Many people are taught that if a lightbulb goes out in your house, you replace it -- you don’t go looking for a whole new house. The same should hold true for many other possessions, ranging from clothes to electronics. However, if everyone were to follow this, there would be no need to always buy the latest generation of a smartphone instead of fixing it, for example, and an economy that is only held up by constant, furious production could not survive that way. This gave birth to a practice called planned obsolescence, which means that a product’s useful life is artificially limited in order to force consumers to replace it sooner (also referred to as shortening the replacement cycle).
Although the definition of “planned obsolescence” might lead someone to think of laptops or smartphones, the phrase is much older than that. Its roots can be traced back to the 1920s and the American automotive industry, when the saturation of the market led General Motors to change designs annually to convince car owners that they had to buy a new car every year. This marked the birth of the phrase, but the business practice had been in use long before that.
There are several different types of planned obsolescence, including designing a product to deteriorate quickly, deeming it unfashionable after a while, or having newer programs incompatible with the product. Some inkjet printer manufacturers use smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent you from using them after a certain number of pages printed, in spite of the cartridge containing more than enough ink. Similarly, YouTube's Android application does not work with older versions of the OS although it theoretically could. All in all, planned obsolescence is a practice that serves to feed the juggernaut of production with no end in sight.