Did you know how the "Sony Timer" works within your Sony made computer?

Question

I would say that Sony is probably the most advanced electronics company in the world. Why? Because they are able to conceal the "Sony Timer" within most of their products and no matter how many of their products you take apart, you just would not be able to find out how this ingenious piece of technology works.So what on earth am I on about? Well the Sony Timer enables Sony's products to conveniently time out either when the warranty runs out or when Sony brings out a new line of that product. Now this is probably not common knowledge - a search for "Sony Timer" in English a while ago brought up no results - but have a look now on Google and Yahoo! (you get more useful results for this on Yahoo)You will start to realize the scary truth when you do a search for "Sony Timer" in Japanese on Google - 350,000 results! You can even find a full explanation of Sony timer in Wikipedia in Japanese and English.　

Answer 1

It's a load of codswallop! It's a Japanese Urban Legend. Many electrical goods manufacturers have been doing it for years. How many things have you had which you used every day and they failed just a month or a week or a day, even, after the guarantee ran out?

Many manufacturers do a LOT of research into component failure. They know how consistent their parts are and exactly the mean failure rate. Their object is to keep a steady flow of sales not to make things that last forever! A failure rate has been built in to light bulb manufacture for years - that is an accepted fact - and the same thing applies to many other articles. Whether Sony do it with any of their products is anyone's guess, but it's likely that they do because everyone else does. To grace it with the name of "The Sony Timer" and to pretend that its a very sophisticated piece of secret electronics that acts on a signal from Sony is just plain ridiculous!