Planned Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is the practice of designing or marketing a product so its useful life is shorter than it could be, for reasons serving the seller rather than the owner. The term covers three distinct things run together in popular use, and separating them matters.

Genuine engineering compromise is not obsolescence at all: every product trades durability against cost, weight, or price, and a part built to outlast the rest of the assembly by a wide margin is usually a sign of over-engineering, not virtue. Psychological obsolescence is real and well documented — fashion cycles, seasonal releases, and styling changes that make a functional product feel outdated, driving replacement through desire rather than failure. Deliberate lifetime limitation — a component engineered to fail on a schedule — is the strongest and rarest claim, since it requires evidence of intent, not just a short lifespan.

The usual exhibit for the strong version is the Phoebus cartel: manufacturers of incandescent light bulbs agreed in the 1920s and 1930s to cap bulb life at around 1,000 hours and fined members whose bulbs lasted longer, an agreement established through surviving cartel records rather than inferred after the fact — one of the few cases where the Ground Truth of intent is documented at all. Even here the reading is contested: a 1951 UK Monopolies Commission inquiry rejected it, holding that a shorter-lived filament burns hotter and yields more light per watt, making 1,000 hours a defensible compromise between efficacy and lifetime. Nor is it the only documented case — Epson was prosecuted in France in 2018 over printer chips that declared cartridges and waste pads spent before they were. Most accusations of the same pattern — batteries, appliances, the general sense that things used to last — lack anything close to that standard, and are usually Plausible Mechanism doing the work a citation should: a short lifespan is consistent with a conspiracy story and equally consistent with ordinary wear, cost engineering, or the Survivorship Bias behind "they don't make them like they used to," which forgets every early appliance that already failed.