Between The Lines

How long should a TV last? In 2002, I was moving into a new apartment and was in the market for a TV. So I went to the local Costco and purchased a widescreen 46” Panasonic rear projection TV. In the giant Costco warehouse, the TV looked like a modest size, but when I got into my new apartment it was well mammothly large for the space. That said, the TV had a fairly sharp picture and had cool features like split screen, which allowed my kids to play video games on one half of the TV and freed up the other half to watch shows. It was a very cool TV…while it lasted.

Two weeks ago, I walked into the family room and noticed my 5-year old daughter sitting in front of the TV with 3D glasses. I thought to myself, wow, this is really cool, they are showing a show in 3D on PBS. I wondered how they could do that—did PBS assume every kid out there had 3D glasses, did they mail 3D glasses out as a promotion? I didn’t remember hearing anything about that from my kids and didn’t remember receiving it in the mail. It was about an hour later that, to my dismay, I discovered that every station was in 3D.

At first I hoped that someone in the house had accidentally worked their way through the many menu choices, messed with the green, red, blue convergence on the TV’s remote control. No such luck—something’s busted in the conversion circuitry so that the green projector is now stuck to the viewers' left--the TV’s busted (or maybe it is an evolutionary 3D’s a “feature” I didn’t see in the manual). Grrrr I had a mind to tear the TV down (or more likely have the technician do it), find the problem and then berate the engineers at Panasonic (or its suppliers) who made the defective part. Then I started shopping for repairman rates and adding the part costs reported by folks who reported on the Internet the same problem. Alas, it wasn’t looking cost-effective to repair.

Then at an editorial meeting a week or so ago, I was bemoaning my TV troubles to my fellow editors and I was a bit amazed that a few of them said “five years is a pretty good run for a TV.” I was a bit taken aback--five years is a good run for a TV? (I’m certainly glad I didn’t build an entertainment system around it).

Every product has a life expectancy and conspiracy theorists even hold that some companies design that into their products—built-in obsolesce. Of course in covering EDA and knowing the issues of debugging and verification, I know that just creating a design that works in silicon is a very difficult task. Then of course there are manufacturing/yield/test issues. But all these steps basically test that a chip works once it is designed, once it is manufactured and once it is packaged--then it gets shipped to the customer, who of course checks to see their systems work before shipping.

How do you test a product will work over time, how can you test how long it will work and how do you or should you convey that information to the consumer? I guess for a TV, it isn’t critical for a product to be tested for longevity, obviously for a pacemaker it is. I guess I’m a bit old fashioned and think something that has a lofty price tag, should indeed last—But I guess the question is for how long?