Phoebus Cartel (opens in new tab)

I would believe this if the cartel fined members based on the inefficiency of their lightbulbs relative to light produced (lumens per watt), and fined according to this.

Or allowed longer life bulbs if they met a lumen per watt efficiency target.

Or even if they added a minimum life to ensure that consumers got quality, and fined producers if they produced bulbs that were too low-life.

They didn't, they fined members who produced lights that lasted longer regardless of bulb efficiency.

Because the decision to limit bulb life to 1,000 hours had obvious financial benefits for cartel members, I think it's pretty generous to think that this policy was solely based on wanting what was best for consumers.

The Pheobus Cartel wasn't just about bulb lifespan, but also bulb price. They also used their power to increase the price of bulbs. The fact that they converged on a practical trade-off in terms of life span & energy costs doesn't change their anti-competitive nature.

One amusing tidbit not mentioned in the IEEE article I noticed while looking at some congressional testimony: the Scandinavian competitors apparently did not just undercut Phoebus, but signed up first to get Phoebus to bankroll construction of their lightbulb plant and then began undercutting them with it!

But the cartel colluded to prevent such innovation. The British monopolies commission effectively colluded with them by first decided that there should be a single lifetime as a standard: with that decision already made, then of course they could easily claim to have reached a decision based on the facts provided by the companies they were investigating.

And I would happily pay an extra $5 in electricity for a bulb that reduced my need to change them. Should we ban the iPhone because you could easily use a cheap Android instead?

True, one has always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs and I've done so myself to use in certain industrial situations. However, I'd contend that that has little or nothing to do with planned obsolescence.

Moreover, there's more than a whiff of the Phoebus Cartel still about today with light bulb manufacture. Let me give you an example: when compact fluorescent bulbs first came out some four decades ago, I installed many of them. The principal brands I bought were Philips and Wotan and the majority of them lasted well in excess of 10,000 hours. I recall losing track of the life of one low power bulb of ≈8 watts after it had passed 50,000 hours operation (that is, after having being in service for over 25 years and used between 4 and 5 hours per day over this time, eventually it was replaced not because it had failed but rather to replace it with a bulb of higher wattage).

Take the current situation: almost every compact fluorescent that I've bought in the last 10 or so years has only lasted about 1000 hours despite the fact that the packets they came in usually advertised their life to be a nominal 8,000 hours or so. The fact is that none of them ever reached anywhere near these published figures. To make matters worse, often these bulbs would break (usually around the base) and sometimes the coiled glass would fall to the floor (no doubt dispensing its small amount of Hg everywhere in the process).

Moreover, a while back, so called 'green' environmentally friendly compact fluorescent bulbs were all the rage. They were advertised as having less mercury and thus more environmentally sound. What a joke that turned out to be. All the Greenies loved them because they contained less mercury. Unfortunately, most never knew how the bulbs worked anyway and thus they never realized that reducing their mercury levels below a certain concentration would dramatically reduce the bulb's life to such an extent that the overall result was a net loss for the environment. Right, environmentally friendly bulbs actually had an even shorter service life (hence, Watt for Watt, they produced much more environmental e-waste over the long run)!

Clearly, all manufacturers were disingenuous by not stating the consequences of lowering the mercury levels in compact fluorescent bulbs. They deliberately played on the fact that consumers weren't cognizant of the facts, thus the lowering of manufacturing standards was a win for them as there were few complaints. Manufacturers not only made savings by including less mercury but also other manufacturing standards were lowered such as using lower grade capacitors and the maximum working voltages on capacitors and semiconductors were reduced to much closer (lower) tolerances which made these bulbs much more prone to failure from over-voltage spikes, etc.

In the end, many more bulbs were consumed than there should have been. Concomitantly, we've ended up with even bigger piles of electronics waste—and the net amount of mercury used was actually higher than it would have been if the bulbs had been designed to have a service life of >10,000 hours (as had been the case some 20 years earlier). Incidentally, the same unacceptable logic is now being applied in the manufacture of normal fluorescent lights† in that current tubes have a much, much shorter lifespan than those made 50 or so years ago).

Yep, it wasn't kosher to go around advertising the fact that 'our bulbs have a little more mercury but they will last you many times longer'. Right, manufacturers must have been laughing themselves sick over the fact that they could double-dip their profits by playing on the fact of the public's current, almost irrational, phobia over Element 80 and that reducing the amount of it in bulbs automatically led to vastly increased bulb sales. Moreover, they gloated even more when some governments made compact florescent bulbs mandatory but did not also introduce mandatory manufacturing standards to ensure their long operational life.

The overall net effect being bulb manufacturers scoring two wins whilst consumers and the environment both scored nil. Right, the incarnation of the Phoebus Cartel is alive and well.

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† Several years ago, I was involved in relocating a factory and the old site used T12-type fluorescent tubes the majority of which were made by Crompton Parkinson and were over 50 years old and still in good working condition!

We decided not to relocate those old lights and we replace them with new T8-type fluorescents of Eastern manufacture at the new site. These new tubes are now already starting to fail. The lifespan difference between the old and new types is so startling that I reckon it ought to be part of a study into changes into manufacturing techniques. These new tubes have to represent one of the most quintessential examples of planned obsolescence ever. Frankly, it's absolutely outrageous that this can happen.

Because we didn't get to that point? My Apple phones last 3+ years unless I break them, and only the ones I hold on to for closer to 5 years aren't still working entirely fine when I upgrade; usually all they'd need to keep working for another couple years is a battery replacement.

The hallmark of a Phoebus-cartel-style situation would be if smartphones from N years ago from multiple manufacturers were still going strong but newer phones were slower, or had crappier battery life, or broke down more often (consistently year-over-year). I'm not sure that's an easy comparison to make; go too far back in the space and you pass into the pre-iPhone, pre-Android era "smartphones" that were robust as hell but remarkably featureless relative to what came after.

That having been said, Apple has been sued over the planned obsolescence of its smartphones (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/08/apple-chile-planned-obs...)

Phones last years now although first party software updates are frequently only available for 1-2 years and apps eventually are made that require more recent android versions effectively forcing you to update in 5 years to have access to all possible apps. Games may be more aggressive in their requirements as well.

Yep, and the issue is that most people will run from the opportunity to make their relationship with technology more complicated. Most people don't care if you can't replace the battery on the new iPhone because they intend to replace it in 2-3 years. As sorrowing of a statement as it is to say, it's hard to get first-class citizens to care about issues that don't affect them. In other news, the earth is round and gravity pulls downwards.

Obviously, these laws will only apply to the tech sector, but it's a start.

The 30% commission has a long history. There are precedents going back to the early days of games consoles. Both the iTunes music store and Steam opened in 2003 charging 30% or very close to it (iTunes tracks were 99c so it doesn’t work out exactly).

It’s hard to argue the 30% in either of those cases were a matter of abuse of market power. Steam was struggling to establish itself against the incumbent distribution channels. The iTunes rates were negotiated with the major labels who were notoriously hard deal makers and very wary of online sales channels. They held all the cards is their negotiations with Apple and yet they seemed to think 30% was fair. So at that point I don’t think it’s possible to make a credible case that the 30% rate was extortionate.

If 30% was abusive, we’d expect to see it act as a brake on adoption of the App Store by developers, but is there really any evidence for that? On Android have any of the smaller stores tried to differentiate on price at lower than 30% to attract developers, or has Google tried to woo iOS developers with lower rates? If 30% was abusively high we’d expect to see something like that happening.

Or is it more that "Apple stuff" is not directly substitutable with "Google stuff", and that Apple has a monopoly on "Apple stuff"?

Whereas incandescents were trading lifespan versus efficiency. You can make 5000 hour incandescents, but your "60 watt" 5000 hour lamp will put out far less light, so it costs the same to run but it's not bright enough, then you buy the 100 watt version, now it's bright enough but you're paying two thirds more money to run it!

A hypothetical 5000 hour incandescent only makes economic sense if your electricity is basically free (greedily maybe it makes sense if you don't pay for it, e.g. rental inclusive of electricity bills) whereas a Dubai lamp makes sense regardless of electricity price, because over long enough periods the increased lifespan saves you money anyway.

None has lasted even half a year here, which is shorter than incandescent bulbs. It is all a big fraud.

But then it's also not unlikely that other people got the same YouTube recommendations, after which they did some online research and posted interesting links to HN. Or maybe the causation was the other way around. Who knows?