Expanding a tiny bit on your point, from where I am sitting, it all be summed up with greedy, plain and simple...and extends further to Capitalism as a whole, n

Expanding a tiny bit on your point, from where I am sitting, it all be summed up with greedy, plain and simple...and extends further to Capitalism as a whole, not just corporate America. I work for a US-based manufacturing company that has customers around the world as the guy who fixes the things the engineers build when they inevitably break. I have encountered so many design flaws that could have been done far, far better but we're not, largely due to cost, that I have come to just expect it. This is admittedly sad. Some other commenter mentioned we can have all these great long-lasting things if we "are willing to pay." We, the consumer my might be, but the manufacturer and distributer who makes the the product not only want to sell you something once, but want to sell it to you repeatedly while maximizing their profit margins. This would not be so bad if a good chunk of those yearly record profits reached the folks who were on the work floor actually making the product (thus allowing them to buy more expensive things) but instead, the money gets sucked up and stays up, while costs get passed on to the consumer who likely is not making enough to afford the longer-lasting version. Which, I guess is the point of Capitalism, in a nutshell.