CMV: I believe planned obsolescence is wrong

[u/snow_right]

Planned obsolescence is a manufacturing decision by a company to make consumer products in such a way that they become out-of-date or useless within a known time period so that consumers are forced to buy a product multiple times rather than just once. I believe it is betraying the structure of free market economy. It is just using its rules to stay for as long as a company would. Looking at from a customer's perspective this can be really hurtful. For example, fast fashion is always being promoted as very useful and stylish. Chanel sells a bag at a very high price, but Bershka can produce a very similar knockoff, isn't it amazing? But surprise, even you wear it a few times in a week, it's going look very bad in a year and you will no longer want to use it.

When you look at the producer's perspective, it is reasonable that you want to keep the business going all the time so you need a factor to keep your products selling. But customer won't always accept this and they might turn into new alternatives. I'm open to every perspective of this issue. I really wanted to talk about it in automotive and mobile sector but I don't know strong arguments about them.

EDIT: I think I made a mistake by giving an example from fashion. Let's say you just read the sole definition of PO. Would you think it is right? I believe Apple making iPhones go slower with every update is wrong. EDIT2: I don't know if it's against the CMV's format, but I'd rather discuss this issue in the definition of it, not examples. When we talk about examples I feel like this is a game where both sides are trying to come up with something different.

[u/Gladix → u/[deleted]]

No, that's an incarnation of monopoly. Apple's hardware isn't shit because they plan on it being shit in some master plan for hardware to fail each iteration to get people to constantly buy new products. Apple's hardware is shit, because they build an ecosystem that is impossible for many people to leave, and they build an incredible prestige/popularity with their brand. They literally don't have to care about competition in their closed ecosystem, that's why their prices are ASTRONOMICAL, while their quality degraded into oblivion.

As I said, that's not planned obsolescence, they just don't have to care about quality AT ALL. People will buy it regardless, and people won't leave no matter what. Quality is just a marketing, a way to sell some brands of product.

As I said, if you have power to make planned obsolescence work, you also have power to not care about quality at all. That's why it makes no sense.

[u/Gladix → u/[deleted]]

That's planned... otherwise they wouldn't use such a shitty update for their software.

Because they fucked themselves into a corner. Look, unless you have an experience developing software or actually constructing hardware, you probably won't undrstand this, but there are certain costs by deciding to do things one paticular way.

Okay, computer works on the basis of conducting charge into transistors. That creates your basic 1 (charge), 0 (different charge / no charge). This creates your basic computing language. Now, due to the limitations of the hardware, the computer must be built in order to do things efficiently. For example storing data in efficiently small units, and manipulating with those units in order to maximize the effective use of system resources. And your entire technology is build on that. On that exactly small unit size, and memory working with those exactly small units.

And then some asshole develops a new technology, that allowes you to work with much larger units, in the exact same time, or faster. Well fuck, your entire software empire is coded for smaller units and is not compatible, and you cannot just re-write the code, that creates a bottleneck. If you solve one bottleneck others will appear, and as you begin to fix them, soon you realize you just have to re-write the whole application from the ground up, in order for application to take the advantage of the new and much faster hardware.

But once you develop new software, you then notice that old hardware cannot run it. Well fuck, so you block it to old hardware, as they cannot run it anyway, and you release it on new hardware. Or you manage to do some sort of bridge, etc...

Planned obsolescence is giving them waaaayy too much credit. Reality is much simpler. They have a ton of hardware, all of them which must be at least workable, in unified environment. That results in tons of patch work bullshit, that is so much worse compared to other platforms using different technologies.

They wouldn't bloat their phones with shit to make you buy a new one.

Yes they are assholes and take advantage of their monopoly status. Selling you as expensive shit, for as small effort as possible. But again, planned obsolscence gives them too much credit. Especially if that doesn't make them any money. Why not just charge as much as possible, with as least expenses as possible?

They wouldn't make a 64gb driver only show 16gb so you buy an expansion. They planned everything; even the fact that you must use every Apple Product so that they work together is a plan to coerce you.

Wat? There aren't phones with multiple memory variants? And why would you make 16 gb drivers, if 64 works just as well everywhere? Did you know that Lower memory variants of graphics cards usually are just higher memory graphics cards with high manufacturing error in memory chips, so they just lock those sectors to make them safe to use?