Planned Obsolescence: How Companies Engineer Products to Expire and the Legal Battles

The Depression-Era Idea That Became a Global Business Strategy

In 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression, real estate broker Bernard London published a pamphlet titled "Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence." His proposal: legally mandate expiration dates on all manufactured goods to force consumers to keep buying replacements, thereby stimulating production and employment. The government never adopted London's scheme, but the private sector did something more elegant—engineers and designers began building obsolescence into products not by legal requirement but by profit motive. Nine decades later, planned obsolescence is so deeply embedded in consumer product design that most people have never purchased a product that was not engineered to fail, slow down, or become socially obsolete before it was physically worn out.

Three Types of Planned Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is not a single strategy but a family of design and marketing approaches:

The Phoebus Cartel: Planned Obsolescence as Industry Agreement

The most documented historical case of deliberate functional obsolescence is the Phoebus Cartel—a secret agreement among the world's major light bulb manufacturers (including Philips, Osram, and General Electric) formed in Geneva in 1924. The cartel set a standard bulb lifespan of 1,000 hours and fined member companies whose bulbs lasted longer. Prior to Phoebus, bulbs routinely lasted 2,500 hours or more. The cartel effectively halved bulb lifespan to double replacement demand. The agreement was dissolved in the early 1940s, but documentary evidence emerged in the 1970s in legal proceedings. The Phoebus Cartel is the rare case where planned obsolescence was explicitly documented rather than merely inferred from engineering choices.

The Apple Battery Case: Litigation and Settlement

In 2017, researchers discovered that Apple's iOS software intentionally throttled the processing speed of older iPhone models with degraded batteries. Apple initially denied the practice, then acknowledged it, describing it as a feature to prevent unexpected shutdowns in phones with reduced battery capacity. The company faced immediate consumer backlash and multiple class-action lawsuits in the United States and regulatory investigations in France, where planned obsolescence has been illegal since 2015. Apple settled a class-action lawsuit in 2020 for $113 million. France fined Apple €25 million in 2020 for the practice. The episode illustrated the blurry line between legitimate technical management of aging hardware and deliberate obsolescence designed to drive replacement purchases.

Printer Ink: The Most Profitable Obsolescence

Inkjet printer economics represent perhaps the most naked example of planned obsolescence combined with vendor lock-in:

• Printers are sold at or below manufacturing cost; profits derive entirely from proprietary ink cartridges.
• Printer manufacturers embed chips in cartridges that report "empty" status when cartridges may still contain 20–40% of their ink.
• Firmware updates have been used to disable third-party compatible cartridges that would otherwise function correctly.
• HP's "Dynamic Security" technology—later rebranded as "HP+"—blocked third-party ink cartridges through authenticated chips, a practice that resulted in class-action lawsuits and FTC scrutiny.

The Right-to-Repair Movement and Regulatory Response

Growing consumer and legislative backlash against planned obsolescence has crystallized in the right-to-repair movement, which seeks to require manufacturers to make parts, tools, and diagnostic information available so that consumers and independent repair shops can fix products:

• The EU's Ecodesign Regulation (2021) requires manufacturers of appliances including washing machines, televisions, and refrigerators to supply spare parts for 7–10 years after a product's last sale.
• France enacted a repairability index law in 2021, requiring consumer electronics to display a repairability score from 0 to 10.
• The U.S. Right to Repair Act has been introduced in multiple Congresses without passage, though the FTC issued a 2021 report supporting right-to-repair policies.
• Apple, John Deere, and other major manufacturers have historically opposed right-to-repair legislation, arguing that repair access creates safety and security risks; most critics view these objections as pretextual.

Planned obsolescence sits at the intersection of capitalism's drive to maximize recurring revenue and society's mounting costs in resource depletion, electronic waste, and consumer expenditure. The legal and regulatory battles currently underway will determine whether the next generation of products is designed to last or designed to expire on schedule.