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Matt Paxton
Recently I was confronted with one of my pet peeves – the inability, or at least, the difficulty of repairing something. I’m a tinkerer by nature, and also cheap, and I hate to toss something that I think could be fixed, if parts or some sort of repair manual were available. But the ever-accelerating “throw-away economy” makes fixing anything a real chore. Add to that the fact that so many things made today are of poor quality, and are designed for a relatively short useful life, so you’re forced to buy one again.
This came up when I started looking for a printed shop manual for a used car we bought a couple of years ago. Owners’ manuals don’t give much information beyond the recommended inspection or replacement intervals for such things as oil, transmission fluid and spark plugs. Heck, they sometimes don’t even tell you what part number spark plug you need. That means you have to pull one and hope that the numbers on it are still readable.
Anyhow, my search for a printed shop manual for a 2018 Subaru Forester turned up nada. Haines doesn’t print one any longer. I was able to get a d ownloadable P DF f actory service manual – very complete at 7,224 pages, but not as convenient as a printed book you can lay on the fender. It’s reasonably well indexed but will require printing out of the sections I need or setting up the laptop in my garage.
Our accounting department recently got a notice from our accounting software vendor saying that after the end of May, the 2020 version we’ve been using would no longer be supported, and that we needed to upgrade, at a significant cost. We expect this every three years – that’s been this supplier’s pattern for many years. But this year, we’re told that we need to migrate to their cloudbased online accounting package, or subscribe to their desktop version, which now has an annual fee.
Computer software is well into the planned obsolescence mode. In fact, it’s hard to find software which you buy and install on your computer, and use as long as you want before upgrading. This is a pattern with software today. Gone are the days when you’d buy a copy of Microsoft Office and use it for several years with no additional cost. Now, most software is by subscription, with annual or monthly fees, and it upgrades whether you want it or not. I really hate that system.
I’ll admit, I’ve always been slow to upgrade software. If I have something that works, I don’t feel the need to change just for change’s sake. I still prefer the older versions Word and Excel – the menus are more intuitive and better organized. I haven’t found much that the later versions of these software packages, which I do have, can do better.
Graphic design software is a big expense for anyone in our industry. Several years ago, the manufacturer of the package we use went from selling desktop-based software to so-called Software as a Service, or cloud-based software. Their rational was that you would always be working on the most up-to-date version. You would also be paying a monthly fee for each “seat” you used. I check the current cost, and it would cost us $55 a month for each of the six stations we have. That’s almost $4,000 a year!
We bought copies of the last desktop version that was sold, and we’ve acquired additional copies with the product keys off of the secondary market. This isn’t current software, but it’s served us well for a decade and continues to produce files that no printer has a problem with.
This idea of planned obsolescence, or the corollary, planned limited useful life is just foreign to me. In general, the quality of appliances, hardware, tools and many other items of daily use is much lower than even a decade ago. Much to my wife’s amusement, I take pride in keeping our 18-plus-year-old washer and dryer working, thanks to YouTube videos that show me how to fix them.
It’s pretty telling that nobody uses the Maytag repairman commercial pitch anymore, because very few products are marketed based on their durability. And that’s a shame.
