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Yes, for a suitable value of "easily." It doesn't make sense to design every product to be as robust as possible, so there is a trade-off between robustness and other factors like cost and weight. A laptop or phone breaks easily if you drop it, but that doesn't mean the manufacturer is unethical for not making every single one be one of those super-rugged ones with rubber corners. As the ease of breakage increases, and as the cost of making it more robust decreases, so it becomes less and less justifiable to do.
The problem here is really uncertainty and lack of knowledge. If you knew that the product you were buying was going to last for exactly 17 months, you could compare the cost over its lifetime to one which would last exactly 25 months. Then all the underhanded tactics of planned obsolescence would be far less effective. But we don't know that, and really we don't even know the average or likely range.