Planned obsolescence is a source of a lot of frustration in consumer electronics.  You might imagine there is a boardroom full of executives smoking cigars and deciding how to make products stop working right after warranties expire. The reality is a much more complex sequence of failures, w...

Every now and then, articles get released stating how much higher the prices of products are than the cost of the parts that go into them. Most of these are based on woefully incorrect estimates, but they also ignore the full cost of bringing a product into market. As a consumer, it’s illuminat...