graceful degradation: the opposite of planned obsolescence

Not this particular example, maybe, but the concept of a device remaining usable in failure runs counter to planned obsolescence.

Not necessarily, if the point of failure is the battery connect then this is able to continue until complete failure. It’s the opposite of one way planned obsolescence is done of putting the expected point of failure in a position where it is no longer operable at all or repairable

This concept is infact compatible with planned obsolescence. You can design things that break overtime on purpose, have that thing still work, just work not as well over time.

What do you mean "nothing to do with"? The title literally says "the opposite of planned obsolescence", which is planning the failure of a device. This is showing the planned continued use of a device when parts of it fails.

Yes, you could have both ideas in the same product: it retains some functionality as it fails, but it fails in a planned way to ensure it's lifespan is short enough.

And oddly, the example of the flashlight isn’t even an example of either. Support for heterogeneous batteries is a feature, but it’s a stretch to call it “degradation”. It’s not like batteries fail randomly before they run out of juice.

I feel like the opposite is your multifunction refusing to scan because it needs ink.

I'd argue that planned obsolescence is about designing something to break early and shorten its useful life, while graceful degradation is about designing things that are resilient, that work even after being broken, to give them as long a useful life as possible.

In that vein, the flashlight is a useful analogy even if you could argue it's not an exact example - it works when it power source is at full, it works when it has fewer power sources, it works when it has less energetic power sources, it just tones down its output to match the power it has available.

Apple, on the other hand, went out and said "if you don't buy a new phone we're going to make your old phone run slower". I think the battery life was just an excuse - did Apple really think its customers would rather have a slower phone than a phone with shorter battery life? Sounds ridiculous.

If you want a better example of graceful degradation in technology, think about solar panels. Solar panels gradually become less efficient with age - a 20-year-old solar panel is working at about 80% of its original efficiency. And for high efficiency needs, like powering a house where you have limited space to put solar panels, 80% might not be good enough anymore. But a solar panel that works at 80% is totally functional for other uses where less power is needed, so you can repurpose it and swap it out. And as long as somebody doesn't drop a rock on the panel and break it, it can keep going for decades more.

Less efficient panels can be repurposed for systems that need less power. Older computers can get new operating systems and be repurposed for less demanding uses. Some things can be repaired indefinitely, and some can't, but even things that gradually and inevitably decline in efficiency can be repurposed instead of being discarded. That's the sort of resilient design we need for a sustainable future.

It does extend the life of the device though. If your connectors/wiring/bulb fail anywhere on a single circuit flashlight (which most are) then your flashlight is dead. This flashlight has separate bulbs and a separate connection/port for each battery due to the non-sequential layout, so over time if any of them fail the others still function and the flashlight isn’t a total loss.

It rendered devices almost unusable, rather than just dim the backlight. And as you said, that was a consequence of other fuckery, so they rightly got flak for it.

It's not about the planned obsolescence of the flashlight, but of the batteries.

Suddenly, I don't need to buy a new pack of batteries if just one stops working.

Apple got grief because the processor can work at full speed even without a battery and works very well on Linux, but Apple chose to throttle back on OSX.

The proper term isn't graceful degradation, but fault tolerance.

It just describes how many core systems or components can fail before the device itself stops working.

For example, a jet will have multiple redundancies for almost all major systems which allows many of them to fail in the air without causing the plane to crash or force an emergency landing.

That's how you end up with Frankenstein scope creep.

Sometimes escalators also become meat grinders though. Less graceful.

"Escalators temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

Escalators are usually not safe to use when broken. So this is a good example of the idea in a spherical cow sort of way, but not practically.

Thanks, Mitch.

Don't put yourself down describing your D-Cell as a AAA

TL;DR: Beauty in imperfection. Not too relevant.

I assume there are either voltage sensors to detect which batteries are installed in order to control the light intensity, or there are multiple individual LEDs attached to the individual batteries.

Watt are you talking about, don't be so resistant to the idea. Have you tried meditation? Ohmmm

It could be related to battery position, rather than purely electrical characteristics. The spaces for AA and AAA appear to be keyed for the cell diameter. Since everything is the same, electrically, except for the mAh, you can probably control the LED driver by using basic position sensing on the cell locations with minimal components and efficiency cost. An LTC3090, for example, could be used with relatively simple voltage dividers to adjust the ratio on the Vin and Vctl pins.

Batteries wired in series increase the voltage provided. The example in the OP us just a battery whose LEDs run at anything from 1.5V to 6V and accepts both AA and AAA batteries. It's not a foil to planned obsolescence, it's just smart design. It could still be made with the same design, but purposely use LEDs that die sooner, in which case it's smart design and planned obsolescence.