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In December of 1924, the heads of all the major lightbulb manufacturers
across the world met in Geneva to concoct a sinister plan. Their talks outlined
limits on how long all of their lightbulbs would last. The idea being that if their bulbs failed
quickly customers would have to buy more of their product. In this video, we’re going
to unpack this idea of purposefully creating inferior products to drive sales, a symptom
of late stage capitalism that has since been coined planned obsolescence. And as we’ll see,
this obsolescence can have drastic consequences on our wallets, waste streams, and even our climate.
What is Planned Obsolescence:
Corporations create obsolescence through two main avenues: planned obsolescence and perceived
obsolescence. Both practices are meant to make a product seem useless or actually useless in order
to drive sales. Planned obsolescence occurs when a company manufactures a device to fail
before its realistic lifespan. This usually means a weaker filament, plastic encasement, or a
fragile glass screen that limits the durability of the good. In the case of the collection of 1920s
electricity companies known as the Phoebus cartel, they applied this principle to lightbulbs. The
Phoebus cartel collectively cut the lifespan of their products in half from 2,000 to 1,000 hours,
so that consumers would have to buy twice the amount of lightbulbs that they did previously.
On the other side of obsolescence there’s the more amorphous phenomenon of perceived obsolescence.
Think of that new phone you bought or that new style of clothes you’ve been eyeing or even
this year’s new line of pickup trucks. All these are instances of perceived obsolescence. When
companies release their new line of products, their older products quickly become unfashionable
or less desirable. In order to get you to keep buying their goods corporations consistently
market their new lines to make it seem like that new gadget you just bought a year ago
is an antique, even though, in most cases, the older product still works. This kind
of perceived obsolescence is especially prevalent with cars, technology, and fashion, because these
consumer goods have been transformed into status symbols. If you want to keep up appearances,
you grab the newest model of the iPhone. If you want to look good, you buy the latest style
from that instagram ad. But how and why does planned and perceived obsolescence work on us?
How Does Planned Obsolescence Work? As we’ve just seen, modern obsolescence comes
in various forms: from brittle parts that break easily, to glued-in batteries you can’t replace
to aesthetic upgrades that take the previous version out of fashion. And it seems the master
of all these methods is Apple. It’s one of the top three phone producers in the world as well as the
most valuable company globally. In part, the tech giant’s market dominance was created by and now
allows for Apple to employ an environmentally dangerous combination of perceived and planned
obsolescence that leaves consumers buying a brand new iPhone every two or three years.
For the iPhone it all starts with the battery. After about 2-3 years of peak performance,
the iPhone battery begins to wear out. But if you want to change the battery, it’s not as simple as
popping the back phone and sliding in replacement. Depending on the version of the iPhone you’ll need
special screwdrivers, adhesive removers, suction cups, and possibly even a soldering gun just to
replace your rundown battery. In an interview with the team at the popular DIY tech website iFixit,
they call the iPhone battery a “premature death clock that they're building into it by building
in a consumable is designed to increase the number of iPhones apple sells by.” Apple’s normalization
of the built-in battery, which, before the age of the iPhone, was rarely seen in cellphones, nudges
customers into buying new rather than struggling to replace the battery. And if you do want Apple
to replace a battery or some other damage to your device, you’ll have to cough up a lot of cash.
At times up to 50-70% of the phone’s original cost. This is because you can’t just take your
iPhone to any old repair shop. Only Apple stores and Apple certified repair locations are allowed
to fix iPhones. So, when the cost of repair is high and the newest model of iPhone has just been
released it’s difficult to not splurge on that new device. This is, yet again, another barrier
towards reusing your phone, reducing consumption, and ultimately minimizing your environmental
impact. Finally, Apple’s warranty only covers your freshly purchased iPhone for one year, which
is well before the 2-3 year range when Apple’s hardware typically begins to fail. The point here
is this: none of these practices are necessary for the production or sale of Apple’s products;
Apple intentionally chooses to build this waste into its product design and business
plan because these steps are necessary to make Apple into a tech giant and capitalist behemoth.
Indeed, Apple just comes out and admits how long they expect their devices to last: 7
years. After seven years, their products, in their words, “become obsolete.” But wait,
Charlie, isn’t 7 years kind of a long time for a phone or computer to last?
It may sound like a long time now, but prior to the advent of this iPhone paradigm,
spending $1,000 on a product that will be obsolete in 7 years at most would have felt completely
unreasonable. Many of us are so surrounded by planned and perceived obsolescence
that we have been primed to think that owning a single device for 7 years is actually a long time.
And even if their phones do last the full 7 years, Apple creates perceived obsolescence
by consistently marketing their phones through aesthetics, lifestyle, and status. Even that
green bubble in iMessage seems to be telling us that other phones are somehow worse. So,
at the end of the day, if Apple genuinely did want you to continue using your phone then they would
offer longer warranties or create more durable, easily repairable tech. But they don’t, because
once you’ve captured the market like they have, obsolescence becomes pretty damn profitable.
Apple, however, is just one of many examples of obsolescence in capitalism. There’s Epson’s
proprietary ink cartridges, barely modified new editions of school textbooks from McGraw Hill, and
even Tesla seems primed to be next, with its reluctance to allow independent auto-repair
shops to service their cars, a move remarkably similar to that of Apple.
Both planned and perceived obsolescence lead to that pile of perfectly operable phones in
your desk drawer as well as fuel the 50 million metric tons of e-waste created
each year. These corporate practices make our quest to embrace climate-aligned actions such
as reusing and reducing consumption much harder. In short, manufactured obsolescence
fuels consumerism and environmental degradation in an already overconsuming world. So if it's
clearly a terrible scheme for our wallets, wellbeing, and the environment, how do we stop it?
A New Economic Model vs. Planned Obsolescence
Luckily, there are a variety of short-term and long-term solutions for getting rid of planned
obsolescence. On an individual level, simply taking the time to repair, take care, and reuse
your possessions is a great first step. But as we’ve just seen, companies have a vested interest
in making that as hard as possible--both through the durability of their product and by influencing
your mindset through advertising. Which means that Right to Repair campaigns and court cases like
these are essential to easing the unnecessary burden on the consumer. But as we zoom out
further, companies like Apple have to be forced to change how they do business. France already
has planned obsolescence laws, and companies like Fairphone show that it is actually possible
to make a longer lasting phone that is easy to repair. The battery on the Fairphone only takes
about eight minutes to replace. But ultimately, obsolescence is a symptom of late stage
capitalism, so if we want to create a world in which durable, sustainable products are the norm,
we have to embrace a new mindset and build a new economic system that at every stage in the process
asks: “does it actively contribute to humans and nature thriving together as one integrated system
on this planet? If yes, green light. If not, red light. Period.” If all of this sounds hard
or impossible, science tells us there can be no other way. Since the early eighties we’ve known
that global temperatures will rise if left unchecked, and yet we’ve made very little progress
since then. So, the world, and for that matter, our economy, needs to change, and eliminating
planned obsolescence is just one step on the path to a more just, more sustainable economic system.
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