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Planned obsolescence is not at all unintentional, it is highly deliberate. Every product needs to plan for it's intended lifespan, from phones to nuclear reacto
by manfredo 7y ago
Planned obsolescence is not at all unintentional, it is highly deliberate. Every product needs to plan for it's intended lifespan, from phones to nuclear reactors.
Planned obsolescence and what this contractor did are not on any sort of continuum. This contractor was not making a trade-off, he deliberately sabotaged his work. This is not on any sort of continuum with optimizing phone's battery life for a certain number of years, or making similar tradeoffs.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoI agree with you to the extent that companies design their products to become obsolete in a way that actually considers all of the trade-offs in a way that makes optimal use of the resource at hand and does not intentionally shorten the lifespan of its products in an attempt to boost sales at the expense of generating additional waste and reducing the value of the finished product. Once you start doing that, you ARE being intentionally destructive.
- perl4ever 7y agoWhat I think you're ignoring is that they are both examples of utilizing dishonesty for profit. Planned obsolescence could in the abstract be just about making a trade-off between price and durability, but in all real instances it leverages the fact that the consumer can't reliably assess the ratio of cost to lifespan of a product. If the trade-off was transparent to the buyer, then competition would produce much more durable products, even if not infinitely durable.