Yeah, but ask any engineer, and they’ll tell you the only reason why that definition exists is because the public created it out a complete false interpretation of what it actually means. The dictionary is full of such words.
Oh, and Wikipedia isn’t a dictionary. 
Should we rename planned obsolescence to lower price for a car due to non repairable parts that are cheaper to produce are more expensive to replace than if it was a repairable part? If the cost of making a part repairable makes it 20 cents more expensive, skip it?
Eraser, I was an engineer. Worked in the manufacturing industry for 23 years, including many years as a manager. I have never heard what you claim an engineer would say.
TSM - are you claiming you heard engineers refer to it as purposely limiting the life of a product, like much of the public thinks? If so, I’m calling you on that one. 
I’ve never heard of that either…Been working as an engineer for over 35 years.
Language is constantly evolving. Many many many words have changed meaning due to popular meaning at the time. New definitions have been added and are being added all the time to existing words. This is nothing new…been going on for hundreds of years.
What you will see is older people holding on to the older definitions…and not adapting to the new definitions.
My idea of planned obsolescence is the notion that a certain era or generation of car models will be kept around for X number of years and then replaced with something that is different to one degree or the other.
I do believe that car makers do this and my opinion is based on sitting through a lecture where a Subaru rep flat stated that not only is the next generation of cars that has not been built yet going to be phased out in 5-7 years after introduction but also the generation after that; a generation that is not even on the drawing board yet.
The words “obsolete” and “obsolescence” were not only used in that lecture but also by the Subaru factory parts representative who stated at the time that Subaru was going to look at cars over 4 or 5 years old as being obsolete.
Unless there’s something I’m not comprehending in the Queen’s English it all sounds like a thought out plan to me. 
Eraser, yes, I’m saying that I’ve had many a discussion with many colleagues about the public’s perception that engineers intentionally design parts to last only for a specific lifespan and the fallacy of it. Note that that is NOT the same thing as reducing cost while trying to meet or beat the intended lifespan of the product. The former is intentional failure. The latter is attempting to keep the product working while keeping costs down.
I’m also familiar with the definition that you’ve offered, and that OK4450 alluded to, the idea of design obsolescence. The difference is that this goal is for the design to become obsolete by displacement with better or cooler product. It does not incorporate failure into the design goals. It assumes that the product will still be functional, but the buying demographic will want to replace it with the new one.
There were some design changes that made cars easier to service. Three examples:
When Ford motor company changed to suspended pedals for the brake and clutch back in 1952. This moved the master cylinder up under the hood instead of under the floor where the mat had to be pulled back and a plate removed before the brake fluid level could be checked. Also, it made the master cylinder easier to remove so that a person didn’t have to work under the car to replace the master cylinder.
My dad’s 1939 Chevrolet and my 1948 Dodge had a “butterfly” hood. The hood had two halve that were hinged in the middle. To remove the radiator, the hood had to be removed. The alligator style hood certainly made radiator removal easier.
My dad’s 1939 Chevrolet and my 1950 Chevrolet pickup had the battery undre the floor on the passenger side. Moving the battery undre the hood made checking the battery a lot easier.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see them go from 4~5 year refreshes to 2~3 years. Afterall, why would someone turning in a lease vehicle want to consider another of the same car they just got rid of when there are other new cars that got updated in the meantime?
@the same mountainbike: I agree with you on DFM. It’s not just cars of course. Part of the problem is the increasing complexity of today’s technology, and cramming more into smaller spaces. Maybe a good example is the electronics industry: It used to be that everything was wired point-to-point on a chassis. With increasing technology and smaller components, printed circuit boards came into being, with DFM principles certainly applied here. But you could still work on them. It wasn’t too difficult to unsolder and replace a bad component until the mid/late 80s. Now, with almost exclusively surface-mount components and boards having 4 or more laminated layers of connections, it’s pretty much impossible to replace a failed component, if you can even find the problem, even for a pro with the right tools. Take a look at your computer motherboard and you’ll see what I mean. Of course I’m preaching to the choir here.
Soon enough, I expect higher end electronics to be manufactured fully 3-dimensionally. Some already are to some extent. Instead of a flat motherboard, you’ll have a “mothercube”
I think we are confusing “obsolescence” with a number of other aspects of today’s technology. Cheap and quick assembly, as previously stated, is an overriding concern. With federal rules on emissions, all items on the power train have to be durable to get the run time without any penalty. Corrosion protection makes car bodies last at least twice as long as previous. In other words, we are getting spoiled in some ways. I do agree that “repairability” and maintainability should receive more attention. So far, manufacturers have not been pressured to do so.
Today’s vehicles and other consumer items last a very long time, often without any repairs. We used to have tube type TVs that required constant attention and were finished in 10 years, aside from nice wooden cabinet, of course. We have a 32" JVC old style TV (not flat screen) which is now 10 years old, is used daily, and has not had a single repair or adjustment. True that there are many throw-away items which are so inexpensive to buy, such as toasters, blenders, kettles, that they are worth less than an hour’s labor. It will usually say “no consumer repairable/removable parts inside”. When it quits, just chuck it and get another one.
We have a 20 year old Black & Decker coffee maker (made in USA) that just won’t give up. We get at least 18 years out of a dishwasher with only minor repairs. And so on.
In other words, if you buy highly rated products you can expect a long life with few repairs. Those washers that lasted 25 years did require quite a few repairs that at tody’s labor rates would not be economical.
If you want to see true obsolescence, go to an airplane grave yard. You’ll see them cut up perfectly “good” Lockheed L-1011s and other fuel-thirsty planes that would bankrupt an airline. There is nothing wrong technically with these machines, and you will still see them used by billionaires, as corporate machines and in oil rich countries with cheap fuel.
The definiton of true obsolescence is “no longer fit for intended use”. That could mean technically, environmentally or economically. It is not a fashion definition. The Boeing 727 was a great plane, but could not be fitted with quieter and more fuel-efficient engines. Miami was the only remaining US airport where it was allowed to land with the excess noise level. The purported reason was that Miami wanted to become the gateway to Latin America and those countries’ airlines still had many of these noisy planes.
I think some of our dissatisfaction with cars is that whatever the manufacturers offer to lavish on as options the buying public seems so self-indulgent that they will go upside down on a trade and finance the newest most luxurious model for 7 years or worse, lease it to satisfy some crave for status. And the manufacturers see that market as the softest and most profitable so they cater to it. Several years ago a customer needed to upgrade more than a dozen old trucks and shopped around for basic work trucks. No dealer had any and no dealer could quickly get any. Everything available on the lots and in the pipeline had power windows, AC, carpeted floors, automatic transmissions, sport wheels and tires and AM-FM CD players. He could buy the loaded models off the lot cheaper than he could get the stripped down models which were only available by special order. He couldn’t imagine having a landscaping work crew in a better truck than he drove but that’s what he did. He just couldn’t turn loose of the old F250 4x4 with the granny low 4 speed and winch that he often needed to get his crew leaders out of holes. It has no AC.
The part I found especially distasteful about the Subaru situation that I mentioned is not necessarily the part about steering people into a new generation of cars ever so often; it was the deliberate destruction and dumpster consignment of countless truckloads of new parts which then led to “don’t have, can’t get, sorry” statements to the car owners.
This policy (voluntary on the part of the dealers but most went along with it) led to astronomical price increases on the remaining parts.
I’m in total agreement with Rod Knox about the bells and whistles on modern cars; which buyers want and car makers are only too happy to provide.
The cost of adding things on in bulk at the production line can be done comparatively cheap and those option packages are vastly inflated in price compared to the actual production cost of that package.
(Just an example of how cheaply things can be done. Many years back Subaru was replacing a lot of turbochargers under an emissions warranty for some reason. At one point Subaru, as per the norm, cut the dealer cost on turbocharge kits back to just slightly over what they (meaning the factory) paid for them. I bought a couple of complete Garrett turbocharger kits with all hoses, fittings, etc for the sum of 130 dollars each for the complete kit. I have no idea what the actual production cost of those Garrett units is but that 130 was over the counter to an employee before I got the 10% employee discount subtracted. This does go to show how cheaply even the suppliers can turn something out.)
“Now, with almost exclusively surface-mount components and boards having 4 or more laminated layers of connections, it’s pretty much impossible to replace a failed component, if you can even find the problem, even for a pro with the right tools”
Times have changed dramatically. When I started messing around with electronics, we had to drill holes and install eyelets and then wire things between them in free space more or less. Today, we’re working with state of the art geometries that dictate working under microscopes with very small tools. In engineering, we build boards and R&R parts like this every single day. Doesn’t matter the pin type or spacing (BGA, J lead, gull wing, etc) we have the tools necessary to effectively remove and replace them. We can apply solder paste and use reflow or even solder many parts by hand (the iron tips and solder diameter are sufficiently small but it does take skill to accomplish). It definitely helps if you don’t drink too much coffee or mountain dew
Where it has become “impossible” is on a production line or a general service shop. It’s not economically feasible to repair many boards in production. If the cost of your highly integrated PCBA is $500, there’s no way you can really afford to have someone sit down and repair it. It’s cheaper to scrap it and move on. The general service shops aren’t going to have the tools, let alone the schematics or assembly prints to figure what the part was in the first place (most discretes are not marked with values anymore they are so small).
By and large, the quality of circuit board fabrication has made failures very rare. There was a serious uptick in issues when the industry transitioned to RoHS solders. The resultant balls and splashes made removing parts a common occurance during FAR investigations. Much of this was then foisted upon the board vendors to figure out what was going wrong and to correct any mistakes. But we had a busy year or two working through that transition.
I recall some years back an effort to lay down the components into the mechancial structure of the device itself. Rather than a circuit board, the parts were simply integrated into the interior enclosure surfaces.
About that buyback from Subaru:
Some states (CA is one) require the manufacturer to ensure availability of parts for a given number of years after production. Various rumours swirl about federal requirements, but it appears that the state requirement is just as strict as the rumoured fed requirement, with 7 years being pretty common upper bound (it’s the requirement in CA, so you can count on that being the minimum manufacturers go with).
That may have been the driving force behind Subaru’s decision, plus a lack of desire to deal with warranty/liability claims for parts after that period. Certainly a BAD business decision, IMO,
That’s also one of the little-discussed aspects of GM’s killing off of the EV1 that people missed. Had GM not repossessed the cars (which were all leased), by law they would have been required to insure parts availability for several more years (some components might even have been covered under even longer warranties required in CA for certain components). Unlike other EVs of the time, that meant small scale custom fabrication of parts… by comparison, the Rav4EV used mostly common Rav4 parts and Toyota got waivers signed to keep them from having to supply specialty components…
Folks, I agree with most of your statements. I remember working with gas tubes and hard wiring, and then solid state devices came along followed almost immediately by PC boards. Then IC devices with SMT and gold-ball-bonded devices in cavities became common, to be displaced by true “chips” wherein everything was grown on multiple layers of silicon. And board manufacturing technology evolved with the development of PC software to where I’ve microsectioned coupons on hardboards with 12 layers. Talk about a 3-D circuit puzzle! The manufacturing is a challange as well. In addition to the truely difficult registration challanges, there’s the problems of preventing lands from lifting during the lamination processes, hailheading, and barrel fracturing during the lamination processes.
I suspect the next giant leap is going to take us all by surprise. With all the research going on in nanotechnology, I suspect that future devices will ne laid down atom by atom. Scientists can already make circuits this way in the lab, and it’s only a matter of time before they can make components this way along with ciircuits in a production line.
TT, you’ve brought back memories. Memories of dealing with new technologies. Wave soldering, SMT, and multilayer boards in particular.
Doc, while I think of obsolescence as being no longer fit for use, I have to agree that there exists also the term in the marketing world, used to mean no longer saleable even if the product is still technically fit for use.
I agree that there are other uses for the term “obsolete”. The coffee percolator comes to mind, as it has been almost completely superseded by the filter coffee machine. You can still buy them in specilaty shops.
Back in the 70s we had a Corningware percolator at the time when Mr. Coffee was introduced by Joe DiMaggio, ex-baseball, ex-Marilyn Monroe. We bought one for $36 which was a lot of money then. we’ve had 5 new coffee machines since and now the market offers the pre-packaged single service at $0.50 per cup. We’re not going that way, but a widowed friend of my wife wears by them for a perosn living alone.
I think I was the last one in my area to still use folding webbed lawn chairs. And re-webbed them numerous times. They are more comfortable than solid resin chairs, and fold easily. When the webbing became unavailable, we reluctantly chucked them out. The new folding types with fabric are not nearly as comfortable.
Foutain pens became obsolete with the ball point pen. They made a short comeback with a very high price; Staples sells them. They are great for signing contracts and government documents. Just ask your kids what “ink” is.
I think my 8-track tapes might be obsolete…
I agree, when I think of 8Track, bell bottom pants, sideburns, and avocado shag carpet comes to mind. I only had one car with 8Track, a 1980 Olds, and quickly replaced it with a casette.
Obsolete can be a strange concept. I’ve heard tubed stereo amps and turntables that sound vastly better than most of the crap available in “big box” electronics stores. The equipment can be pricey, but wow! I don’t care what Popular Mechanics says, some things can’t be perceived with bench testing equipment.