Planned obsolescence is part of product development. Why does Apple make it so difficult to change the battery on an iPod or iPhone? Because they don’t design them to be upgradable or maintainable for years and years. They are designed to be thrown away and replaced with the newest version. Even if they were designed to be upgraded forever, at some point, other technologies will advance to the point where it is no longer compatible or can’t be easily and affordably upgraded. Like networks going from 3G to 4G or maybe MP3s disappearing as a listening format altogether.
All planned obsolescence means is that products have a useable lifespan before they wear out, become outdated or incompatible with other technologies. Manufacturers consider all those things when planning new designs. And sometimes, they add little things to make the consumer want to upgrade that much faster.
If goods manufactured in China/ Rest of Asia are cheap because of the labour and inferior quality...
This is untrue. Replacing an iPod battery isn’t easy, but Apple doesn’t make it impossible. The latter is planned obsolesce. The former is “Something I own broke and I don’t want to pay to fix it.”
You might want to meditate on this a bit, grasshopper.
If products don’t “develop” over time scales shorter than their physical lifespan to drive sales by making the earlier product obsolete… why do they “develop” at all from what was ostensibly a fully-functional stage?
When discussing “planned obsolescence” for electronics, what one is usually referring to is the software that works with it. In the case of an iPod, new hardware is released every year. So fewer and fewer apps will be compatible with older hardware. The older hardware isn’t “obsolete” as its still perfectly capable of running the old software. But people complain because it doesn’t also run the new stuff even though, “it’s only a few years old!” But the software was never designed to work with the older iPod.
Again, that’s not “planned obsolescence.” It is the march of technology. “Planned obsolescence” is more or less a myth (though I’m sure we could come up with one or two real life examples).
I think you’re kind of muddling around in a semantic circle.
Perhaps “planned obsolescence” in the sense that a product is designed to wear out or become useless and thus disposed of is pushing into myth territory.
But how much different is it from a product like a cell phone, which we know from experience can last 5, 8 or even 10 years on a physical/functional level (so, no “planned obsolescence” built into its structure)? If the day you stand in line to be the first to buy this marvel, and Apple or Samsung already has an engineering prototype of an upgraded model that will make your new toy effectively useless… isn’t that also “planned obsolescence” at a more meta level? I don’t think there’s an engineer, marketing ween or CEO that wouldn’t unblushingly agree - of course you’re going to ditch your as-perfectly-functional-as-it-was-new phone for one that has all the latest “improvements.” That’s what their entire company strategy is built upon.
Feel free to explain how this isn’t “planned obsolescence” except in the very limited first sense.
No, this is effectively managing your product pipeline. If, like Apple, you’ve committed to releasing a new phone every 12 months, you’ve got to have constant R&D going to develop these new phones. Do you think Apple released the iPhone 5 and then started working on the 5S the next day? The first iPhone took almost three years to develop and multiple teams development multiple phone platforms so they can release on a yearly schedule.
I don’t think people have a proper basis of comparison regarding the life span of certain devices. Take a smart phone, for instance. We’re talking about an incredibly complex piece of electronics - something that would have been considered pure science fiction 20 years ago - and use it constantly, for hours a day, every day, while bouncing it around, sitting on it, dropping it, and letting it absorb your butt sweat. The fact that some of them last for as long as four years without breaking down is an Apollo Program-level technological miracle.
A house is supposed to last a century; a car, a decade; a cup of cottage cheese, three weeks. Three or four years seems about right for an iPhone.
Semantics. If the iPhone XIII is released knowing the vastly “improved” XIV is already in final engineering for release in a year, then Apple is clearly expecting - based on endless market experience - that some very large number of customers will upgrade within the first few months of the XIV’s sales, abandoning XIII’s that barely have a scratch on them.
The difference here between “managing your product flow” and “planned [virtual] obsolescence” is semantic.
I haven’t found any concrete cites, but a quick Google search shows that the average smartphone user replaces their phone every 18-36 months. So no, the vast majority of people do not replace their phone every year.
Well, in the US, many people get a new smartphone at a subsidized price when they sign a two-year contract. So it’s not so surprising that the replacement cycle is about 18-36 months.
The way I look at it, that I plan to release a product with XYZ features today, and one with WXYZ features *next *year (with W being at ready for Beta sometime soon), is not quite what people commonly talked about in the past when they mentioned “planned obsolescence” unless in fact feature W would “make your new toy effectively useless” (which would be a dick move).
There is however the psychological, i.e. marketing-based *perception *of obsolescence based on a social pressure of having other people and enterprises flaunting the newest while you’re being a late adopter. Adding voice command to a smartphone, or a rear-parking camera to a minivan, does not render last year’s models useless. But it does render them “last year’s models”.
And as was mentioned, it’s not as if Apple/Motorola/Samsung *makes *us buy the new smartphone that comes out every year, or Honda/Toyota/Ford makes us buy a new Accord/4Runner/Mustang every time they do a model refresh, even while still paying for the last one.
Eventually the new products* will* have accumulated enough improvements or be so pervasive that it will be to our benefit to replace the one we have even if it has *not *physically worn down to inoperability. That’s an economic decision.