Planned obsolescence

You got to

be able to get some, like, Russian shit that'll last forever, right? They ain't down with this planned obsolescence shit, I'm sure.

Look,

man, everybody's down with it.

And I think Apple had to, like, settle a lawsuit because they actually were doing that allegedly.

Like, a planned obsolescence, I think they call it.

Yeah.

And they, they, like, had to set...

So every three years you do get a big advancement, but it, I think it's insidious that a corporation would intentionally sabotage their product to sell more of it.

That, I mean, that is almost like a, a terrorist act on our economy, if that's really happening.

So I got big, big issues with that, with, with planned obsolescence.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, what? Brew, I, I don't see how that ties in.

Well, if you think about it, this all isn't that different from planned obsolescence.

Planned obso-who-now?

Planned o-

It is a bleak thing, an existential nightmare that looms over me like the Sword of Damocles, a nightmare wrought of ones and zeroes.

zeroes.Yeah, what Howard said.

Planned obsolescence can manifest in a number of ways, but smartphones are probably the best example, like the iPhone, that are typically built in such a way to be hard to repair with techniques like using adhesive in place of screws to hold components in place, making it necessary to pry the components apart and risk breaking the very same parts you're trying to remove.

The end result of this is 41.8 million metric tons of electronic waste in 2014 alone, only a sixth of which was recycled.

Yeah, so it's always the promise of that.

And of course, the other side of that is planned obsolescence, which was a real thing at one point in time.

We've talked about it on the show.

And a lot of people think that there's still this planned obsolescence when, in fact, Apple does.

It seems that they work pretty hard to support older devices.

They adjust to accommodate weaker batteries.

This is the funny thing about this work that we do is we're on the front lines, just like the Apple employees are, but we have a little bit more freedom and stuff to speak a little more freely, I think.

But we hear all of the misplaced criticism about, oh, Apple, again, plagiarism.

Haven't got to deal with that then.

I'm just going back to Robert's planned obsolescence.

[laughs]

Oh, yeah.