Edit: After some thought, I feel a precedent. My car has parts that don't become obsolete, they flat break requiring never ending service. Surely I can sue for fraud as the auto company has the ability to use another means. (Devils advocate)
For example, Apple noticed that most customers replaced their phones within 2-3 years. A lithium ion battery's lifetime is determined by its charging and discharge characteristics. Its life is extended if it is charged more slowly and neither charged or discharged fully. But this increases charge time and reduced usable battery capacity - both of which are key selling features for smartphones. So Apple optimized the iPhone's battery management to deliver good charging and usable capacity, with the tradeoff that it would degrade significantly beyond 2-3 years of use.
This contractor's activities would have been analogous to Apple introducing code that checks the current timestamp with the timestamp from when the phone was sold and degrading performance when that difference exceeded a threshold.
Perhaps, but it's two points on the same continuum.
Is it particularly that you think that there isn't a continuum from legal actions to illegal actions? Isn't it possible and common that two instances of similar actions can be on the right and wrong sides of the law?
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.
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.
No, your assertion is quite wrong. All engineered products have service lives, because they all have failure modes that are taken into account in the design process. If a phone's failure mode consists of the battery dying the the battery will be designed to ensure it will likely work well for a minimum of x time following a typical usage pattern. Likewise an airplane failure mode is the fuseage breaking off due to fatigue, thus it is designed to be flown X times (takeoff/landing counts, number of hours in flight) taking onto account the likelihood of cracks forming and propagating. Targeting a certain service life in a design does not mean there is mischief in play. It only means engineering.
Thus obviously planting time bombs has absolutely nothing to do with engineering a product.
You're missing the whole point. Everything fails after a while. Everything. It's the engineer's job to ensure that it fails only after X amount of use, which can be expressed in time of normal usage. There are no time bombs, only the fact that designers picked a small service life.
They really aren't. All engineered products are designed to meet a target service life. Even today's houses are designed with a design lifespan of 50 years. A consumer product is not different.
Surely you understand the difference between a part that naturally wears out over time due to friction and wear and tear, versus a part that's delibrately installed incorrectly to cause a malfunction?