Planned obsolescence

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Overview

Planned obsolescence is a form of malicious product design that intentionally shortens the lifespan of a product, often in such a way that it fails soon after the legally mandated warranty period. In recent years, software and firmware updates have increasingly been used to augment planned obsolescence, for example by requiring replacement components to be validated by a whitelist.

In most cases of planned obsolescence, the producer of the product uses this malicious effect for one purpose: profit, and it makes quite a bit of sense if we look at it from the company's perspective. Imagine a company like Bic, who makes the Cristal ball point pen (since 1950). Let's imagine this company figured out a way to make a ball point pen that lasts "forever", perhaps someone's lifetime. This consumer never has to buy another pen (unless they lose it or break it), so Bic would make far less profit, and they might even find it hard to keep their employees working, which would cause a large chain reaction of things that need to change.

However, the above example is for a physical product. The other case we often see, and which is becoming far more relevant in the current day, are electronic products like apps, games, and services. Back in the time of CDs, a game could be purchased once and used again and again. Now, products such as that are far less common, as most electronic companies have strayed to a subscription based service (or free services that implement ads or both). However, it isn't the re-usable copy or the subscription copy that's the problem, it's often how the company goes from point A to point B. They make the physical, one time purchase copy, obsolete, and move to the new form where they can continuously charge the consumer so they make more profit.

It is important to point out that not all cases of planned obsolescence are bad. Companies making a profit isn't bad either, since they tend to pay their employees, which is how many of us make a living. The largest thing is when they take something good and perfectly functional and alter it in some way to make it work worse to encourage or force the consumer to buy their new version. This is what this page focuses on most: malicious planned

Famous Planned Obsolescence Cases

Cases

Year	Company	Product	Details
2017	Apple	iPhones	Apple admitted it had released software updates that could slow down older iPhone models when their batteries degraded. This was allegedly done to prevent unexpected shutdowns caused by aging batteries. This resulted in 3 settlements totaling over USD $600M
2018	Samsung	Galaxy Note 4	Italy’s antitrust body fined Samsung €5 million regarding software updates that allegedly slowed down certain Galaxy phones.
2016	HP	Printer	HP released firmware updates for "Dynamic Security", causing printers to show error messages or stop working if a non-HP-branded cartridge was installed. Multiple settlements were reached totaling over USD $5M between 2016 and 2020.

See Also

• IPhone planned obsolescence incidences
  

References

1. REDIRECT Self-destructive design