In December of 1924, the heads of  all the major lightbulb manufacturers  

across the world met in Geneva to concoct  a sinister plan. Their talks outlined  

limits on how long all of their lightbulbs would  last. The idea being that if their bulbs failed  

quickly customers would have to buy more of  their product. In this video, we're going  

to unpack this idea of purposefully creating  inferior products to drive sales, a symptom  

of late stage capitalism that has since been  coined planned obsolescence. And as we'll see,  

this obsolescence can have drastic consequences on  our wallets, waste streams, and even our climate.

What is Planned Obsolescence: 

Corporations create obsolescence through two  main avenues: planned obsolescence and perceived  

obsolescence. Both practices are meant to make a  product seem useless or actually useless in order  

to drive sales. Planned obsolescence occurs  when a company manufactures a device to fail  

before its realistic lifespan. This usually  means a weaker filament, plastic encasement, or a  

fragile glass screen that limits the durability of  the good. In the case of the collection of 1920s  

electricity companies known as the Phoebus cartel,  they applied this principle to lightbulbs. The  

Phoebus cartel collectively cut the lifespan of  their products in half from 2,000 to 1,000 hours,  

so that consumers would have to buy twice the  amount of lightbulbs that they did previously.

On the other side of obsolescence there's the more  amorphous phenomenon of perceived obsolescence.  

Think of that new phone you bought or that new  style of clothes you've been eyeing or even  

this year's new line of pickup trucks. All these  are instances of perceived obsolescence. When  

companies release their new line of products,  their older products quickly become unfashionable  

or less desirable. In order to get you to keep  buying their goods corporations consistently  

market their new lines to make it seem like  that new gadget you just bought a year ago  

is an antique, even though, in most cases,  the older product still works. This kind  

of perceived obsolescence is especially prevalent  with cars, technology, and fashion, because these  

consumer goods have been transformed into status  symbols. If you want to keep up appearances,  

you grab the newest model of the iPhone. If  you want to look good, you buy the latest style  

from that instagram ad. But how and why does  planned and perceived obsolescence work on us?

How Does Planned Obsolescence Work? As we've just seen, modern obsolescence comes  

in various forms: from brittle parts that break  easily, to glued-in batteries you can't replace  

to aesthetic upgrades that take the previous  version out of fashion. And it seems the master  

of all these methods is Apple. It's one of the top  three phone producers in the world as well as the  

most valuable company globally. In part, the tech  giant's market dominance was created by and now  

allows for Apple to employ an environmentally  dangerous combination of perceived and planned  

obsolescence that leaves consumers buying a  brand new iPhone every two or three years.  

For the iPhone it all starts with the battery.  After about 2-3 years of peak performance,  

the iPhone battery begins to wear out. But if you  want to change the battery, it's not as simple as  

popping the back phone and sliding in replacement.  Depending on the version of the iPhone you'll need  

special screwdrivers, adhesive removers, suction  cups, and possibly even a soldering gun just to  

replace your rundown battery. In an interview with  the team at the popular DIY tech website iFixit,  

they call the iPhone battery a “premature death  clock that they're building into it by building  

in a consumable is designed to increase the number  of iPhones apple sells by.” Apple's normalization  

of the built-in battery, which, before the age of  the iPhone, was rarely seen in cellphones, nudges  

customers into buying new rather than struggling  to replace the battery. And if you do want Apple  

to replace a battery or some other damage to your  device, you'll have to cough up a lot of cash.  

At times up to 50-70% of the phone's original  cost. This is because you can't just take your  

iPhone to any old repair shop. Only Apple stores  and Apple certified repair locations are allowed  

to fix iPhones. So, when the cost of repair is  high and the newest model of iPhone has just been  

released it's difficult to not splurge on that  new device. This is, yet again, another barrier  

towards reusing your phone, reducing consumption,  and ultimately minimizing your environmental  

impact. Finally, Apple's warranty only covers  your freshly purchased iPhone for one year, which  

is well before the 2-3 year range when Apple's  hardware typically begins to fail. The point here  

is this: none of these practices are necessary  for the production or sale of Apple's products;  

Apple intentionally chooses to build this  waste into its product design and business  

plan because these steps are necessary to make  Apple into a tech giant and capitalist behemoth.

Indeed, Apple just comes out and admits how  long they expect their devices to last: 7  

years. After seven years, their products,  in their words, “become obsolete.” But wait,  

Charlie, isn't 7 years kind of a long  time for a phone or computer to last?  

It may sound like a long time now, but  prior to the advent of this iPhone paradigm,  

spending $1,000 on a product that will be obsolete  in 7 years at most would have felt completely  

unreasonable. Many of us are so surrounded  by planned and perceived obsolescence  

that we have been primed to think that owning a  single device for 7 years is actually a long time.

And even if their phones do last the full 7  years, Apple creates perceived obsolescence  

by consistently marketing their phones through  aesthetics, lifestyle, and status. Even that  

green bubble in iMessage seems to be telling  us that other phones are somehow worse. So,  

at the end of the day, if Apple genuinely did want  you to continue using your phone then they would  

offer longer warranties or create more durable,  easily repairable tech. But they don't, because  

once you've captured the market like they have,  obsolescence becomes pretty damn profitable.

Apple, however, is just one of many examples  of obsolescence in capitalism. There's Epson's  

proprietary ink cartridges, barely modified new  editions of school textbooks from McGraw Hill, and  

even Tesla seems primed to be next, with its  reluctance to allow independent auto-repair  

shops to service their cars, a move  remarkably similar to that of Apple.

Both planned and perceived obsolescence lead  to that pile of perfectly operable phones in  

your desk drawer as well as fuel the 50  million metric tons of e-waste created  

each year. These corporate practices make our  quest to embrace climate-aligned actions such  

as reusing and reducing consumption much  harder. In short, manufactured obsolescence  

fuels consumerism and environmental degradation  in an already overconsuming world. So if it's  

clearly a terrible scheme for our wallets,  wellbeing, and the environment, how do we stop it?

A New Economic Model vs. Planned Obsolescence 

Luckily, there are a variety of short-term and  long-term solutions for getting rid of planned  

obsolescence. On an individual level, simply  taking the time to repair, take care, and reuse  

your possessions is a great first step. But as  we've just seen, companies have a vested interest  

in making that as hard as possible--both through  the durability of their product and by influencing  

your mindset through advertising. Which means that  Right to Repair campaigns and court cases like  

these are essential to easing the unnecessary  burden on the consumer. But as we zoom out  

further, companies like Apple have to be forced  to change how they do business. France already  

has planned obsolescence laws, and companies  like Fairphone show that it is actually possible  

to make a longer lasting phone that is easy to  repair. The battery on the Fairphone only takes  

about eight minutes to replace. But ultimately,  obsolescence is a symptom of late stage  

capitalism, so if we want to create a world in  which durable, sustainable products are the norm,  

we have to embrace a new mindset and build a new  economic system that at every stage in the process  

asks: “does it actively contribute to humans and  nature thriving together as one integrated system  

on this planet? If yes, green light. If not,  red light. Period.” If all of this sounds hard  

or impossible, science tells us there can be no  other way. Since the early eighties we've known  

that global temperatures will rise if left  unchecked, and yet we've made very little progress  

since then. So, the world, and for that matter,  our economy, needs to change, and eliminating  

planned obsolescence is just one step on the path  to a more just, more sustainable economic system.

Hey everyone, Charlie here. If you've been  watching Our Changing Climate for a while  

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