Designed to Fail
Just curious if anyone has ever found evidence of timed failure of tech products. I've often wondered if manufactures rig their devices to break after a certain amount of random time has passed to keep the product flowing. What do you think? I edited the topic to be more clear. I misused "obsolescence". I'm not talking about end of life support. I am talking about purposely choosing materials with a known fatigue duration failure or software/hardware counters/timers. An example would be using flash memory with a known read/write failure after so many uses to make a product such as a cell phone have a failure after a certain amount of time. Not all devices would exhibit this behavior, but a high enough percentage would to be beneficial to new product adoption.
Ambulance chaser alert.
I’m going to start issuing tinfoil hats to everyone who uses the word “planned obsolescence”. Manufacturers are not required to make every successive generation of a product backward compatible. Nor are they obligated to repair legacy products at twice the cost of a current generation replacement.
You obviously don't know what planned obsolescence means. You're describing End of Life. EOL is a legit business strategy to keep you from supporting something forever. Thats a lot different from designing a product to fail after a certain duration
Apple stops offering repairs after five years and Mac parts to repair shops after seven (but only in certain states where they have to stretch the extra two years by law)
Again, this is EOL not design to fail
So for example refrigerators whose compressors go out right after warranty?
Yes, like every iPhone ever invented. Also, Land Rovers. Those are guaranteed to begin falling apart after two years. I don't think it is always intentional, I think often it is a product of poor development and engineering.