How Capitalism Killed Quality: The Dark Story of Planned Obsolescence
Why did your grandparents' refrigerator last thirty years while your smartphone struggles to make it past five? It's a question worth sitting with, because the easy answer — "technology just moves faster now" — doesn't actually hold up under scrutiny. A refrigerator and a smartphone are both, at their core, machines built to do a job reliably for as long as possible. One of them was built by companies competing primarily on durability and reputation. The other was built by companies competing in an environment where a product's death, at a roughly predictable interval, has become part of the business model rather than an unfortunate side effect of it. This isn't a claim that every short-lived product today is short-lived by design, or that no part of the story is genuine technological progress. Batteries do degrade with chemistry, not malice; software genuinely does need updating to stay secure; competition genuinely does drive some companies toward b...