For many products I think it's incorrect to say they're designed to stop working after a maximum duration. That would be a very expensive thing to actually design and implement. You can test a component and understand its MTBF but it's much harder to design a "die after X days" without explicitly putting in way fuses that a burnt after some counter expires.

Instead it's more accurate to realize things are made to survive at least a minimum period of time. Components get engineered such their MTBF is longer than some mandated warranty period.

While it seems like only a semantic difference I've found thinking this way really helps me price things. If you look at an item and assume it's been engineered to have a MTBF just a bit longer than its warranty/support period you can calculate its amortized price, including an evaluation of extended warranties or service contracts.

This is instead of assuming I can buy something and it will last a decade. If something lasts me longer than my estimate that's awesome and I'll likely favor that brand on my next purchase.

This is nice , and a valuable way to take agency. But it does suck when the cost to manufacturer something that lasts 2x longer would be much less than 2x the price, but such things don't exist because of market incentives.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with planned obsolescence.

There are exactly two alternatives to planned obsolescence. Planned infinity, which is an impossible engineering constraint. And unplanned obsolescence, which you know from temu products, which break after days of use, as they are designed with massive flaws.

If you are engineering a product you absolutely need to plan how long the product will last. The "alternatives" are significantly worse, especially for the consumer.

The Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 are planned for obsolescence, the parts they are made up of are designed to last a specific amount of time and use and are discarded afterwards. This is not some nefarious greedy management/engineering decision, but a reasonable tradeoff to make aviation possible, cost effective and safe.

Of course this is distinct from malicious engineering, which is the totally unrelated practice of building things which have specific negative properties. E.g. intentional design flaws.

That's not the definition of planned obsolescence

I'm not sure that belongs as a bullet point in an article about things working well. A lot of products built with planned obsolescence in mind work very well, until they don't.

Planned obsolescence is usually taken as a "bad thing" but it isn't necessarily - when considered as "there's no reason to spend money on making a part of this outlast the useful lifespan of the whole."

A cruise missile doesn't need to fix a bug that can only occur months after it has detonated, after all.

The real problem comes from the manufacturer's idea of "useful lifespan" and the customer's. For most people, an appliance's useful lifespan is "as long as it keeps working" and they don't care to ever upgrade it if it doesn't fail. Manufacturer's aren't incentivized to make those, however, and only accidentally do so (something designed to last 10 years is likely to last much longer on average).

I think what you call the 'real problem' is what people mean by planned obsolescence. It does not refer to any sort of tradeoffs, its specifically used to refer to times when the manufacturer sets their useful lifespan lower than the customer would want, and lower than the optimal price/lifespan ratio, so as to force more sales

Usually you can find the price/lifespan ratio you want - by paying more. What the customer wants is the cheapest item to last forever, but also be cheaper. There's obvious tradeoffs here, and the problem for everyone is the customers keep buying the cheapest ones.

From the Wikipedia link a few up:

"Limited lifespan is only a sign of planned obsolescence if the limit is made artificially short."

Its not always the consumers fault, its a market for lemons and paying more is by no means a guarantee of a better product. Especially when models are updated every few years , so keeping track becomes almost impossible.

Most examples have some sort of devils advocate reason (which I rarely believe) but some are extremely cut and dry: "For example, inkjet printer manufacturers employ smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent them from being used after a certain threshold (number of pages, time, etc.), even though the cartridge may still contain usable ink or could be refilled (with ink toners, up to 50 percent of the toner cartridge is often still full)"