this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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I am suggesting that companies specifically designing products to fail at a specific point isn't as prolific as people like to claim.
Cheaper parts have lower MTTF specs, so by default a cheap product will fail sooner than an expensive one.
That's not to say that expensive appliances can't use cheap parts, but I'd argue the main goal is to increase profit margins rather than to increase turnover.
Yeah. It's not "how evilly can we design this to only last three years", it's "how cheaply can we design this to last only at least as long as it has to". There's a difference between making it fail and just not caring if it continues.
Like how the mars rovers had a design lifetime of like three years or whatever, and anything past that was just a bonus. NASA didn't design them to fail after three years, they designed them to last at least three years at minimum.