A box. A container just as sleek as the contents inside. A creamy, white coating feels smooth to the fingers, disguising the advanced technology with hints of organicity. It’s a brand new iPhone, now with four cameras to provide 33% more pictorial range. A great rush is manifested out of the loyal steeds of consumerism, and perhaps, you think to yourself, time would be ripe to replace your primitive device as well.
Everything sucks. Well, not everything, but many things that do well on the long term market sucks – and most things have been around for a while. Certain markets practically run on inefficiency itself, losing consumers billions, if not trillions of dollars each year. These economic sectors lack the drive to create better products – in fact, there is often an incentive to sell bad products. But why are products… bad? What even defines a ‘bad’ product?
A ‘bad’ product is a product that is unusually inefficient despite temporarily fulfilling its designated purpose. We live in a society with technological production capabilities that far exceed the efficiency of the products on our markets today. Everything from toilet paper to actual toilets is far below an theoretically easily achievable threshold, yet these products simply refuse to improve in the cost/value ratio. For example, many consumer necessities such as toiletries have hardly changed over the past century in terms of usable lifetime – we’ve only gotten better at making more and using more. While it is true that all products are subject to entropy and thus can never last forever, it does not change the fact that the current lifetime of such products fall far short of the estimated potential.
Why? Wouldn’t it be beneficial for companies to improve their product and thus garner a greater consumerbase to guarantee increased sales? Or to even out compete competitors through sheer technological innovation?
Not really. It isn’t always the win-win case scenario in which company profits and product efficiency/usefulness go hand in hand; in fact, it is far more likely that a win-lose relationship exists completely undetected, shrouded by consumer ignorance. It is the unfortunate reality of our capitalistic society that is often unmentioned and brushed aside – while it is true that the incentive for profit drives innovation, the opposite is also true: the incentive for profit can come with an inverse relationship with technological progress and thus drives innovative regression.
Perhaps the most famous historical example of the influence of planned obsolescence is the development of the lightbulb. Not the invention by Edison, but rather the inevitable commercialization that befalls every product. In the early 1900’s, many companies involved with the production of the lightbulb had grown to enormous margins with the rush to electrify the United States. One might have expected the lightbulb market bubble to pop and suddenly throw these companies in financial ruin, but these companies had long noticed their seemingly inevitable fate. At first, these companies competed against one another in a normal market, trying to make the best quality light bulbs to outcompete their competitors. However, as more and more lightbulbs were sold and demand was increasingly sated, lightbulb sales continuously declined throughout the 1910’s.
Thus, the lightbulb industry responded with the infamous “Phoebus Cartel” – an international organization which specialized specifically in maximizing the profits of lightbulb industries around the globe. Similar to the monopolies that dominated late 17th century Gilded Age, these companies had essentially banded into one huge co-owned and co-operated monopoly, artificially keeping the lifespan of the average lightbulb short and forcing profits up at the complete expense of the consumer. Only after brilliant journalism and intense investigations was the scam revealed to the public, and thus not long after, the ‘Phoebus Cartel’ lost much of its power and began to disband.
However, planned obsolescence isn’t illegal in the United States – perhaps it is due to the nature of inevitable obsolescence. Unlike direct ripoffs and undercuts, the greed and producer hostility found in planned obsolescence is often hidden from consumers, especially if consumers do not have a way to evaluate the quality of a product long after buying it. In fact, some even argue that planned obsolescence is necessary, and sometimes inevitable in growing markets, benefiting consumers when they upgrade or replace their existing equipment. However, despite the lack of a specific law to protect consumers, the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the United States does hold the power to enact industry standards that are seen fit, which essentially acts as a ‘minimum quality/minimum durability’ baseline that prevents companies from taking excessive advantage of consumers, especially with potentially dangerous products.
A modern example would be several enormous lawsuits against Apple for various instances of planned obsolescence within their products. The largest consists of a 113 million dollar lawsuit against Apple for the “intentional concealment of battery issues within Apple devices.” Apple was eventually forced to pay the 113 million sum to over 34 states in which malfunctioning devices were sold in significant quantities. This certainly isn’t the only lawsuit Apple has ever faced, either – similar lawsuits regarding software, camera, processing power, etc. have been filed against Apple, even in export countries such as Portugal.
The ‘Deadweight Loss’ of planned obsolescence partially comes from the direct loss in value of product sold to consumers, but is also composed of the lack of incentive to drive innovation, which in turn causes the loss of technological progress that hinders the future of the industry and the consumer market. This loss is rarely discussed due to the same indirect affliction as observed in planned obsolescence, and despite the ‘Deadweight Gain’ experienced by companies that do integrate planned obsolescence within their business plan, I personally believe it makes planned obsolescence a net loss overall for both the technology and the economy.
Citations:
- https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/planned-obsolescence#:~:text=their%20customer%20base.-,Planned%20obsolescence%20is%20a%20business%20strategy%20in%20which%20the%20obsolescence,its%20conception%2C%20by%20the%20manufacturer.
- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160612-heres-the-truth-about-the-planned-obsolescence-of-tech
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/planned_obsolescence.asp
- https://durabilitymatters.com/planned-obsolescence/
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/15/the-right-to-repair-planned-obsolescence-electronic-waste-mountain
- https://sustainablebrands.com/read/defining-the-next-economy/planned-obsolescence-and-your-right-to-repair
- https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/08/apple-to-pay-34m-in-chile-to-settle-planned-obsolescence-lawsuit#:~:text=Apple%20has%20agreed%20to%20pay,update%20released%20prior%20to%20Dec.
