Planned Obsolescence: Why Your Phone and Printer Are Built to Fail

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The phone battery that fades the week a new model arrives and the printer that refuses to scan without cyan ink belong to a philosophy with a century of history. It began in the 1920s car market. Henry Ford built the Model T from durable vanadium steel and wanted it to last forever, which left a saturated market with nobody needing a replacement. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors answered with dynamic obsolescence: the 1923 Chevrolet put a restyled body on technology nearly a decade old, and the annual model change turned a tool into a fashion statement.

This episode follows the idea from Depression-era proposals to legislate expiration dates through the engineering tricks of today: brittle gears, glued-in lithium-ion batteries, proprietary screws, parts that check each other's serial numbers, and ink chips that count pages. It also weighs the argument that fast replacement cycles drive innovation against the waste they produce, and surveys the laws now pushing back in France, Quebec, the European Union, and American states.

• In 1932 real estate broker Bernard London proposed legal expiration dates on shoes, tractors, and building materials to force demand and end the Depression.
• Industrial designer Brooks Stevens popularized the term in 1954, defining it as the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.
• Many front-loading washers now mold the drum bearing into the plastic drum, so one worn metal ring can cost more to fix than the machine is worth.
• Hewlett-Packard settled a class action over cartridge chips with $5 million in credits, and Canon was sued over all-in-one printers that disabled scanning when ink ran out.
• France made planned obsolescence illegal in 2015, with fines up to 300,000 euros and up to two years in jail. The EU will require user-replaceable batteries by 2026.