Short Design Lives
In general, entry-level products—those at the lowest end of the price range fulfilling a certain specification—will tend to have shorter design lives than more expensive products fulfilling the same function, since there are savings to be made in using designs that are cheaper to implement, or, conversely, costs to be passed onto the customer in engineering to provide a safe margin leading to an increased working life. This economic truism leads to the phenomenon of products designed (or appearing to be designed) to last only so long as their warranty period.
Read more about this topic: Design Life
Famous quotes containing the words short, design and/or lives:
“It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the quilts I had found good objects—hospitable, warm, with soft edges yet resistant, with boundaries yet suggesting a continuous safe expanse, a field that could be bundled, a bundle that could be unfurled, portable equipment, light, washable, long-lasting, colorful, versatile, functional and ornamental, private and universal, mine and thine.”
—Radka Donnell-Vogt, U.S. quiltmaker. As quoted in Lives and Works, by Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson (1981)