Planned Obsolescence

What planned obsolescence is

Planned obsolescence is the practice of designing a product so that it wears out, breaks, or feels outdated sooner than it needs to, nudging the owner to replace it and keep the maker’s sales rolling. It is sometimes called built-in or forced obsolescence, and while the exact boundaries of the term are debated, the core idea is simple: a thing is built to have a shorter useful life than it could have, on purpose.

The logic comes from a problem every manufacturer faces. A product that lasts forever can only be sold to you once. Shorten its life and you shorten the gap between purchases - what the trade calls the replacement cycle - and the money comes back round sooner. Durability stops being a point of pride and becomes a dial the company can turn.

Seen this way, planned obsolescence is commodification aimed at lifespan itself. The question shifts from “how good can we make this?” to “how long should this last before it pays us to sell you another one?” That is a quiet but profound change in what a product is for.

The Phoebus cartel and the birth of planned obsolescence

The clearest origin story is a lightbulb. In December 1924, the leading bulb manufacturers - including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips and America’s General Electric - met in Geneva and formed the Phoebus cartel. Among other things, they agreed to cut the working life of a standard incandescent bulb from around 2,500 hours down to a target of 1,000, and set up a central testing lab in Switzerland that fined any member whose bulbs lasted too long.

This episode, documented in detail by IEEE Spectrum, is widely treated as the birth of planned obsolescence as a deliberate industrial strategy. The cartel itself fell apart in the 1930s as patents expired and competition crept back, but the idea it pioneered - engineering a shorter life to drive repeat sales - long outlived it.

The idea was soon argued about in the open. In 1932 the property dealer Bernard London proposed making obsolescence compulsory by law, as a way to end the Depression by forcing people to keep buying. Three decades later the journalist Vance Packard turned the argument the other way in his 1960 book The Waste Makers, attacking the deliberate manufacture of waste. The practice has been named and contested for almost a century.

The three kinds of planned obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is a family of tactics rather than a single trick, and it helps to separate three of them. They can run at the same time, in the same product.

Built-in obsolescence: products designed to fail

This is the version most people picture: the product is physically engineered to give out. A component is chosen because it wears, a case is sealed so the battery inside cannot be swapped, screws are non-standard, and spare parts are either unavailable or priced so a repair costs almost as much as a replacement. Nothing has to “break” dramatically - the product simply reaches the end of a life that was decided in the design studio. Inkjet printers are a favourite example: many count the pages they have printed and declare themselves full or faulty while usable ink remains, and consumer groups have taken several makers to task over the practice.

Perceived obsolescence: making what works feel outdated

Here the product still works fine - it just feels old. New colours, restyled cases and an annual “this year’s model” teach you to see last year’s perfectly good item as embarrassing. The industrial designer Brooks Stevens, who popularised the phrase in the 1950s, described the goal as instilling a desire to own something a little newer a little sooner than necessary.

This is where manufacturing desire does the heavy lifting. Advertising and design work together so that the want arrives on schedule, and the launch of a new model becomes an event - a piece of the spectacle that quietly ages the device already in your pocket without a single part failing.

Systemic obsolescence: when software retires working hardware

The newest version lives in software. An update slows an older device, “support” for a model ends, an app stops running on last year’s operating system, or a new accessory simply will not connect to the old one. The hardware is intact, but the ecosystem around it has moved on, and the device is stranded.

The most-cited case is Apple’s 2017 “batterygate”. Apple admitted that software updates slowed older iPhones, saying the aim was to stop ageing batteries causing sudden shutdowns. France’s consumer regulator fined the company 25 million euros in 2020 - not for proven planned obsolescence, but for failing to tell owners that the update would slow their phones. France is one of the few countries to have made deliberate obsolescence a crime, under a 2015 law. The episode shows how systemic obsolescence blurs into enshittification: the same logic of degrading a working thing for profit, delivered through code rather than hardware.

Why planned obsolescence works on us

A strategy this old survives because it leans on how people think, not just on how products are built. Several familiar habits of mind keep the cycle turning.

When something starts to fail, the sunk-cost-fallacy clouds the decision. The money and time already poured into a dying device make us reluctant to “waste” it, even when a repair is the sensible move - and a repair priced just high enough tips the balance towards buying new instead.

Difficulty does the rest. When cases are sealed, parts are locked away and manuals are nowhere to be found, people learn that fixing their own things is not really an option. That taught sense of futility is a mild form of learned helplessness: we stop trying to repair and reach for the replacement. Step back far enough and the whole upgrade treadmill can feel less like a choice and more like the weather - an instance of capitalist realism, where it becomes oddly hard to picture things working any other way.

Planned obsolescence, waste and the right to repair

The bill for short-lived products comes due somewhere, and a lot of it lands as rubbish. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2024 from the UN’s ITU and UNITAR, the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, of which under a quarter was formally collected and recycled. On current trends that figure is heading for 82 million tonnes by 2030.

The pushback is the right-to-repair movement, which argues that if you own a thing, you should be able to fix it. The European Union has introduced rules on repairability and a right-to-repair directive, campaigners publish repair guides and parts, and some regulators now score products on how fixable they are. A healthy repair culture also keeps independent repair shops in business and gives second-hand devices real value, so fewer working things end up in a bin. The point of all this is the hopeful flip side of planned obsolescence: if a product’s short life is a choice made in design and law, then a longer one can be chosen too.

So the lens to carry away is a question. When something you own stops working or starts to feel old, it is worth asking whether the thing genuinely failed - or whether it was quietly built to.