Another epic fail for the free market
Dumb bitch in the notes arguing planned obsolescence is necessary to keep costs down,
I thought planned obsolescence was to prevent your phone from just suddenly turning off and never working again? Like it’s meant to be an “oh, my thing isn’t working, I should invest in a new one soon.” Kind of thing?? Like shits gonna break either way, I just thought this let us know like a month earlier than it would otherwise.
I mean… that’s kind of what they want you to think?
Sure, throttling your phone’s cpu so that the battery doesn’t wear down faster is certainly… a thing that’ll extend battery life… but, uh………… Hey, why don’t we just allow customers to replace their old batteries, you know, just like batteries were originally designed to do?
This extends far beyond phones/computers/etc as well. I recall, there’s light bulbs that exist from around the time of their invention that can still burn to this day. But companies only manufacture light bulbs that degrade and burn out over a few years, so that they can keep selling more light bulbs and turn a profit.
There’s a lot of examples of this, really. But, no, the main purpose of this is simply to make people continually have to replace their old “““broken”““ products for new ones, when the only reason they break to begin with is because they purposefully build in deficiencies that cause the product to degrade over time. It’s capitalism, baby
My mom had one vacuum cleaner all through our childhood. That first generation of vacuum cleaners was made to a very high standard because the companies were trying to convince people who had never seen one to buy them. Now, unless you buy the very high end models, they break in five years.
Can confirm, once helped my dad paint a client’s house interior and needed to vacuume after due to all the sanding we did. Dad’s shop vac would have taken us hours to clean since it was made for small messes and not whole carpets. Dad dug out the client’s home vacuum (with permission) which was this ancient heavy metal kirby from the 70s and holy shit not only did it still work but it had the strongest suction I have ever seen in a vac and it was that day that really hammered into me that planned obsolescence was A Thing.
I can literally go to a junk mall, but a 1920s sewing machine, oil the moving parts, replace the rusted needle and sew on that damn thing for the rest of my life.
And if one part or piece breaks, literally takes the mechanical knowledge of a 3yr old with plastic tools to fix it. I can access every part of that machine and fix it with a screwdriver and needle nose pliers. No special screws so only a “””professional””” can fix it. No parts that can be “so hard to fix you might as well buy a new one”
Corporations CAN make functioning lasting products. They just choose not to.
