Planned obsolescence is a business strategy where products are deliberately designed to have a limited useful life, pushing you to buy a replacement sooner than you’d otherwise need to. It can involve physical components engineered to wear out, software that stops being supported, or styling changes that make last year’s model feel outdated. The concept has been around since the 1930s, and it shapes everything from the phone in your pocket to the printer on your desk.
Where the Idea Came From
The term traces back to a 1932 pamphlet by Bernard London, a New York real estate broker who proposed planned obsolescence as a way to end the Great Depression. His idea was essentially a “scrapping premium,” a government-mandated expiration date on goods that would force people to keep buying and keep factories running. It never became policy, but the logic stuck around in the private sector.
By the 1950s, industrial designer Brooks Stevens gave the concept a friendlier spin. He defined planned obsolescence as “the desire to own something a little newer and a little better, a little sooner than necessary.” Stevens wasn’t talking about products that broke. He was talking about products that looked old next to the newer version on the shelf. That distinction between things that fail and things that simply fall out of fashion still defines the two main forms of planned obsolescence today.
How Products Are Engineered to Fail
The most straightforward version is called contrived durability. Manufacturers use cheaper materials at stress points, design suboptimal component layouts, or place soft plastic or weak metal at key junctions so a product wears down faster than it needs to. The goal is a predictable failure point that lands just outside the warranty window.
One of the earliest documented cases involves the Phoebus Cartel, a group of major light bulb manufacturers who agreed in 1924 to limit bulb lifespans to 1,000 hours. At the time, bulbs routinely lasted 1,500 to 2,500 hours. The cartel spent years engineering a bulb that would reliably burn out sooner, turning a longer-lasting product into a shorter-lasting one on purpose.
Modern examples are subtler. Inkjet printers sometimes contain smart chips that disable the machine after a set number of pages or a set period of time, even though the hardware still works. Firmware updates on printers can also reject older or third-party cartridges through chip incompatibility checks. When the print head eventually fails, the replacement part costs nearly as much as a new printer, steering you toward buying a whole new device rather than fixing the one you have.
Making Repairs Difficult on Purpose
Even when a product doesn’t break by design, it can be built so that fixing it is impractical. Apple’s iPhone 6s, for example, used pentalobe screws that couldn’t be removed with standard consumer tools. The design made the phone difficult to open without damaging it, effectively discouraging self-repair.
A broader industry shift has moved from screws to adhesives. Engineers increasingly use glues and tapes to bond batteries, screens, and internal components into place. This makes devices thinner, lighter, and sometimes more waterproof. But it also means that replacing a cracked screen or a degraded battery often requires professional tools and heat guns to soften the adhesive, turning a simple swap into a risky procedure. Devices held together with screws are far easier to take apart and reassemble, which is exactly why the shift to adhesives works in the manufacturer’s favor when your device needs a fix.
Manufacturers also control the supply of spare parts. When replacement components are unavailable, or priced so high that repair costs approach the price of a new unit, most people just buy new. This parts strategy pairs neatly with sealed designs to make replacement the path of least resistance.
Software as an Expiration Date
Physical durability is only half the equation for modern electronics. Your smartphone’s true expiration date often arrives when software updates stop coming, cutting you off from new apps and security protections. Until recently, most phones hit that wall after about three years. The hardware still worked, but the software ecosystem moved on without it.
This is starting to change. Samsung now promises seven years of software updates for its flagship Galaxy phones, and Apple has gradually extended support windows as well. That shift matters because a phone that receives security patches for seven years has more than double the functional lifespan of one abandoned after three, even if the physical hardware is identical.
The pattern isn’t limited to phones. Operating system updates for laptops and tablets regularly drop support for older processors, and smart home devices can lose functionality entirely when the company shuts down its cloud servers. In each case, the hardware doesn’t break. It just gets left behind.
Style Changes and Psychological Obsolescence
Not all planned obsolescence involves a product that stops working. Psychological (or stylistic) obsolescence relies on making you feel like what you own is outdated. Annual model refreshes for cars, phones, and fashion lines all tap into this. The exterior changes, the color palette shifts, and suddenly your two-year-old device looks like it belongs in a museum, even though it performs the same tasks it always did.
Brooks Stevens built a career on this idea, wrapping everything from peanut butter jars to automobiles in optimistic, future-oriented design. The strategy works because desire is a more reliable driver of purchases than necessity. You don’t need a new phone every year, but a slimmer profile, a new camera module, and a fresh color option can make you want one.
The Environmental Cost
Shorter product lifespans generate enormous amounts of waste. According to the United Nations, the world produced a record 62 million metric tons of electronic waste in 2022. That figure is rising by about 2.6 million metric tons every year and is on track to reach 82 million metric tons by 2030, a 33% increase in under a decade. Only a fraction of that e-waste is properly recycled; the rest ends up in landfills or informal processing sites where toxic materials leach into soil and water.
Planned obsolescence isn’t the sole cause of rising e-waste, but it accelerates the cycle. Every printer disabled by a chip, every phone abandoned after a software cutoff, and every laptop sealed shut with adhesive contributes to a replacement rate that outpaces what recycling infrastructure can handle.
Legal Pushback and Right to Repair
France became the first country to make planned obsolescence a criminal offense in 2015. Under French law, anyone who deliberately shortens the lifespan of a product they bring to market faces up to two years in prison, a fine of €300,000, or a penalty equal to 5% of the company’s average annual revenue over the previous three years. The law’s biggest practical challenge is proving intent: showing that a shorter lifespan was a deliberate design choice rather than a cost-saving trade-off.
The European Union has taken a broader approach with its Right to Repair Directive, adopted in 2024. The directive requires manufacturers to repair goods at the consumer’s request when those products fall under EU repairability standards. It also addresses spare parts availability, pushing companies to keep components accessible rather than discontinuing them the moment a new model launches.
In the United States, right-to-repair legislation has gained traction at the state level, with several states passing laws requiring manufacturers to provide parts, tools, and repair documentation to consumers and independent repair shops. The core principle across all these efforts is the same: if a product can be fixed, the person who bought it should have a realistic path to fixing it.