made products that were prone to failure just out of warranty, people would tend to migrate to other brands. This really hurt American car brands and spurred the growth of Japanese car brands a couple of decades ago).

Exactly!

The other fact that makes deliberately engineering weaknesses into a camera so counterproductive is the pattern on usage by camera customers. A proverbial 90% of camera buyers only shoot occasionally -- maybe a 1,000 to a few thousand frames per year. But then there are the 10% of serious enthusiasts and pros who might shoot a thousand frames a week (or a day). Any engineered weakness that causes cameras to die in a few years for most users (i.e., all those casual users) would mean that the camera would die within a few months for the heavy users. But it's the heavy users that are probably the most profitable to the camera maker because they are the ones who buy more than just a kit lens. Any engineered weakness is likely to piss-off (and drive-off) the company's best customers.

Overall, companies do build to a price point and expected volume of usage. They will use cheaper components in low-end models that are less likely to attract heavy-duty users. But it would be almost impossible to engineer a drop-dead date into a product that doesn't cause a high rate of warranty claims.

[CoolMan8]

220400 at the moment and counting!

[joergens.mi]

220400 at the moment and counting!

cool man.


what are your motives?

[brightseal]

Should I be concerned at 34,723

[Mikesul]

Should I be concerned at 34,723

How is the rest of the camera? If everything looks fine it probably is at that shutter count.

[siegbert]

I believe, that most cameras had the same one problem, which causes their end:


After some time, there is a better one.

And after some more time, there is a much more better one.


That the natural end of most cameras I think. So I have stopped thinking about shutter count and enjoy taking pictures.

[brightseal]

How is the rest of the camera?

It seems ok though, I was being facetious.