Planned obsolescence: who’s to blame: companies or users?
Spanish journalist Fede Durán called me to comment for an article he has published in Actualidad Económica (pdf). We talked about the extent to which brands create products specifically designed with a short lifetime, or if it is simply that technological development is so rapid that some products that will just be out of date within a few years, if not months, with new features, and that many of us would prefer to buy the latest version anyway.
In many ways, Apple’s business model, specifically mentioned by Fede in the article, is to give customers a reason to go to its stores and spend money every year. In the case of many of its devices, the benefits offered by newer models eclipse the previous ones, which generates frustration in a good part of the market if they are unable to get an update, and in the process creating two market segments that, depending on their purchasing power and how important they think the device is, swing between updating only when the old device suffers a breakdown or is unusable, and acquiring new models practically as they come out. For brands like Apple, problems can arise if the performance differential of the new model is perceived as not striking enough, such as the iPhone 7 or, apparently, the latest MacBook Pro.
How long should a device like a smartphone or a computer last? Some components, such as batteries, measure their useful life in terms of charge cycles, which means prolonging that average life is bothersome. If the brand chooses to design a non-replaceable battery, it is clearly going down the planned obsolescence route, conditioning the life of the device to the duration its components.
The question comes down to the increase in functions that the brand envisages for the rest of the components of the device: if, at the time the battery has to be replaced the performance differential of the rest of the components is noteworthy, then the brand wants you to consider a complete replacement.
Whether or not consumers accept this or seek protection from consumer authorities depends basically on the same thing: if at the time certain functions on the device stop working the latest model is not notably better, they will complain at being forced to update a product that in their opinion, still has plenty of life in it. Obviously, loyalty to the brand, image, and other factors are all factors that need to be taken into account.
The term consumer durables no long applies to most categories, even though planned obsolescence is seen by increasing numbers of people as environmentally unsustainable. Although we still wait for most appliance to break down before replacing them, despite the technology they contain, smartphones, tablets and computers have very short lives, given their high price, although manufacturers and consumers no longer see them as durable goods, accepting that they should be replaced given the advances in technology.
In the automotive industry, to a certain extent, the same thing is happening, and it is this conception of obsolescence that is behind trends like the connected vehicle, whereby certain components and systems can be updated periodically, which to some extent challenges the traditional conception of a car’s value dropping from the moment we drive it out of the showroom.
The question is whether we would we really want to keep a smartphone for three or four years, while several generations of new models appear with functions we would like to use? In answering that question we must first decide whether the responsibility for planned obsolescence lies with manufacturers … or ourselves.
(En español, aquí)
