Planned Obsolescence

The myth of endlessly increasing sales and revenue might be so appealing that corporate leaders ignore the easily demonstrable fact that any fixed population, including the total amount of people in the entire world at a given time, has a finite number of potential consumers with a finite amount of financial resources, concentration, and time to devote to actually making purchases.  It is logically impossible for there to constantly be an increasing level of revenue from a product or even a company's entire set of products and services, unless there is an infinite number of people with infinite resources--and yet unlimited resources is merely a dream for many.  Many people do not have even enough resources to buy everything they might want, and certain executives nonetheless hope to convince as many people as they can to buy yet another product even if they do not need it, are initially content without it, or do not have the money to immediately purchase it.  Deception or other outright exploitation can be manifested in a very particular way to achieve this goal.

Planned obsolescence is one way that companies ruled by this category of idiot, someone too irrational to see the impossibility of forever expanding profits with a limited range of buyers or too obsessed with profit to care, try to maximize profit at the literal expense of consumers.  This entails designing a product so that after a fixed duration of usage or simply a certain amount of time after it is purchased, it loses much or all of its initial quality, falling apart, no longer working ideally, or needing a total replacement.  Consumers are targeted with the intention of just draining them of their money without regard for the longevity or quality of the product they are supposed to buy, and not just buy once, but buy again for each variation that is released, if the company leader(s) had their way.  Planned obsolescence has many forms, and some of them can be quite easy to notice, so easy that even people who do not think often or thoroughly about business might still recognize them--and despise them.

Hardware of electronic devices might rapidly deteriorate, software might start running slowly or stop require newer hardware, parts on toys might break off, and so on.  Very intricate, delicate, expensive, or rare parts could be used in the making of a product, especially with electronics, so that repairing an item as a consumer is very risky or not financially worth it, with the price of a replacement item perhaps being the same as a replacement part for the defective piece.  Companies furthermore might withdraw support for items after an arbitrary number of years to make it even more difficult to continue using what one already owns.  In doing some of these things or all of them together, there is a great deal of difficulty in not purchasing newer items, or just the increasing likelihood of the product malfunctioning by design.

Entire product categories are especially prone to being created with planned obsolescence at the core of the process.  Apple is a prominent practicer of this, discontinuing support for previous hardware models and aggressively releasing new models of the same basic device every single year, but this is the same company that even shipped phones in 2020 without chargers because the smaller packages "helped the environment"--as if trying to force new buyers to pay more just to have the fucking charger is really ever likely to be motivated by anything but greed!  In general, electronics ranging from smartphones to computers (including laptop computers) commonly develop battery, performance, or screen related issues within less than five years, whether they are an Apple product or not; in fact, one of the only types of electronics not plagued by this is the category of video game consoles.  This is in part because of systematic planned obsolescence.

This approach to business does intrinsically exploit consumers, though depending on the product and the need for or usefulness of it, choosing to purchase something intended to prematurely stop benefiting the user (at least to the same degree) is done willingly.  To be sure, it is also true that not all possible kinds of planned obsolescence are as obvious or petty or greed-driven as others.  In a handful of cases, the persistent push for buyers to continue buying might even put products with genuinely superior features in the ownership of consumers, but this does not justify exploitation of customers if exploitation is immoral.  It is not irrational to recognize planned obsolescence and still desire or purchase something, of course, as long as one does not make assumptions about the matter one way or another or think that personal convenience for those with enough resources to constantly update or replace their belongings justifies the way that planned obsolescence hurts almost every consumer even if they in some other way benefit from it.