Do you agree with the practice of planned obsolescence?

[nanarchy]

Faelco said:

Planned obsolescence is bullsh*t and a pure conspiracy theory. The reality is that if you want an electronic device to work for life (or a long time), you have to pay a huge price. You don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a TV? Then expect some of the parts to fail after a while. That's basic engineering. You can't put anything of an unnecessary quality in a product because it costs a lot. So you put something of an acceptable quality instead. And the more parts there are in a product, the more chance it has to fail one day or another. So today's cars full of electronic devices are a lot more likely to stop working than cars from a long time ago with no electronics and a lot fewer parts. And this without mentioning the more likely production defects (more parts, more production steps, more likely defects). And for the "warranty conspiracy" a lot of people talk about too to "prove" the planned obsolescence, it's just as easy, companies run failure tests for each products. You have a failure spike at the beginning of the product life cycle (production defects), then almost no failures for a while, and then a new spike when you attain the end life of some parts. The goal of the warranty is to insure the first spike and part of the "almost no failures" period, but not the last spike (or it would cost a lot of money to the companies). So yes, your product is more likely to fail right after you buy it and after the end of the warranty.

All of this comes from production costs and engineering issues, nothing to do with the so-called "planned obsolescence". There is no conspiracy to kill your product after a planned period in order to force you to buy a new one. And the fact that a lot of people are stupid enough to buy an iPhone every year because the camera has 1MP more, even when their current phone still works, has nothing to do with planned obsolescence either, it's just peer pressure and pure stupidity. I've had some products (TV, computer...) for 10 years and they still work, the only reason to change is if we want something better and more modern, not because of a planned obsolescence.

planned obsolescence exists. It isn't so much about failing products though, it is about support lifecycles. parts are produced for X time, software updates are available for X time. capacitor quality with known lifetimes because that is all they need them to last. Smartphones are the classic model with planned obsolescence, try getting parts or software updates for a 3 or 4 year old phone from most manufacturers, hell many you will struggle getting an update or parts after just 1-2 years.

and no this isn't some conspiracy theory, it is simply how you engineer and produce a product, especially iterative products, you determine lifetime and usually at release you already know what will be in the next version that will make the current one obsolete and usually you even know the release date.