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by otagekki 1488 days ago
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...
2 comments
JKCalhoun 1487 days ago
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.

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otagekki 1487 days ago
> 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.

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eurleif 1488 days ago
>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...

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otagekki 1488 days ago
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.
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