Is planned obsolescence dead and gone (and did it actually exist in the first place?)

Factual Questions
1

When I was a kid (born in 1960) not a week would go by without seeing a television repair man at someones house. And picture tube testing devices were at the local drug store for kripes sake. Everyone I knew had, at least at one time or another, a television, radio, stereo, entripulator, or record player in their house that no longer worked just sitting around. And none of those appliances would be very old.

It’s been 25+ years since I’ve seen a repairman at anyone’s house or known anyone that took such devices to be repaired. I realize that many appliances are cheaper to replace now days than repair, but consider this:

We have a Sansui television in our bedroom that we bought in 1989. We use it as an alarm clock. It goes on at 5:45am and stays on all day until 11:00pm 5 days a week. It’s on a set internal timer.

We have a GE television in our rec room that’s on about 8 hours a day, everyday, whether anyones watching it or not. We bought it in 1992.

We have an RCA 36 inch tv in our living room that’s 14 years old. I don’t think it’s ever been turn off. We mute it at bed time but keep it on all the time.

Not one of these tv’s has ever needed a repair.

Are we just lucky, or did the technology move ahead enough to screw the manufacturers and repair businesses? I would love a big HD tv in our living room. But what do I do with the 36 inch we have? There is nothing wrong with it and the picture is fantastic. I have no real justification to replace it.
Which is why I don’t.

Did the old theory of “planned obsolescence” actually exist? Or was the technology just lagging and things went to shit at that time because manufactures didn’t honestly know how to make them last any longer? Or is the “cheaper to replace than repair” factor that exists today the same as planned obsolescence? But that wouldn’t explain things lasting as long as they do now. Or are we just lucky?:confused:

2

Keep in mind that all of your televisions became obsolete once digital took over.

3

I think once an appliance or other device gets below a certain price, it gets cheaper to replace it than to repair it. In which case they might as well use even cheaper materials to be competitive, and also it becomes cheaper to manufacture if you don’t have to design it to be easily repairable. With the additional factor of, if it’s a technology that is rapidly advancing, it’s likely the consumer will buy a new version before the old one dies, so there is added incentive not to put a lot of money into it’s longevity.

OTOH TVs, have certainly gone as plastic as they can with their cases, but there’s not much you can do to save money on the working parts, which are fairly sturdy. Whereas the cheap parts, the casing aren’t really stressed because the unit is just sitting there.

So I think it’s really the things which have moving parts that are going to to last less time do to planned obsolescence rather than the things which mostly just sit there and perform a simple or long ago perfected task.

Hijack: I do find it annoying though, when super cheap plastic is used for things which encounter a lot of stress, like my ipod connector cable, and my car window opener handle. These are things that aren’t going to be replaced for reasons other than breakage, and which encounter a lot of physical stress. They really need to be made of sturdier material. Thanks!

4

I don’t know for sure that cars were designed to break, but they certainly weren’t designed to not break until the Japanese started to eat Detroit’s lunch.
As for TVs and appliances, components today are a lot more reliable than vacuum tubes in the '60s, so that is a good reason why they are better. When our TV broke we discovered with surprise that we had had it for 12 years or so.
I know of one real case. Before the split up of the Bell System, phones were rented, not bought, and they were built to be insanely reliable. After, people were allowed to buy their own phones. I actually went to a seminar about how to design phones to be less reliable, since building them to last 20 years no longer made sense. AT&T lost phone market share right after the breakup and got it back, because people assumed that every phone would last 20 years and so bought the cheapest one they could find - to discover that they did break after all.

5

Cars and clothing are designed so that you can tell at a glance whether you have the latest thing, something fairly recent, or something old. If it matters to you that people see you with the latest thing, then your car and clothing are obsolete in a year or so.

6

You sure watch a lot of TV in your house.

7

I don’t think “planned obsolesence” means what you think it means. It does not mean the deliberate design of things so that they break and have to be repaired. It means the deliberate design or marketing of things to get consumers to replace them often

Take the example of televisions. While it’s true that TVs don’t break as often as they used to, it’s also true that TVs used to be easier to repair. Many consumers tested and replaced their own tubes. The fact that tubes had to be replaced every so often didn’t lead to the sale of new TVs. (Speaking as an electronic engineer, I can say that tubes just don’t last as long as solid state components, which is why most manufacturers started using transistors as soon as they could.)

A real example of planned obsolescence would be a phone that uses a non-standard battery, for which the manufacturer stops providing replacement batteries a couple of years after manufacture. When the OEM battery dies, you have to buy a new phone. Another example would be the deliberate creation of software dependencies so that, when you install a new version of one piece of software (like the OS) you must upgrade other software to keep everything working.

“Planned obsolesence” also refers to changes in design or styling to make something look out-of-date when it’s still usable, so that status-conscious consumers will buy new products regularly. Car manufacturers used to do this by changing the styling every year - they don’t make major changes in styling nearly as often as they used to. The women’s clothing industry engages in this practice.

8

For your example, TVs, I think it’s just a case of the modern technology being longer lasting. If you could make second rate circuit boards that lasted five years at a lower cost, they probably would use those, but I expect you can’t do that without getting lots of duds and circuits that only last 6 months, or a year, so the total cost to the manufacturer would be the same.

And while you, and I, might be uncomfortable with throwing out a working TV to get the latest technology, the rest of the western world isn’t. The manufacturers don’t need our TVs to break, they just need us to think we have to have the next new thing.

9

This. I found the OP hella confusing. Planned obsolesence is what we have NOW, much more than in the past.

10

Maybe they just can’t find the off buttons?

11

tv sets are used as video (NTSC and direct input) display devices all over the USA for cable, satellite, dvd, vcr and will for their useful lifetime. with a digital tuner they are still being used for terrestrial broadcast for their lifetime.

people selling tv sets hoped you would think they were obsolete.

12

:confused:

We have cable. The digital switch didn’t affect us at all.

Yes but not as much as you’d think. We keep The living room TV on as it calms the dog when we’re not home. Also, studies have shown that making it look like someone is home (or up) is an effective anti-burglary tool. Having a TV or 2 on is an easy way to accomplish this.

13

nm.

14

electronics are designed with maybe a 6 year lifetime. with the variation in parts and manufacture you may be to either side of that.

electronics are not field serviceable like they used to be. miniaturization (includes components are no longer socketed) makes it harder to service in the field. integrated components makes field servicing difficult. diagnostics have become more complex. board or even device replacement cost is cheaper than component level repair.

15

A good example of that is corrosion. When I was a kid, growing up in the Rust Belt, about a third of the cars on the road were “rustbuckets”. Rustproofing and auto body shops did a booming business. Used car and parts dealers specializing in “Carolina doors” or “Florida cars” were commonplace. Mufflers would disintegrate or fall off every 50,000 miles or so; my Mom’s car had a driveshaft that broke due to corrosion. If you had a car that was more than three or four years old without rust, you were either anal about washing and rustproofing your ride, or very, very lucky.

Today, rustbuckets are rare. The only rustbuckets I see are 25 year old ghetto hoopties, beater trucks, and for some reason, European-style vans, even those of recent vintage. Ten year old cars might have a spot or two of rust, but that’s it. I can’t remember the last time I had to replace a muffler. I haven’t seen an ad for Zeibart or any other rustproofer in ages. The only time I see “Florida cars” or “Arizona cars” mentioned in a classified ad are those for 20+ year old cars.

16

Is it possible that the OP’s appliances have such a long lifespan due to the small number of power cycles? (leaving them on all the time)

17

see, at the time Asian cars were even worse, and they were already gimped by the trek across the ocean. The problems back then were various:

  1. up until I think the '60s, the inner sheetmetal surfaces of the car’s body were left uncoated. so the outside had a nice protective coat of primer and paint, but where you couldn’t see was plain steel.

  2. anti-corrosion dips became popular in the '70s, where the assembled body would be submerged in a etching primer bath, which would in theory apply a protective coat to every last square mm of steel. GM’s first application of this was- ironically- the Chevy Vega.

  3. after that, the problem of rusting was mostly due to lack of proper drainage. From a design standpoint you don’t want any areas where water, salt, or wet dirt can collect and stay. It wasn’t until about the late '90s where the automakers started to really focus on making sure all body crevices had proper drainage. Not all of them were perfect, though, late '90s to early 2000s Honda Accords tend to rot out fast behind the rear wheelwell.

A lot of people don’t seem to realize how much better cars are these days from a corrosion standpoint. My dad still has his '91 Dodge Spirit, which has one small rust through in the driver’s door due to a small ding breaking through the paint and primer. OTher than that this car’s been driven year-round in SE Michigan with all the road salt and slush that entails. A 20-year-old car with only a small bit of rust would have been cause for animal sacrifices up through the '80s.

matter of fact, the only thing I still see rust-through on newish cars are some early-mid 2000s Chrysler cars where the front lip of the hood rusts out. But we have Nickel-and-Daimler to thank for that.

18

To sum up what people have said, planned obsolescence was a criticism leveled at industry by people who hated industry. A certain set of people have always hated industry. It was too big, too dirty, too exploitative. Its products were too expensive or hard to repair or didn’t last. They weren’t conveniently designed or pretty or easy to use. With tens of thousands of products from hundreds of different industries, it’s always easy to find huge numbers of examples of things you don’t like and even things that can legitimately be improved.

Engineering historian Henry Petroski has said that form doesn’t follow function, form follows failure. Engineers spend their entire careers looking at the failure points of previous designs and then work to correct them and make new and better designs - that will will fail in other ways that have to be corrected. His books are utterly fascinating to me. Here’s a brief interview of him on one of his books, Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design.

There are almost no examples in which designing products to fail so that people will buy new ones is a successful business strategy. People will avoid that company if at all possible. Car manufacturers knew that. Cars are large collections of failure-prone components that are subject to constant stress and abuse. It took a good while after the invention of the auto before people could have a car without a professional chauffeur who doubled as a mechanic, someone who could spend all day repairing the car after every trip. For the first half of the 20th century, cars broke down all the time in all sorts of ways. The charge of planned obsolescence was because cars had gotten so much better after WWII that manufacturers needed tricks to get people to buy new cars as often as they used to. Cars lasted longer and people were holding on to them instead of replacing them regularly. Even so, they chased customers through new designs, not through worse components.

Cars are even better today. I can buy a good car and expect not to have any major part break down for ten years and never have a flat tire over that time. That was utterly impossible when I started driving in 1966. Today everybody has a car. Everybody. Every adult. There are several cars in almost every household. That wasn’t true even in the 1960s. Cars are far more affordable today as well as being better built.

Price is far more important than almost anything else. Get the price down low enough and you make more money, because now you can sell to the entire market and not just a segment of it. The rich can still buy high-priced, high-quality luxury products, but now even the far more numerous poor can buy a version that may not be of equal quality but works quite well and is cheap enough to afford.

That’s the expectation of modern society. Everybody should be able to buy everything. That was not true at all until the past few decades. That does mean compromises. Cheap - but lightweight - plastic will get used where heavy - but indestructible - metal was once used. That’s fine with me. My old television weighed 100 pounds. My new plasma is something even I can pick up. It’s better in every way, even if it might not last for the 20+ years of the old one.

A certain set of people will find lots to complain about, in almost every set of products. Overall, however, everything is better than it used to be. Both viewpoints are perfectly true, just from opposite sides. And really, most people, if they’re honest with themselves, bounce back and forth between the two extremes depending on whether things are working or not.

19

Agreed that the commonly understood meaning of “planned obsolescence” is not what the OP is referring to. The term has been explained by previous posters. It was popularized for the general public by Vance Packard in the 1960 book “The Waste Makers”, and within industry circles by industrial designer Brooks Stevens a few years earlier. Wiki cites a 1932 pamphlet which used the term:

What the OP discusses with tube electronics is simply a fact of life for vacuum tubes - they wear out fairly rapidly. In some cases, the filament wore out and broke, just like a light bulb. You might not even need the drugstore tube tester for that - the tube didn’t light up. And that tester (which generally was not used to test the picture tube, but the other tubes in the set) was quite a good solution for the average consumer. Without knowing anything about how the TV worked, you could take out all the tubes, carefully noting which numbers went in which sockets, take them all to the tube tester, follow the directions for setting the dials from the tube number, and see if any of them were bad. Quite often, one or two would be, so you bought replacements, went home, stuck all the tubes back in the set, and maybe the thing worked again.

20

‘Today the appearance of a motorcar is a most important factor in the selling end of the business—perhaps the most important factor— because everyone knows the car will run.’ – Alfred P. Sloan, CEO of Gemeral Motors, 1941