[JKCalhoun]

I just don't see "planned obsolescence" as a top-down directive.

Has any engineer come forward to say management told them to make specific changes to cause a thing to become obsolete in some period of time? I am not aware of any.

Rather what looks like planned obsolescence can generally be explained by other factors — not the least of which might just be the fickleness of consumers.

[otagekki]

Looks like a top-down directive to me. Just look at the lightbulb cartel.

From an engineering perspective, some designs simply don't make any sense if not for planned obsolescence: on a quite famous printer brand, the printer stops working after X pages printed [1]. You can fix that with soldering and chip reprogramming, but it may or may not be trivial. In the end, warranty is really short and is void the minute you open the product to see its guts, so it's not exactly for safety reasons.

Some people blame planned obsolescence on the consumer, but in fact that's just blame shifting. The truth is rent-seeking, at the expense of the environment.

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/4a965dc0-f27c-11db-a454-000b5df10...

[JKCalhoun]

Lightbulb cartel, I agree. But that's ancient history now.

Any current "cartel" would no doubt also have a Wikipedia page write-up. Maybe I should have said I am unaware of any current planned-obsolescence directive.

I was, to be sure, putting some of the blame on the consumer, there are other reasons though — like the always moving technology wavefront that makes composite-video "obsolete", SCSI "obsolete", etc.

Your printer example is the first I had heard about a printer designed to stop after 'n' prints. That sounds ripe for a class-action lawsuit.

[otagekki]

> Your printer example is the first I had heard about a printer designed to stop after 'n' prints. That sounds ripe for a class-action lawsuit.

AFAIK the printer manufacturer hasn't been affected by any class-action lawsuit (yet) regarding its design.

[eurleif]

>void the minute you open the product

That's not legal (in the US). https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/11/601582169...

[otagekki]

Legality indeed varies, but even if it's illegal hardware vendors easily away with it, and will still bill you the repairs if they want to repair it at all.

[convolvatron]

as someone who repairs things for myself and others its really hard to explain some of these failures as anything other than planned obsolescence. board-mounted fuses. sacrificial plastic gears in the drivetrain. chillers with the filler tube folded over and brazed.

the most charitable explanation is cost reduction. but $0.05 savings on a $500 retail item isn't helping anyone if it means my mixer lasts 1 year instead of 20 like the ones they used to make.

[jotm]

That explanation, as dumb as it seems, can be the actual and only reason for many designs. Barely functional heatsinks in laptops, using 0.1mm metal backsides in keyboards instead of 0.25 or something (the fucking thing bends and keys stop working!), plastic clips instead of screws, etc.

Yeah, we say "it's just $0.05, I'll gladly pay that for higher quality!". But somewhere, a new CxO is saying "we have saved $10,000,000 on production this year". And it's a big number, indeed.

But what about the users? Well, fuck the users. They will buy overpriced parts from the company or a new device from the company or the few competitors who do the same thing. They could be in cahoots, but it's more than likely they all decided saving tens/hundreds of millions a year is worth far more than a small number of disappointed buyers.

[nonrandomstring]

I think you're right. Planned obsolescence has perfectly sensible bottom-up explanations that revolve around the linear algebra and optimisation of MTBF in mixed source components. Indeed, planned obsolescence is no problem whatsoever if you have a "Right To Repair". Even better if you Design for Repair