This is why we can't have nice things 

The thing I hate most about planned obsolescence is that it assumes we have endless resources. It's terrible for our planet.

8.5 million people watch you, and you planted a seed today in their mind about right to repair. Thank you.

A JD tractor my grandfather owned back in the 40’s is to this day running strong. It’s a beast that has outlasted three tractors I have bought since the late 90’s.

We bought our house in 1999, and it came with an old brown electric stove, built by American Motors Corporation sometime in the 1970's or so. It has outlasted all the other appliances we bought when we moved in.

As an electrical engineer, I can assure you... We are literally educated in school about how to design for the desired failure timeframe. It seems criminal

When I was a young boy and my Grandfather complained "They keep making this junk cheaper so you have to keep buying it"... he must have said that a hundred times to me over the years... turns out Grandpa knew what the hell he was talking about.

I work for an unnamed software company X. When a new extremely fast solution was found to one of the algorithms, sold to customers, management decided to put sleep() function in some places to throttle the perofmance, so it matches the old algorithm. They said: "we will remove some throttles each quarter release and charge for the speedup we're doing".

I've been following the right to repair movement for a few years now and the attention it's been getting has been great, there's been some decent wins for the fight recently. I hope that this video encourages you to do research and avoid products where the manufacturer put R&D money into making sure you get screwed 2 years after purchase

Imagine the trillions of tons of unnecessary garbage planned obsolescence has caused our planet, the poisoning of our rivers and air and soil... It's so backward and disgusting. 😞

A GM engineer once told me, "it's easy to make a car last forever, getting one to break down in 7 years is the trick"

My parents bought a house in 1963 that was built in 1928 from the original owners. The front entrance had an unusually shaped light bulb. It must have been the original bulb from when the home was built. It was only turned on occasionally. When my Mom sold the house, we unscrewed that bulb and it’s installed in a closet at my sister’s home. It still works. It’s not continuously on of course. But that makes it even more special because turning it on and off weakens the tungsten more than keeping it on! I think the tungsten filament must be quite strong and thick. Yep, they don’t make things like they used to sure applies to this light bulb. 💡

My grandparents have a lightbulb in a sealed housing in their shower. They bought the house in 1965 and it was bult in 1946. They have never changed the bulb and it still works. Use it every time they use the shower.

My parents recently got a new microwave and gave me their old one they got for their wedding - I'm 25 and warming up my leftovers in the same microwave my baby food was warmed in... pretty amazing. I would love if everything lasted forever. Planned obsolescence feels like such a waste of resources.

The saddest example is that of school textbooks, each new edition has the most negligible changes in content.

I went full LED early about 10 years ago, and as you said, didn't expect to ever have to change them. But I have had to change some bulbs out twice already. And some of these were name brands (Philips, CREE), and other cheap brands performed about equally well. I suspect there's some planned obsolescence in LED bulbs, too. Regardless, their low power consumption and cooler temps make them great, but I wish they lasted longer.

When i was a young boy my grandfather said to me " Son you'll grow up, grow old and die"...he was a very wise man. Miss you gramps.

My mum had an oven that lasted 30 years, fully functioning right till the end. Then when she got a replacement, the technician told her that the company who manufactured them went broke because their ovens very rarely broke down. It's sad that we've gone from one extreme of excellent durability and reliability to planned obsolescence.

My aunt moved into her family home in 1919 at age 14 and had a 1913 Edison light bulb on her second story stair well. She lived in the house untill her death in 2002. She replaced that bulb a year before her death and she gave it to me and I have kept it right up to writing this comment and the other day plugged it in to see if it's still works. Bright as ever! Going on 108 years old.

I do believe Technology Connections just threw down a gauntlet here.

This video oversimplifies the Phoebus Cartel's actions. Incandescent bulb longevity inversely affects efficiency. Longer-lasting bulbs are dimmer and need higher wattage for the same brightness, which costs more in energy. Back then, it was cheaper to replace shorter lifespan bulbs than to bear the energy cost of long-life ones. The Cartel also standardized bulbs, making any brand's product similar, and removing manufacturer advantages. Granted, it did reduce competitive advantage to innovate and make more efficient bulbs, but that’s not the argument here. Technology connections just released a great video on this, I recommend checking it out.

>makes a bulb that lasts forever >sell it to everyone in the world >no one needs any bulb anymore >leaves

I studied Latin in high school, and there is a passage, in the Satyricon, in which Caesar is presented by a material that seems glass, as it is transparent, but when the artisan that presented it throws it on the ground and it does not break, instead he picks it up and works it back in the original shape, like it was plastic. In the story, Caesar asks the guy if someone else knows that secret, when he says no one does, Caesar has the man killed and the object destroyed in fear that gold would lose value. Guess the Man in the White Suit wasn’t the first story like this!

Planned obsolescence is quite depressing, but always good to keep in mind. Thanks a lot for this video ! 🙏

I enjoyed your video. I used to believe a lot of things not the least of which is that products keep progressing both in technology and longevity. As a young man in the late seventies I began to doubt a lot of things not the least of which is that my very respected government told me a tale about Lee Harvey Oswald being a lone assassin. I noticed cars were not as durable in many ways and ever more difficult to actually repair. Same for appliances in the home. About light bulbs...I noticed the first iteration of CFL lightbulbs never lasted as claimed. Later, same with early LED bulbs. As for phones, I never had a replaceable battery model past the Samsung Galaxy 3 and as a result often dealt with battery issues making my mind up to replace before I wanted to actually do so. Now, at 64-years old I see that what you're video is about isn't conspiracy hearsay. It's part of the actual product specs we all buy. In my little corner of an industry, footwear retail, I've seen the continuous cheapening of products to allow higher GPMs because purchasers have to replace footwear quite often due to both decreased durability and fashion pressures. One segment that held on to durability a bit longer within footwear was the work segment of boots. Outside of small companies building niche boots all of the major makers "dumbed down" durability to a point it couldn't be missed. This continues. During the pandemic the longest lasting mass maker of American maker of US made work boots shut down their 2 plants in Carthage Missouri never to re-open those plants. It's probably not the maker you're thinking of and I won't mention names, but those boots lasted an average of five to seven years with one or two heel replacements and no full-sole replacement needed. And this is in the toughest environments. Small dealers around the country expressed horror, but because the latest corporate imagining of how to sell these products no longer wants to depend on independent small dealers it hardly made a ripple. After three years of not being able to get any of these boots to sell I found out they were going to reintroduce them (some with same look and stock numbers) as made in Cambodia models. I've yet to be able to get any of these to sell, but I know it won't be the same. The leather uppers will not be tanned to the same high standards. The heart of the boot, which is the sole. was made by the best US sole maker in NY ,the new ones, while retaining the look, will not be made of the same very tweaked PU raw material and exacting standards of the US made one. I predict these boots will last a third, at best, of the old ones which fits in with what your video reveals. And, the wholesale price is almost as much as the last ones this brand made in the Missouri plants insuring maximum gross profit margins unattainable, so the brand claims, if they continued to make the boots here. Footwear companies do not answer to their consumer and are ran by accountants. They answer to Wall Street and pure greed. I've been around long enough to remember when this wasn't the rule of the day. This makes me glad to be in the twilight of my career. Things are not being made better, smaller retailers are being kicked to the curb, the climate of both product and distribution has changed . I'm being marginalized before I can be wholly cancelled. I've made a decent life for my family as the third generation of a shoe business over one-hundred years old. But, you will see less and less of my kind every year...and, you'll pay more for footwear that lasts less and less. How is this good?

Planned obsolence has also a huge environmental impact. It is not sustainable to buy every year a new phone or a new car. Therefore I think that companies have a huge responsibility not to use planned obsolence but to offer more repair and upgrade services to customers.

My 93yr old great Aunt just told me that her first refrigerator from late 1960's finally stopped working.

Technology Connections recently made a great video about this topic (specifically about lightbulbs and the phoebus kartell). There were very good and economical reasons to make a bulb last for only 1000h, evan as a customer. Shorter lived bulbs are way brighter or use less power(depending on the wattage). And with how cheap a lightbulb were compared to the increased power a long lived bulbs used it was just cheaper for customers to change them more often. Planned obsolescence sadly still exist, but the whole lightbulb conspiracy is kinda bs.

As a service technician I can agree with planned obsolescence. Late 1990s and early 2000s vehicles were built with durability in mind where as vehicles from 2005 on up seem to have lesser quality components in them. Iirc I believe I read somewhere that dealerships would expect the average consumer to trade in around 100k miles for a new vehicle.

At recording studio where I worked in my 30s, the chief engineer who was in his 60s told me that when he was a kid, his mother told him never throw away a burned out light bulb. When asked why, he said his mother told him they could take it back to Edison and get a replacement one for free. They were never supposed to burn out and a burned out light bulb was considered defective.

You completely glossed over the biggest problem with this obsolescence: resources. The planet isn't infinite. If we keep producing cheap produces and replace them every two year we will run out of material at some point. Nevermind the amount of single-use plastic in the oceans.

The fact that this video opened up with a Harbor Freight ad is the most beautiful irony available on the planet

Sorry I have so recently learned of your channel. This topic will continue to be of interest. Asked Subaru of America to help pay for a repair to a ten year old Crosstrek, I had purchased July,14,2023. Dealership said this oil leak was bad, and that it was leaking on to the catalytic converter, a potential to start a fire. They recommend contacting Subaru of America for help, since I had no resources after the purchase to pay the $2353.00 repair to fix the dangerous leak. Subaru of America basically said, "Cars ware out, sorry you bought a used Subaru." I will have to save up for this repair. Dealership I purchased it from was so kind to refund $500.00 toward this repair.

As an industrial designer I can honestly say that’s one of the most frustrating aspects of the industry. One always wants to design a product with the best characteristics.

Planned obsolescence joke A woman wrote to a refrigerator manufacturer, thanking them for a fridge that had lasted twenty years without fail. The company offered to send one of their design engineers to inspect it and the lady agreed. When he got there, she asked, "you want to make sure all your products are made to this higher standard?" He said, "No! They want me to make sure we never make one that lasts this long ever again, or else no one would ever need buy a new one!" That was an old joke when I heard it forty years ago!

After watching the recent video from Technology Connections I remembered this video, and I can now see how poorly researched and explained things are. Turns out there was no actual conspiracy if you take long enough to learn how lightbulbs actually work and the tradeoff between duration, light emitted and efficiency. Not saying planned obsolescence isn't a thing (my washing machine I fixed with 5€ by replacing a connection caused by purposely faulty design instead of the 200€ or straight up replacement of the whole thing was a good lesson about it), but the Phoebus Cartel is an awful example of it because the lightbulbs weren't made bad on purpose, they simply had to pick a tradeoff between filament life and power.

I got training on cell phone/laptop/flat tv repair. I have an eye to see parts designed to fail. It's an excellent business to get into. People will literally give you broken items before they go buy new 1's.

All of this neglects one of the worst parts of planned obsolescence: the overwhelming waste. We don’t have infinite resources, and even when we recycle the old models and items, we still produce emissions and non-recyclable components. Planned obsolescence only further exaggerates resource depletion and pollution

When I first started learning/working as a mechanic I asked my boss, after getting very frustrated trying to remove rusted brake lines, why the car manufacturers wouldn't just use metals that were stronger and wouldn't rust and corrode so easily. He goes " do you like having a job?" And even knowing he had a point, it still really annoyed me that things are basically designed to fail. especially when you consider how ridiculously expensive cars are nowadays. If I'm spending 30, 40 or 50 grand on something.....it should damn well be built to last me the rest of my life.

Planned obsolescence is quite depressing, but always good to keep in mind. Thanks a lot for this video !

I love history and origins, pretty much the beginning of things and why. I knew nothing about your channel except that the title, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, was clever. Actual Conspiracies didn't sway me, not because I don't believe in conspiracies but I didn't know if it were true or just the rantings of a nutter. I clicked and I'm glad I did. I also subscribed because you backed up all your arguments with real facts. Good video.

It seems like planned obsolescence also snuffs out innovation. Like, we could be reaching the end of the road on certain technologies and ask "ok, what's next?" But instead we're keeping ourselves in limbo.

people thought: "in a hundred years, we'll have flying cars." what really happens in a hundred years is, "we'll focus on making tires break in a safe way."

As my prof used to say "only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely holds up"

I have one of those lightbulbs, I've had it since I was about 10 years old...my grandfather gave it to me and told me it would never fail. That was more than 40 years ago. It was old when he acquired it.

The worst part of planned obsolescence is that it affects the environment negatively ....waste produced by us would be far less if it wasn't for this stupid money making strategy

In my engineering college, I had some professors who told the story of the old Bridgeport milling machines. They were built so sturdy and reliable that many still work perfectly today almost 80 years later. The machine never broke down or needed to be replaced, so the company started running out of paying customers. The intended takeaway from this story was to emphasize supposed importance of planned obsolescence, but that conclusion always bothered me. I saw a triumph of engineering and yet it was framed as a failure because someone couldn't make more money off of it.

This change from Ford's original vision was really catastrophic in retrospect. The general idea that we all deserve to have (be ?) unique things is everywhere and dictates how we consume. Good video, as very often. One thing that would have been worth mentioning about LED: while they are indeed a great technological improvement a) they are far more complex than incandescent lights, and did change an electrical device to an electronical one, that requires more material and is harder to recycle and b) yes, we seldom have to change our light bulbs, but we tend to use waaaaay more of them. Smart, modular LED panels, LED strips, small LEDs in toys, on the back of TVs, etc... the rebound effect strikes again.

this is one of my favorite videos of all time. not one of my favorite veritasium videos but one of my favorite videos ever.

Slightly different than obsolescence, but when I was 13 or so, my neighbor (who lived about a mile away since I grew up on a farm) hired me to help him cut and load some old, dead oak trees to sell the wood. For those who don't know, wood is usually sold by the cord when dealing with large sales, which is a measure of volume (around 1,000 gallons, I think). So I started loading this wood into a trailer, and on the second day I was helping him, he stopped me and told me that I was loading it too well. I was being too efficient, packing the wood into the trailer too tightly and thus reducing his profit from the sale of the wood, since there was more wood per cord. He made me stop and instead load it loosely and less efficiently. A few days after that, I came up with a way to use his tractor to load the wood faster than either of us could by hand, and he fired me once he realized how well it worked. Really taught me a lot about the world.

Great video! A great follow up would be companies who have grown beyond integrated obsolescence and rent out products as services (like the carpet tile company Interface). The old way of designing products for landfill needs to be over. Can we get some examples of circular economy businesses? Congratulations on your excellent work on this channel!

The appeal of paying less but more often, as well as pushing new trends in styles, is how this has been so accepted by most people

On the other hand, RU-vid is filled with lots of unplanned obsolescence

"Good products are bad for the economy" is something I never thought I would hear.

(Hopefully you aren't inundated with this kind of comment right now) It would probably mean a lot to a lot of people if you issued a partial retraction on this video or something like that; personally, I would be very interested in a breakdown of exactly *how* you got the light bulb part so wrong - what errors in your process could have caused it. Such information would, at the least, be of great value to me. Knowing how smart people still manage to make significant factual errors helps to avoid them in the future.

Fantastic video. Thanks. I wish you spent some time on the environmental and sustainability impacts of planned obsolescence.

The phrase “They don’t make’m like they used to” exists for a reason.

How are we meant to reduce waste and move forward if so many companies models are literally, "let's make this stuff turn into garbage as quick as possible"

TBH several years after this video I feel like it’s always worth coming back to. We as a society need to figure out a way to design and build things which not only last for as long as possible, but also to make companies who dedicate themselves to making these products sustainable. I think one of the biggest things is stopping the requirement of the pursuit of infinite growth by shareholders.

The Model T was available in 5 colours right from the start. It only went to black only 5 years later, when they standardised production to reduce the price.

My most recent experience with planned obsolescence: Most laptops typically can be unscrewed at the bottom and opened up. It is necessary to do this every few months to blow the dust and hair out of your computer fan with some compressed air- especially if you have pets. If you don't ever clean that dust and hair out, the fan slowly gets clogged up, ceases to work properly, and your computer can become dangerously hot. A lot of people are unaware that this maintenance needs to be done at all- which is a win for the company that sold the computer when it overheats and breaks. However, apparently some computer manufacturers don't even want those who know they need to clean their laptops to clean them. A relative of mine recently noticed that her laptop was overheating and that the fan is clogged. So she turned it over to unscrew it and clean it out. There were no screw holes. She called the professionals, and the professionals told her that model of laptop could not be cleaned. It was *glued* together rather than screwed. From now on anytime my family goes laptop shopping, we will be checking the bottom for screws!

it took me a while to realize that this video is LITERALLY EXPLAINING WHY WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS

This has been popping up in my recommended for 2 years and they finally got me. I guess i have to watch it now

We mostly have bayonet fittings on our light fixtures in the UK, we do use screw bulbs but they're not the standard.

"There was a secret meeting between the world's top executives from the world's leading lightbulb companies" Never thought I'd hear that sentence is my life.

As an engineer this is why its frustrating when people talk about how dumb the engineers are for designing this the way they did etc.... my response is always to the effect of the engineers can design just about anything to work well and last forever but corporate/ management wouldn't want it

In 2008 for Christmas I bought two 8gb iPod nano 3rd gen (fat iPod). For some reason both still work just fine, in spite of dents and scratches and both hold about 12-15 hours of play.

Pretty knowledgeable and significant video it is! Thank you Veritasium 💜❤️

"A secret meeting of top executives..." Nothing good ever comes out of secret meetings of top executives of any industry.

"Planned obsolescence and Apple" Louis Rossmann: "There are no happy accidents, there are only mistakes."

Yes, I definitely remember this from economic class back in high school...planned obsolescence. Thus, I take apart all my electronics if something was wrong and my engineering background helps.

Formally electronics engineer here, worked on redox probes in pools treatment industry and I tell you we designed those probes to last just as much before replacement (few months). The CEO explicitly told me it was to make profit.

Judging by how many "20 year" LED bulbs I've already replaced, I'd say there's some intentional quality degradations in that field as well. But the worst part is they constantly change the style and slightly vary the color. So when one bulb in a fixture burns out, I can't buy a matching bulb anymore and I have to replace all of them anway.

My parents love pointing out to me how everything made in their day was actually higher quality. It makes me so sad to not have nice things. And it makes the planet sad. Imagine how much less pollution there would be if things lasted decades instead of a single year.

I love the hints of hopefullness in the video! Reminds us that things can and are getting better.

Thinking about it, the very first time I've been exposed to this idea/conspiracy was probably through the show Fairy Odd Parents. There's this one episode of that cartoon show where Timmy made this wish to make his father's pencil unending or something. This pencil was then sold in bulks and everyone in the world bought one. As a result, no one needs to make pencils anymore. And since no one need to buy pencils anymore, the company also lost money. Meanwhile, the trees around the world just kept on growing.

It is actually outrageous that planned obsolescence isn't discussed more. It is definitely one of the main issues we need to solve in order to save our planet.

Shout out to Louis Rossmann and his efforts towards right to repair.

I have 9 LED bulbs on my kitchen ceiling that I replaced with LED when I moved in few years ago. Roughly every 2-3 years (according to amazon order date), they all die almost simultaniously (or get really dimmed) one after the other and have to replace them all. On the box they're rated for 1500 On-Off cycles.... on-off ~2 times a day, ~700 cycles per year... If there's no counter within the bulb, that's pretty impressive to be that accurate !

I believe this video is 100% accurate. In my life I have had the experience to speak to former employees from different manufacturers. They all reported that if the company wanted to make their products last 20 times longer, they could do so with a very small increase in cost relative to the type of product. Another example in my life is computer operating systems. Windows wanted to update to Windows 10 but I passed on it because I loved my current laptop, which ran perfect, and I hated Windows 10. The very first update AFTER the offer expired killed my laptop. Searching online at Windows, Windows chat rooms and talking to computer repair companies, they all reported to me that a massive number of people all had the same thing happen to them. I can't tell you that it was in fact on purpose, but what do you think? Forgive my typos and grammatical errors.

The real reason that we can't have nice things is that we let companies get away with these things. We keep buying their products and don't call them out. People actually believe them when they are told they need the "latest and greatest". If we want nice things, we need to stop following marketing and start holding companies accountable.

The fact that they were able to get away with this really angers me. Imagine how many other industries might have the same kind of agreement between major companies, like pharmacuticals.

This is probably tne best video I've seen ever since RU-vid was created.

LED bulbs in my house break between 2 and 3 years after I start using them. It's exactly the case of planned obsolescence, not the everlasting light bulb you mention. And it's way easier achievable with all this electronics inside, then it was with ordinary bulbs.

This hit close to home. I had a friend that was an engineer at Kohler (which I always thought of as a plumbing company, but they make engines too). At the time, he worked at a plant making Kohler small engines, for lawn mowers and small tractors. Anyway, he stops by my place after work, and he looks exhausted. He said it was a very stressful day at work, they were on a conference call with the Kohler HQ bigwigs all day, and they were NOT happy. It seems that one of Kohler's most popular consumer lawn mower engines was lasting way too long! I was dumbfounded, reliability sounded like a Good thing to me, but they considered it a disaster and heads may roll over this engine lasting so long. So I asked what did you guys decide to do to correct this "problem"? Redesign the engine to be less reliable? Use inferior parts? And he says, all those were considered and discussed at length, but were less than ideal solutions. Their solution was to stop selling those engines on the consumer brand mowers that you buy at Walmart, Home Depot, etc......and design a new, less reliable, consumer engine that would ensure that you'd have to buy a new mower every few years (just like the light bulb cartel). So......what did they do with the uber reliable engine that caused this problem in the first place? They simply rebranded it as "Commerical Grade", charged way more money for it, and put it on their more expensive commercial line of mowers that were priced, to last longer. Yeah, so the cheap consumer engine was simply increased in price by who knows how much, even though it cost no more to manufacture, and now it's an expensive "commercial grade engine", rather than a cheap consumer grade engine. I learned so much in this conversation. I knew that Commerical grade items cost more, and lasted longer, and I always assumed it was because they were built from better parts and cost more to manufacture, but that wasn't always necessarily so. In some cases, Commercial grade simply costs more, because it will last longer and the company will sell fewer of them. And that is the only reason, that they charge a premium for them. That's not always the case, but it was the case in this particular instance. It was also the first time that I found out that engineers could get in trouble for designing a product that was too good, and lasted too long. This conversation was a real eye opener. I never forgot it.....it kinda pissed me off too. haha When I wrote this, I thought about leaving out the name of the manufacturer, but my friend no longer works for Kohler, so screw them. It's not like this only happens at Kohler anyway, this kind of thing goes on in manufacturing everywhere. Planned obsolescence. There is a reason that people say they don't make things like they used to, it's because they make them to wear out on purpose. It's not that older tools, engines, appliances, etc....were built so much better than today, it's because today, things are DESIGNED for maximum profitability, and NOT maximum reliability. This is why things tend to break shortly after the warranty runs out......they are precisely engineered to last thru the warranty period, and fail shortly afterwards......or the engineers are not doing their jobs. It makes sense from their end, but I sure can't help but be pissed as a consumer.

The most insane thing is that people are so unaware of this and so surprised when they hear about this, almost unable to believe. "Whaat!? The mega companies don't love us!?"

Obsolescence of any kind is an important tool for the sustainability of economy. All economies survive due to obsolescence, which forces costumers to buy new products as well as encourages manufacturers to build new products. Innovation should be done for the fields which require it, not for excessive luxuries.

Same thing with glass. In the GDR a basicly unbreakble glass was invented (with the unfortunate name chemical enforced glass) but production was discontinued in the 90s.

This is one of the most important videos you've made Derek. The physical and chemical waste of disposable or intentionally short-lived items is one of the greatest ecological and economic challenges of our time

Imagine the waste of resources, human labor and damage to the environment, that the planned obsolescence have costed the world... For all the products that this tactics have been used combined, we're probably talking about many millions of human lives wasted to sustain this system, let alone the resources and the environment...

I've often wondered if the main reason filament light bulbs tend to fail is partially due to the thermal displacement on the filament. When the bulb is cycled on and off, this causes displacement back to the original length. This certainly causes the filament to endure tensile stresses as a result. So, if a bulb is never turned off, would it's usable hours be greater than if it is cycled on and off regularly?

This reminds me of a similar thing going on with video games, they can’t make video games too good or else eventually they would make the perfect game with absolutely everything and there would be no need to play any other game

My grandma had an old lightbulb that outlived her. She lived in the city of Philips. I have known about life shortening of products all my life. I'm 54. My family can't be the only ones who knew this.

Great video! As a carbon filament lightbulb enthusiast I'm glad you didn't hold out the centennial bulb as an example of long life in and of itself, as the limited power supply is certainly the main factor. The only flaw in this video (in my opinion) is the led bulb being held out as finally being everlasting. If anything, planned obsolescence is more at work in led bulbs than ever. Sure, the leds themselves last, but the components in the base of the bulb which supply the leds with dc power are absolutely not made to last (edit: Actually I should qualify that statement, because I don't know about all manufacturers. There could be some good ones.). You could make your own led bulb that would last far longer than those sold off the shelf.

I had an aunt born before 1920 who told me about testing nylon stockings that wouldn't wear out for a long time .. .. I think she explained this in the 1970s when there was it was a brand of women's stockings called something like " Ironware" from Sears and which was less likely to tear than other brands. My aunt's husband mentioned automobiles that got better mileage. The big deal in the right to repair movement is not so much small personal consumer devices as large firm equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars where manufacturers add built-in and made illegal certain parts which were impossible to repair and got buyers to sign some kind of Licensing that they not attempt to do repairs themselves. I think the obstruction to repairs had something to do with warranties on the equipment. There was a lot of litigation about this because, addition to repairs to the manufacturer being made unnecessarily costly, there were massive knock-on effects such as not being able to get a service technician mechanic or parts at critical times in the planting and harvesting cycle come out there by putting the farmers entire operations and livelihoods at risk. Some of us would like to think that the government is it supposed to help people by regulating or making illegal practices like these, but apparently nobody could demand it because we didn't know what we didn't know -- at least not in the aggregate as the population. What people work in these industries and test them and have memories of buying products that work better. My mother's sister and her sister's husband were obviously hip to planned obsolescence, even though they may not have called it that. They would just mention that companies knew how to make things better and longer lasting. Automobiles used to break down terribly often, to the point that many people learn how to work on their own cars. Even my mother who left everything mechanical to my father knew how to insert a screwdriver into the carburetor to open up the butterfly and change the mix between the air and fuel. Only after the Japanese started more reliable cars into the US market did auto manufacturers start to pay more attention to reliability as an element of quality. Rust on car bodies particularly sheet metal what's a constant up the problem if you weren't trading in a new vehicle every few years play. So people who knew how to keep the cars running and we're unconcerned about style and color also had to learn how to perform cosmetic Body Work repairs. One reason people would hold on to their vehicles is that you could order exactly what you wanted from Detroit and the specifically vehicle would be put together for your specifications. Paint color including two colors, tires, different exterior trim, color and type of upholstery and other interior features including a specific radios; air conditioning was far from standard and so was power steering and power assist brakes. A big decision was whether the transmission was standard or automatic. The type and style of engines diferred but was linked with different models. That was the platform on which to build other choices. The last car I ordered was a Subaru from Japan in the early 1980s and they never shipped it. It wasn't really personalized but specific to two-door or four-door, motor and transmission. I think I had to pay $1,000 more to get something comparable from the next year's models. There wasn't much help from beyond the regional division of the Importer and no recourse. Later I found out shopping for new models at one time the requirement was to put in your zip code and the dealer would only offer the price in your home area not the potentially better price that was available in another state or region. These days it looks like a lot of new vehicles have design flaws in the engine compartment that can once again make repairs frequent and expensive, especially amongst pickup trucks. The last vehicle I bought was a 1985 pickup to avoid paying extortionate property taxes and because there's only so much that can go wrong with a vehicle with less electronics. Whether it's vehicles houses or clothing or Electronics the mass media is always full of voices ready to shame people for wearing or owning something that is "dated". Maybe the people who are trying to make such a fuss about saving the planet or to look into the wasteful practices of the fashion industry and other proponents of style.

Fun fact, the Model T was offered in more colors, even on launch. The only black offering was only from 1914-1925, and was likely due to supply limitations imposed by WWI and its aftermath (at least initially).

this explains the common phrase, "they don't make 'em like they used to."

Fun fact: The Centennial Bulb isn't even the only Shelby Electric Co lightbulb still in existence. It's just the oldest (and therefore most famous) one. There are actually 26 lightbulbs that were made by Shelby Electric prior to 1914 that still function even to this day.

Watching this video with my iPhone 7 almost 10 years old. And it still working fine. Sometimes it’s about people behaviour, not planned obsolescence.

this is why my grandma's sewing machine is the coolest, most amazing thing ever. The monster can sew through anything and it's pretty much working like a new one AND can ALSO do zigzags and decorative seams. I'll never sell it. (It's a sears kenmore 2142 just in case you wanna know)

It's terrifying to think about the implications of this. We are so madly obsessed with profit and acquiring more material goods, we'll burn through our planet's resources like it's nothing. This really feels like end times.