[Liquix]

so if the company has established they're willing to go that far to lock customers into their ecosystem and milk for $$$... it's not inconceivable that they also engineered (or chose not to fix) the cheap flash + chatty logging hardware failure for the same purpose.

[raxxorraxor]

I would switch brands instantly. This is a company that has no customer orientation and I have never seen a company recover from that (they might have financial success, but they will never create good products again). They probably will sell you expensive crap. This time the device was fixable, but the manufacturer worked against the user on that.

[tracker1]

So, you'd rather spend $12k+ to replace the entire system just to spite the manufacturer over making a minor patch to support a new tablet yourself?

[voyagerfan5761]

Shouldn't have to replace the aircon/heat-pump components, only the controller hardware. OP indicated that a new control system would be about $1700 (I assume AUD), or 14-17% of their 10k-12k estimate for the whole build.

Unless this scummy manufacturer also works with the aircon makers to lock those to their controllers. (That would be a great lawsuit to watch.)

[yuye]

Seems those tablets die not long after the warranty expires.

I'm willing to bet money on that it's planned obsolescence, especially considering their "technology keeps moving forward" bullshit.

[zeroflow]

I'm offering you a different viewpoint:

They made the analysis, how long the flash will live and saw, that it will make it out of the warranty period. Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change.

I've seen this myself before. One process step before release of the control module was a write cycle analysis to make sure the unit will live for at least 10 years (i think) before the guaranteed write cycles of the flash memory were consumed.

[audunw]

You're both missing one of the more likely explanation.. that nobody gave much thought about how long the device would last. "It's solid state electronics, it'll probably outlast the warranty anyway".. I can imagine an aircon company puts a lot of effort into analyzing the air-conditioning unit itself to make sure it lasts at least as long as the warranty, with good margin. But I can totally see them winging it on an external control device, which was perhaps even a project they outsourced anyway.

I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe. A device breaking right after warranty is not a good strategy to get repeat customers. It's also a huge risk if you miscalculated and you suddenly get a lot of warranty cases. You want a lot of margin there.

I've been involved in the design of a thing myself, where something the manufacturer hadn't clearly communicated - and we just barely caught - could have made the device die just around a typical warranty period for such a device. When we found out, of course we worked on this problem to make sure it didn't die prematurely.

[yuye]

Advantage Air doesn't produce ACs. They produce smart home solutions, including AC controllers. They're not winging it on an external control device, they're cheaping out on their main product.

Also, their claim is that they're not outsourcing. If you check their website, it claims everything is designed and manufactured in Australia.

Nevertheless, I'd have given them the benefit of the doubt if it were not for:

1. The only option being a full system replacement.

2. Communication protocol being encrypted.

3. App being locked down to certain hard-coded models.

None of these give me any hope that this is a well-meaning company that just has some issues.

Also, I think a company that sells a product most customers would only buy once or twice in their lives is not a company that expects many repeat customers.

[michaelt]

> Also, their claim is that they're not outsourcing. If you check their website, it claims everything is designed and manufactured in Australia.

Looking at pictures like [1] and [2]

I suppose it's possible they're making their own generic android tablet control panel,

designed and manufactured in Australia

and they just happened to add a camera, side-mounted USB charging connector, a headphone socket, microsd card slot, and a battery charge level indicator, loads of space for a battery that isn't present, a connector named VBAT

and also a chinese-language bootloader

but accidentally forgot to include the power and data connector they need, poking out the back of the device

so they had someone bodge it on afterwards by hand with a soldering iron

but IMHO it's more likely they mean

"manufactured in Australia from components sourced internationally"

and one of those components is a generic android tablet.

[1] https://www.myplacenz.co.nz/are-you-making-the-most-of-your-... [2] https://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/advantage-air-ezone-ta...

[yuye]

Should've added a bit more snark to that line to properly communicate that I absolutely don't believe their claims that everything is designed/made in Australia.

It's very obvious they just went for the cheapest bottom-of-the-barrel tablet Alibaba has to offer on one of their main products. I wouldn't trust this company to do anything competently.

[VBprogrammer]

Locking in the model numbers for me is particularly icky. They are leveraging the Android and therefore Linux and open source communities efforts to make this custom display which would have cost them an arm and a leg to have custom built with half the features - then turning around and sticking two fingers up at those communities.

[yuye]

This is the least surprising things to me, as this happens all the time.

Straight out of Microsoft's playbook.

[jerf]

I generally treat my tablets and phones very well. I wouldn't trust a tablet, at scale, to last much beyond three years. By "at scale" that means, say, a replacement rate of less than 10%.

By contrast ACs are on the decadal scale.

Integrating a tablet can't work. It's a dumb idea from the outset.

Similar hardware can work. There are touchscreen UIs that do last for a long time, especially on an AC unit where they're not getting used all the time. But they aren't tablets. In particular I'd finger the lithium ion batteries optimized for tablet-style usage as something you don't put into a system you want to last about ten years. Most of my tablets "die" when the battery just becomes unusable.

And you probably want an LCD chosen for robustness rather than being the cheapest possible high resolution display... again, plenty of LCDs can last for a long time, but the trifecta of "high resolution", "cheap", and "lasts a long time" is asking an awful lot for a fleet of systems. ("Cheap" and "lasts a long time" is, by contrast, readily available; it just won't be pretty. But it'll work fine.) And by "high resolution" I don't mean "retina display", just anything suitable for a tablet. Ye Olde 640x480 is plenty for an AC display, even in monochrome.

You want something pretty, give it a way for a real app to access it on the network. Except don't bother, really, because there's no way you're going to maintain that for 10 years either.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe.

I've been saying this for a while.

Consumers are insanely price-sensitive while also short-sighted. They'll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime.

Manufacturers know this and there's a race to the bottom on pricing. To get pricing as low as possible, quality and durability take a hit.

[wwtrv]

> They'll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime.

One problem for consumers is that often it's very hard to tell which is which. There is no guarantee that a $60 item won't just be overpriced garbage which is as bad (or worse if they spent much of that money on unnecessarily complex features that reduce reliability) as the $20 one, so always picking the cheaper item that superficially might seem good enough is not necessarily irrational.

(of course this doesen't necessarily apply to all brands yet)

[lupusreal]

> Consumers are insanely price-sensitive while also short-sighted. They'll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime.

It's so much worse than that... They'll buy a $500 blender that lasts 6 months if it comes with sufficient "smart" technology integration to make them feel like they're buying into a futuristic lifestyle that others can be jealous of.

Hence, home AC units controlled by fancy tablets (which are actually shit) instead of thermostats (analogue or even monochrome LCD digital units) on the wall. Because tracking down wherever your family members wandered off to with the control tablet is so much easier than simply turning a knob or pushing a button that never moves because it's screwed into place... It must be better, it's new and expensive....

[fmbb]

Never attribute to laziness or stupidity that which is adequately explained by the profit motive.

[oefrha]

Having worked with clients who apparently have little clue about technical details of what’s supposed to be their core tech, I’ll attribute to laziness or stupidity unless there’s ample evidence suggesting otherwise.

[Workaccount2]

>I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe.

Working in the electronics industry, I have never once heard anyone talk about this. Engineers love engineering, and if it was real their would be a whole field devoted to it. But there isn't.

Also, since this board is stacked with software guys...

Planned obsolescence is way easier to implement in software. How many of you have been asked to put a time bomb in a warrantied product?

Planned obsolescence is a term that lay people use to describe unfortunate breaking of things that are sufficiently complex to be considered "a magical black box". In reality it is just another apparition of Murphy's law.

[devbent]

Last time this topic came up on HN an engineer whose job it is to do these calculations and then re-engineer products not last as long popped into the thread

[imtringued]

I'm pretty sure what happens in reality is that someone makes a crappy product and then the warranty claims keep coming and because warranty claims cost them money, they keep improving the quality until the warranty claims stop coming. It's not that they wouldn't improve the quality, it's that the bean counters don't see it in their spreadsheets and thus no time is allocated to engineers building the next revision.

[yuye]

>Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change.

Opting out of a more durable solution when you know the device will break right after warranty is still planned obsolescence.

[muppetman]

Isn't that kinda the definition of planned obselence? You plan so that past you point you have to care, it could well die/become useless?

[TeMPOraL]

Planned obsolescence is when you purposefully design it to fail as soon as possible (but past any warranty period), to force repeat purchase.

[WhyNotHugo]

In other words, _Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity._

This device should not need to write to storage. It has to save settings when the user manually changes them, which can't be more than a few kilobytes per year. Any other writes are likely an oversight on the developer's part.

[nikau]

I'd guess they just didn't think of flash wear, like Tesla did in the early model s , and they got lucky they failed outside the warranty period.

[foobarian]

Everybody forgets the noatime thing at least once in their career