In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is the concept of policies planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain predetermined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable.
Once regarded as a conspiracy theory, the rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as "shortening the replacement cycle"). It is the deliberate shortening of the lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements.
Planned obsolescence tends to work best when a producer has at least an oligopoly. Before introducing a planned obsolescence, the producer has to know that the customer is at least somewhat likely to buy a replacement from them, for example due to brand loyalty. In these cases of planned obsolescence, there is an information asymmetry between the producer, who knows how long the product was designed to last, and the customer, who does not. When a market becomes more competitive, product lifespans tend to increase.
For example, when Japanese vehicles with longer lifespans entered the American market in the 1960s and 1970s, American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products.
History
In 1924, the American automobile market began reaching saturation point. To maintain unit sales, General Motors executive Alfred P. Sloan Jr. suggested annual model-year design changes to convince car owners to buy new replacements each year, with refreshed appearances headed by Harley Earl and the Art and Color Section. Although his concept was borrowed from the bicycle industry, its origin was often misattributed to Sloan. Sloan often used the term dynamic obsolescence, but critics coined the name of his strategy planned obsolescence.
This strategy had far-reaching effects on the automobile industry, product design field and eventually the whole American economy. The smaller players could not maintain the pace and expense of yearly re-styling. Henry Ford did not like the constant stream of model-year changes because he clung to an engineer's notions of simplicity, economies of scale, and design integrity. GM surpassed Ford's sales in 1931 and became the dominant company in the industry thereafter. The frequent design changes also made it necessary to use a body-on-frame structure rather than the lighter, but less easy to modify, unibody design used by most European automakers.
The origin of the phrase planned obsolescence goes back at least as far as 1932 with Bernard London's pamphlet Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. The essence of London's plan would have the government impose a legal obsolescence on personal-use items, to stimulate and perpetuate purchasing. However, the phrase was first popularized in 1954 by Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer. Stevens was due to give a talk at an advertising conference in Minneapolis in 1954. Without giving it much thought, he used the term as the title of his talk. From that point on, "planned obsolescence" became Stevens' catchphrase. By his definition, planned obsolescence was "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary."
The phrase was quickly taken up by others, but Stevens' definition was challenged. By the late 1950s, planned obsolescence had become a commonly used term for products designed to break easily or to quickly go out of style. In fact, the concept was so widely recognized that in 1959 Volkswagen mocked it in an advertising campaign. While acknowledging the widespread use of planned obsolescence among automobile manufacturers, Volkswagen pitched itself as an alternative. "We do not believe in planned obsolescence", the ads suggested. "We don't change a car for the sake of change." In the famous Volkswagen advertising campaign by Doyle Dane Bernbach, one advert showed an almost blank page with the strapline "No point in showing the 1962 Volkswagen, it still looks the same".
In 1960, the critic Vance Packard published The Waste Makers, described as an exposé of "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals". Packard divided planned obsolescence into two sub categories: obsolescence of desirability and obsolescence of function.
"Obsolescence of desirability", also known as "psychological obsolescence", referred to marketers' attempts to wear out a product in the owner's mind. Packard quoted industrial designer George Nelson, who wrote:
Design ... is an attempt to make a contribution through change. When no contribution is made or can be made, the only process available for giving the illusion of change is "styling"!
Variants
There are several variants of planned obsolescence. They are listed in the order of increasing severity:
Contrived durability Contrived durability is a strategy of shortening the product lifetime before it is released onto the market, by designing it to deteriorate quickly. The design of all personal-use products includes an expected average lifetime permeating all stages of development. Thus, it must be decided early in the design of a complex product how long it should last so that each component can be made to those specifications. Due to natural degradation, most products will ultimately break down, no matter what steps are taken. Limited lifespan is only a sign of planned obsolescence if the limit is made artificially short.
The strategy of contrived durability is generally not prohibited by law, and manufacturers are free to set the durability level of their products. While often considered planned obsolescence, it is often argued as its own field of anti-customer practices.
A possible method of limiting a product's durability is to use inferior materials in critical areas, or suboptimal component layouts which cause excessive wear. Using soft metal in screws and cheap plastic instead of metal in stress-bearing components will increase the speed at which a product will become inoperable through normal usage and make it prone to breakage from even minor forms of abnormal usage.
For example, small, brittle plastic gears in toys are extremely prone to damage if the toy is played with roughly, which can easily destroy key functions of the toy and force the purchase of a replacement. The short life expectancy of smartphones and other handheld electronics is a result of constant usage, fragile batteries, and the ability to easily damage them.
Batteries Throughout normal use, batteries lose their ability to store energy, output power, and maintain a stable terminal voltage, which impairs computing speeds and eventually leads to system outages in portable electronics.
Some portable products highly relied upon in the post-PC era, such as mobile phones, laptops, as well as electric toothbrushes, are designed in a way that denies end-users the ability to replace their batteries after those have worn down, therefore leaving an aging battery trapped inside the device, which limits the product lifespan to its shortest-lived component.
While such a design can help make the device thinner, it makes it difficult to replace the battery without sending the entire device away for repairs or purchasing an entirely new device. On a device with a sealed back cover, a manual battery replacement might induce permanent damage, including loss of water-resistance due to damages on the water-protecting seal, as well as risking serious, even irreparable damage to the phone's main board as a result of having to pry the battery free from strong adhesive in proximity to delicate components. Some devices are even built so that the battery terminals are covered by the main board, requiring it to be riskily removed entirely before disconnecting the terminals.
The practice in phone design started with Apple's iPhones and has now spread to most other mobile phones with, as of 2022, the exception of Fairphone and Shiftphone offerings. Earlier mobile phones (including water-resistant ones) had back covers that could be opened by the user in order to replace the battery. On December 9, 2022, the EU Parliament reached an agreement to require, from 2026, manufacturers to design all electrical appliances sold in the EU (and not used predominantly in wet conditions) so that consumers can easily remove and replace batteries themselves.
Prevention of repairs
The ultimate examples of such design are single-use versions of traditionally durable goods, such as disposable cameras, where the customer must purchase entire new products after using them just once. Such products are often designed to be difficult to service; for example, electronics may have internal components coated in glue. Manufacturers may make replacement parts either unavailable or so expensive that they make the product uneconomic to repair. For example, Canon and some HP inkjet printers incorporate a replaceable print head which eventually fails. However, the high cost of a replacement forces the owner to scrap the entire device.
Other products may also contain design features meant to frustrate repairs, such as Apple's "tamper-resistant" pentalobe screws that cannot easily be removed with common personal-use tools, overuse of glue, as well as denying operation if any third-party component such as a replacement home button has been detected.
Front loading washing machines often have the drum bearinga critical and wear-prone mechanical component permanently molded into the wash drum, or even have a sealed outer drum, making it impossible to renew the bearings without replacing the entire drum. The cost of this repair may exceed the residual value of the appliance, forcing it to be scrapped.
Bosch, despite the up to 10-year availability of spare parts declared on websites, assembles in the popular MaxoMixx mixers an easily breaking plastic latch, refusing to sell the replacement latch to the user and instead proposing to replace the entire drive consisting of many elements as a single spare part, which is almost equivalent to buying a new device.
According to Kyle Wiens, co-founder of online repair community iFixit, a possible goal for such a design is to make the cost of repairs comparable to the replacement cost, or to prevent any form of servicing of the product at all. In 2012, Toshiba was criticized for issuing cease-and-desist letters to the owner of a website that hosted its copyrighted repair manuals, to the detriment of the independent and home repair market.
In Australia in 2021, the Productivity Commission released a report on the whether there were "significant and unnecessary barriers to repair for some products". The report concluded that these barriers did exist, and provided recommendations to the government on how to remedy the situation.
Programmed obsolescence In some cases, notification may be combined with deliberate artificial disabling of a functional product to prevent it from working, thus requiring the buyer to purchase a replacement. For example, inkjet printer manufacturers employ smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent them from being used after a certain threshold (number of pages, time, etc.), even though the cartridge may still contain usable ink or could be refilled (with ink toners, up to 50 percent of the toner cartridge is often still full).RTBF documentary "L'obsolescence programmée" by Xavier Vanbuggenhout This constitutes "programmed obsolescence", in that there is no random component contributing to the decline in function.