Meaning of planned obsolescence | Babel Free

Definitions

A policy of deliberately planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete or nonfunctional after a certain period.

uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“An equally important advantage of a system of planned obsolescence would be its function in providing a new reservoir from which to draw income for the operation of the Government.”

“And Brooks Stevens, a leading industrial designer, explained obsolescence planning in these terms: “Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete.[…]””

“To the general public planned obsolescence first came to notoriety through the highly popular writings of Vance Packard (1963), who slammed Stevens in his bestselling book The Waste Makers.”

CEFR level