Hacker News Reader

My hot take is planned obsolescence doesn't exist.

It's a side effect of items being built to cost, and the marketing phenomenon that consumers follow fashion trends.

Your car doesn't have planned obsolescence: it has a warranty period. If you want a longer one, you'll pay more because that is not a free service to provide.

View on HN

That’s a reductionist view. Have you read “Made to Break” by Giles Slade? A great book on this subject. Make no mistake, there’s a lot of deliberate planning and effort that goes into designing things to break after a point in time, for nothing else but profit, the environment be damned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com