Planned Obsolescence

I was reading through this week’s collection of consumer ranting and raving over at The Consumerist site when I noticed a posting about a class action suit against Dell Computers, claiming that the company has deliberately designed its computers to fail and require expensive repairs. This is said to include cooling systems that don’t, power supplies that fail much sooner than industry standards, and motherboards that won’t last, along with other interesting design flaws than the plaintiffs claim were inserted into the design on purpose. I was immediately transported back to the early years of the new millennium and the first laptop computer I ever purchased – also a unit from the Dell Inspiron line – which had exactly this set of problems…

It’s probably worth noting that I initially blamed a number of the issues I was having with the computer on Windows Millennium Edition (often pronounced as “Windows meeeeeee” by people who were plagued by it, since it was widely believed that sheep could have created a better operating system). It was only after it became clear that the thing was overheating for no apparent reason AND the motherboard was failing that I got it looked at and discovered that the entire machine was a complete pile of crap. Even worse, I had failed to take out the extended warranty, thinking that (as is most often the case) the computer would either work for the two or three years I would keep it or fail right out of the box, in which case the manufacturer’s original warranty would suffice. I hadn’t counted on the machine being designed to fail on the ninety-first day in service, or at any rate, the day after the warranty expired…

This led me to referring to the product as the “Expiron” for a number of years, or more commonly the “Dell Doorstop” model, because after ninety days or so the only possible use for this machine was to wedge the door open. As bad as it sounds, however, this was not the worse computer I worked with during that period. In the first year of our consulting firm’s operation, the Senior Partner acquired a number of no-name PC clones (desktop machines, not laptops) from a local shop that built them from bulk components. They were extremely generic machines, but they functioned acceptably for a year or so – until one of them quite literally burst into flames one afternoon…

When I showed the (now charred) wreckage to our usual repair people they were astonished. “We always thought that ‘crash and burn’ was just a figure of speech,” the lead repair guy told me. They were able to recover a surprising amount of data off the singed hard drive, and we had backed everything important up anyway, so the event was more of an operating loss than an actual disaster. But we were unable to get any restitution from the store that sold us these incendiary lemons, because by the time our computer caught fire the shop had gone out of business and no one we could reach had a forwarding address for the owners…

I’m not going to do any better on this class action suit, either; they’ve restricted the class to owners of other models, and in any case you have to have had your Dell repaired by the company in order to qualify. If the plaintiffs here are successful, however, I’d anticipate a flood of other Dell customers suing for damages incurred due to the failure of other Inspiron models, as well as pain and suffering caused by lost data, failed classes, missed deadlines, lost business, and anything else we can think up. I don’t know how the company will play this one, but if the allegations are true, it’s going to be a very long winter for Dell – and anyone who owns part of the company…