Planned Obsolescence
A reader's summary of the idea that products are deliberately designed to fail or go out of style — Bernard London's 1932 pamphlet that coined the phrase, the lightbulb cartel and General Motors' annual model changes that predate and postdate it, and how a Depression-era policy proposal became shorthand for phone batteries wearing out.
The term at a glance
Planned obsolescence describes designing a product so that it stops working, stops being supported, or stops looking current sooner than it otherwise could, in order to push replacement purchases. In popular use the term is almost always an accusation of engineered failure; in its original 1932 proposal it meant something closer to the opposite — a government-enforced expiration date meant to fix an economy, not a corporate trick to sell more units.
Origin
The phrase comes from Bernard London, a real-estate broker who published a 1932 pamphlet titled “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence,” written in the depths of the Depression. London's proposal was that the government assign every manufactured product a legal “death date,” after which continued use would be against the law, forcing consumers to keep buying replacements and keeping factories running and workers employed. The proposal was never adopted, but the phrase outlived it by decades, later attaching itself to manufacturers accused of doing privately and quietly what London had wanted the state to mandate openly.
History and context
The practice long predates London's coinage. In 1924, the world's major lightbulb manufacturers — including Osram, Philips, and General Electric — formed the Phoebus cartel and agreed to cap incandescent bulb lifespan at 1,000 hours, down from the 1,500-to-2,500 hours some manufacturers had already achieved, enforcing the cap with fines on members whose bulbs lasted too long. Around the same period, General Motors under Alfred Sloan introduced annual model-year styling changes specifically to make existing cars look outdated sooner, a strategy credited with helping GM overtake Ford's unchanging Model T in sales. The term itself was later given a very different, more respectable spin by industrial designer Brooks Stevens, who used “planned obsolescence” in a 1954 speech to describe simply “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary” — a marketing strategy built on taste and desire, not engineered failure.
Main ideas
London's 1932 pamphlet proposed a law, not a corporate strategy
Bernard London wanted the government to assign legal expiration dates to products as a Depression-era stimulus measure — mandatory, universal, and openly enforced — a proposal quite different from what the phrase later came to mean once it was applied to private manufacturers.
The Phoebus cartel is the most-cited concrete example
The 1924 agreement among major lightbulb makers to shorten bulb life to 1,000 hours, enforced through fines on manufacturers whose products lasted too long, remains the most thoroughly documented case of an industry coordinating on deliberately shorter product life.
General Motors sold obsolescence through style, not failure
Alfred Sloan's annual model-year changes at GM in the 1920s didn't make cars stop working sooner — they made existing cars look outdated sooner, a distinct mechanism sometimes called 'style obsolescence' that competed successfully against Ford's unchanging Model T.
Brooks Stevens redefined the term as something positive
Designer Brooks Stevens' 1954 usage described a desire-driven strategy of making people want the newer version, explicitly distinguishing it from products engineered to break — a distinction that gets lost in most modern, accusatory uses of the phrase.
Modern tech products revived the engineered-failure version
Non-removable phone batteries, software updates that slow older devices, and parts deliberately hard to repair or source have brought the original, more sinister reading of the term back into wide use, most visibly after Apple acknowledged in 2017 that iOS updates throttled processors on phones with aging batteries.
Critique
- Genuine conspiracies are hard to prove. The Phoebus cartel is well documented through surviving records, but for most modern products, showing that a component was deliberately engineered to fail — rather than simply built to a cost, weight, or size target — is far harder to establish than the popular narrative suggests.
- Some “obsolescence” is just competition and progress. Faster replacement cycles can also reflect real technical improvement and genuine consumer preference for newer features, not sabotage — critics of the strong version of the theory argue it sometimes assumes malice where ordinary market competition is a sufficient explanation.
- The term now covers two different mechanisms at once. Style-driven obsolescence (Sloan's annual redesigns) and failure-driven obsolescence (the Phoebus cartel, throttled batteries) work through entirely different means, but popular use treats them as the same accusation, which can make the underlying complaint harder to evaluate case by case.
Impact
Planned obsolescence now sits alongside Enshittification as one of the internet's default explanations for a product feeling deliberately worse over time, invoked constantly in discussions of phone repairability, printer cartridges, and fast fashion. It has also fed directly into policy: the European Union's eco-design rules increasingly require replaceable batteries and published repairability scores, treating London's century-old idea of an enforced product lifespan as something closer to consumer protection than economic stimulus.