Not really. You can buy a hammer made out of metal, or a plastic one for half price. The plastic one will break long before the metal one would. Is the manufacturer "planning" for breakage? Or it is just a side effect of the product being cheaper?
Real planned obscolescence is making software that requires online authentication and then switching off the auth servers 3 years in so that the customers have to buy a new version. That's a deliberate action.
> Is the manufacturer "planning" for breakage? Or it is just a side effect of the product being cheaper?
It can be both.
I was in a hardware store looking at painter ladders and noticed many of them had the two sturdy metal ladders kept together by a piece of plastic. Pretty much everyone would think they were extremely durable, while actually the weak link would soon wear to make the entire product useless. Was it incompetence or planned obsolescence? I have no idea, still I wonder why I spotted the problem in 5 seconds straight although I am no engineer.
Real planned obscolescence is making software that requires online authentication and then switching off the auth servers 3 years in so that the customers have to buy a new version. That's a deliberate action.