Planned obsolesce isn't real - stop perpetuating the myth that it is

Hardware

Look peeps, here's the thing. I've worked overseeing full lifecycle consumer electronics product
development for about 8 years now for everything from scrappy start-ups to Fortune 500
companies. I see this phrase "manufactured obsolesce" or "planned obsolesce" bandied around all
the time lately with a million people jumping on the bandwagon (who have never worked on a
HW/SW product in their life) adding their own expert anecdotes about how companies MUST have
this nefarious subterfuge where we are always trying to develop product that has an inherently
limited life span.

EXCEPT IT ISN'T A REAL THING

No product company I have directly worked for, contracted or partnered with, or ever even heard of
someone working for has ever had some explicit plan to roll a feature into the roadmap that the
product has to break at some arbitrary time in the future. It just doesn't exist. Manufacturers (if
we're talking the actual manufacturing facilities) don't do this, PD teams don't do this, Product
Managers don't do this, Engineering Managers don't do this. No-one actually developing, designing,
engineering, roadmapping, project managing, or manufacturing consumer electronics f**king does
this.

You consumers coined this term to describe what basically amounts to the aggregate effects of a
lack of continuity planning for post-release lifecycle support. Zero people in any product team I have
worked on in my life have ever submitted a feature request or incorporated an aspect of planning
into our stage-gate of Agile or whatever project methodology to ensure that the "product will
someday become obsolete". Can you imagine writing a user story for bullshit like that?

"As a consumer, I want to buy a gratuitous replacement product at an arbitrary future time"

No. It doesn't happen. That's also why there isn't any kind of "proof" of it like internal company
memos or product planning meeting phone call transcripts getting leaked. Okay, now that we're past
that part, let's address the real question...

Why aren't product companies actually intentionally doing this?

It doesn't make sense from a P&L standpoint. Market strategy around building long-term brand
equity and engineering products that hit a pre-defined point of obsolescence are diametrically
opposed objectives. When the product does break or is rendered non-functional, you've not only
opened the door to an angry customer but additionally afforded them the opportunity to purchase a
product from a competitor. Not a great plan. Better to simply expand the ecosystem of offerings
(higher/lower product tiers, accessories, etc.) or qualify neighboring market segments to expand
NPI/NPD into.
Manufacturing-impacting change requests and feature updates introduce huge risks. There's nothing
product managers hate more than a million CRs. An ideal project is tightly scoped and constrained at
it's proposal stage and released with as few changes as possible. To a Product Manager, the ideal
product is one that it has a suuuper long lifecycle in the market that requires as few running changes
as possible to support. Changes = money + complexity + re-certification requirements + auditing +
time + uncertainty

Companies just aren't well enough organized to pull off something like this. Most product releases
I've seen were complete shit-shows. Sometimes they were shit-shows with fancier names attached
to vendors and lots of international travel and big globally distributed teams but they are always
shit-shows. To think a company can competently assess such a nuanced aspect of line planning years
past a product's release while still in the scope + dev stage is completely crazy.

Of course, consumers will cherry pick a few things to bolster the remnants of any argument that
"planned obsolescence" could still ostensibly, maaaaybe be a thing in certain industries but even
those areas are a stretch and usually better explained by factors like QA/QC/logistics that only make
it look on the surface like some intentional plan to fleece consumers. Let's look at the two brought
up the most.

Ink Cartridges

Ah ink cartridges. The poster-child of planned obsolescence. It's absolutely true that margins are
huge on this kind of product (often >90% when considering COGS vs. retail) but the fervor over
"cartridges not using all the ink they have" comes down to a QC problem. When a ink supplier sells a
cartridge to you, they have to have some semi-reliable method of understanding how much ink is
left. The most reliable solution to is track the total surface area of the black and color ink microdots
placed on a page. Use of sensors can certainly reduce some level of accumulated error in actual ink
displacement but then you're looking EBOM cost increases. In general, trying to err on the side of
using as much of the available ink as possible will only increase the likelihood of a print starting to
look like shit (thereby pissing off a customer). General rule with product? Always better to risk
charging a customer more money than exposing them a situation in which have a low-quality
experience with a product. So ink cartridge manufacturers err heavily on the side of releasing
products that have a 99.9% chance of exhibiting ideal print quality within the product lifespan. No
surprise.

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iPhones/Smart Phone in General

I know, I know. The CPU throttling thing. So, here's the problem with lithium battery
composition...it's incredibly dangerous once it's in thermal runaway. Battery manufacturers basically
take every possible (reasonable) precaution to ensure a battery never encounters conditions that
would result in thermal runaway. Older, degraded lithium ion batteries in phones are more likely to
have been subjected to extensive vibration, shock, and heat cycling over time (lowering the
mechanical reliability of separators that prevent internal shorting) which is compounded by chemical
changes that contribute to overall instability. Allowing an old phone that has likely been through
hundreds of recharge cycles to make the same current draw demands it did at the beginning of its
product lifespan is not just likely to shorten the product life further, but also leave it in the most
dangerous condition possible. Add to the fact that using an old phone to access modern mobile apps
and webpages means that it likely to spend more time in a high CPU state than it even could have
originally and you now have a ticking time-bomb strapped to your face. Why do you think Apple
doesn't care about throttling old laptops? Do people hold laptops up to their faces where a small
explosion would result in death? Do people carry laptops centimeters away from their privates? No.
Think guys.

Anyway. Please stop the clamor about this fake thing so many of you have latched onto to describe
the aggregate effects of business and product processes geared towards making a reliable profit, not
killing people, and maintaining a reasonable quality level.

Jawaban thread

Maybe it isn't planned but it is a byproduct of building stuff as cheap as you can get away with. 50
years ago when they built a toaster it was made to last as long as possible. Now an item is built to
match a price range while being as profitable as possible. It's one big algorithm and if you think
manufacturers aren't using it to their advantage then you are clueless. Companies know quite well
how long something will last with normal use. If resales are down, cheapen next batch to shorten
that rebound time.

This. People are trying to use the ideal of capitalism/manufacturing to imagine a company willing
to make THE BEST PRODUCT POSSIBLE IN ORDER TO WIN IN THE MARKET (big booming godlike
voiceover)

That hasn’t been the case in decades, bar a few luxury brands. Everyone is trying to cut every
corner possible to maximize profit. In that scenario, I’m honestly shocked things work as well as
they do for as long as they do.

It’s not planned obsolescence; it’s “holy shit it works, ship it before it dies!”

The phone debate baffles me: when a laptop gets bogged down by newer-operating systems and
larger, more processor intensive programs, we’re annoyed we have to spend more money, but we
know it’s not planned obsolescence, it’s the technology lifecycle.
College textbooks. Clear, deliberate planned obsolescence (the policy of "updating" the textbook
from year to year with formatting and layout changes that make page numbers not match up, and
rearranging the end-of-chapter problem sets).

The lack of feature- and security-oriented OS updates to Android phones, especially in

combination with locked bootloaders, is another instance of planned obsolescence (vendor won't
invest to keep product up-to-date *and* directly blocks the end user from doing so themselves).

Eliminating the availability of service parts for appliances and other products, while designing new
ones to intentionally use different parts, ensures that products can only be serviced for so long
before they have to be replaced with a newer model. This is especially appalling when buying a
product toward the end of the product lifecycle when they're eliminating parts in the service
channel - the first time any part of it breaks, it has to be replaced. In fact, also sprach Wikipedia:

“In 2015, as part of a larger movement against planned obsolescence across the European
Union, France has passed legislation requiring that appliance manufacturers and vendors
declare the intended product lifespans, and to inform consumers how long spare parts for
a given product will be produced. From 2016, appliance manufacturers are required to
repair or replace, free of charge, any defective product within two years from its original
purchase date. This effectively creates a mandatory two-year warranty.”

Planned-obsolescence is largely a myth.

I'm an engineer, and sure, we often design things to some minimum spec. It could be tougher,
stronger, and last longer. For example, you could design a bridge to last over a hundred years. But
a lot of bridges are torn down to widen roads, increase clearance, add a rail system, or other
feature. And it's generally stupid to plan that far in the future. So, a typical bridge is designed to
last 30 years. Anything longer is a bonus, and is desirable. And if you can spend an extra 10% and
get several more years out of it, you might get approval to spend the money. But generally, you
plan for a minimum, and don't waste money making it stronger than it needs to be.

In devices, this means that a phone might be designed to last 2 years. Anything more is a bonus,
and sometimes they do make them more future-proof. And it does make those phones more
costly.

But companies do not want to be known for having phones that die in 2 years. It reduces their
brand value, and makes their customers angry. They don't do that on purpose, because it's bad for
business, and people would stop buying their crappy phones.
What actually happens is other tech passing up the hardware. Advances to Android/iOS, advances
in cellphone radio technology, new software interfaces, increased bandwidth, higher resolutions,
and other factors besides the phone.

It's worth keeping in mind that planned obsolescence is one of those things that some groups have
a tendency to over exaggerate. It implies malice, the idea that when products break they must do
so because of some consumerist ulterior motive. That from an engineering perspective there is
nothing wrong with the product it's just had one critical component deliberately made shitty so
the whole product breaks earlier than it should and needs replaced.

In many cases it's not true, instead it's simple economics. Why make a heavy duty cast iron 30-
year warranty toaster that costs $1,500 when the technology exists to stick a perfectly useable
plastic one on Walmart shelves for $15.

Is it possible that companies are intentionally making terrible products so we buy more? Sure.. but
it seems like a really short sighted marketing plan to me, I don't know about you but I tend not to
keep buying the stuff if it's properly terrible.

What's more likely is that for some technologies, things that aren't particularly complex or exciting
but just need to perform a basic function, the general population don't give a damn about getting
a quality product. It's not 1945, I couldn't care less about how fancy my toaster is. Does it produce
toast without burning my house down? That'll do. This causes material and manufacturing costs to
get pushed into the ground, cheapest one to meet the very low requirements wins. That in turn
has only one result, throw away products that don't last as long as stuff from years ago.

It's perhaps a bad thing from an environmental stand point but it's a fairly unavoidable part of
reality. Stuff becomes boring and ordinary, ordinary stuff doesn't command premium prices and
it's premium prices that make quality products possible.