Planned Obsolescence in Technology: Reality or Superstition?
Planned obsolescence is becoming an issue. The policy, which presumably seeks to plan or design a product with an artificially limited useful lifetime, first surfaced during the Great Depression when policymakers thought to encourage consumption by placing artificial expiration dates on packaging. Then, in 1924, the strategy was directly applied on the market by General Motors, introducing a yearly car model to convince car owners that they need to replace their vehicle. This controversial business strategy has spread to different sectors, namely electronics and clothing. Often times consumers feel that these companies are acting unethically, forcing them into unnecessary upgrades or fashion choices.
One of the places that you may notice a great degree of planned obsolescence is in smartphone and tablet market. Barely new devices, are constantly upgraded and replaced with newer, faster and more exciting versions that seem to be released on an annual basis. Particularly in the smartphone market a number of consumer watchdogs have found this planned obsolescence to be a worrying trend. For example, some customers have noticed that their devices are difficult to repair, that batteries have notoriously short lives, and that the quality of the products seems to diminish (coincidentally or not) when a new version is released.
The risks of applying this business strategy are many: it can change supply and demand patterns (creating false demand where there is none), drive wasteful consumerism, cause social alienation for those that can’t afford to constantly upgrade, decrease consumer faith in a product and even the entire market system. In addition, the overall quality of the products may diminish when planned obsolescence is applied over time.
Notably, one company is about to face a multi-million dollar class action suit on these very issues. According to a significant number of smartphone users, their handsets dramatically slowed down after installing an operating system update. Eventually, the plaintiffs claim, they were forced to upgrade to new models. They assert that installing the update even interfered with normal usage of the device and that the updates were irreversible.
