when people mention "planned obsolescence" it is mostly nonsense. If people replace stuff every couple of years because they want something new, there is absolutely no reason to spend money and effort on making it last 20 years. All you accomplish is being more expensive and not selling anything
I suppose it depends how we look at things.
A washing machine bought 30 odd years ago was serviceable by most competent mechanically minded people.
They also lasted (well good brands) years.
Many new washing machines fail within 3 years, and very often if you call out a service guy, they tell you it’s beyond economic repair, if it’s under warranty and say the drum bearings have gone, again they won’t repair and will replace the whole machine.
Often the machines are designed now so that it’s almost impossible to just say replace the bearings, you would have to replace the whole drum etc.
I would say that
A) this has been done to make manufacturing as cheap as possible
B) this has been done so that due to how they are now designed it’s usually cheaper to buy a new one hence more sales.
C) it’s been done because the last thing a company wants is for their products to be easily repairable, if they have people keeping their machine for 10 years plus, no new sales.
We are criticised for living in a throw away society with land fills bursting at the seems, lectured on how much harm this is causing the environment, but companies seem to be going out of their way to make things as difficult as possible to be repaired.
Mind you, I remember Korg in 1987, I had a vintage Korg synth (Korg Trident mk2) that had a fault. I had taken it into work as we had very good electronic engineers with all the gear, and they offered to look at it for me for a drink.
They wanted to know what a certain chip was and if schematics were available. I had bought it second hand, didn’t have any spare cash at that time to pay Korg to look at it.
I phoned Korg uk, they refused to tell me what the chip was or let me have a copy of the schematic, their argument was that if my engineer colleagues fixed it, it was doing Korg out of a paid repair job, the fact I couldn’t pay their price was irrelevant.
Ended up giving the synth to a friend as it only made a single noise, they go for around 4000 to 6000 euros now lol