[...] I worked in sales at the fruit stand, so [runs numbers] I’ve spent about 200,000 minutes at Apple Stores interacting with customers
That might explain a lot!
[...] Businesses are, in my experience, no less likely to replace whole systems (as opposed to upgrading) than consumers. If anything, businesses often have fixed replacement cycles that preclude upgrades, and happen whether the machines need replacing or not. [...]
Back in the early days of the PC revolution, I worked as the IT manager for a well known corporation, which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent...
I implemented a clear "planned obsolescence" policy of replacing 1/3 of the company's PCs every year, with the idea being that no PC ever got to be more than 3 years old. Back then, the speed of evolution in the space was so fast that 3 years was actually too long, but the oldest/slowest machines were always usable in some situations (typically, senior executives that were totally computer illiterate in those days, but liked the status of having a PC on their desks - they never knew the difference!).
At the end of the 3 years, I'd auction off the old PCs to staff, who lapped them up - it became an annual event in the company canteen!
Today, things are a lot more uptight, of course, and I doubt I'd get away with this approach...
[...] what consumer gadget isn’t designed to be semi-disposable?!? [...]
In the past, consumer items were actually often designed to be very durable, like the 1971 Maytag clothes dryer that's still doing our family laundry after what... 50 years now? (It was standing in the house when we got it, abandoned by the previous owners. I tried turning it on, it ran perfectly, so I decided - why not keep it?). Hey, it is a round birthday this year! It even measures the resistance of the clothes inside the drum to know that the humidity has dropped far enough to know to shut down automatically, based on what it senses! Pretty hi-tech for 1971... and it still works!
This thing is built of solid materials - a fairly serious gauge of sheet metal, the bearings are big and over-dimensioned for the job, the motor is larger than it needs to be for its power output, the resistive heating element is bigger than it needs to be, etc. etc. etc. - it all adds up to something that "just works" for 50 years, and ends up costing the consumer almost nothing to own per month.
It is just a completely different philosophy to modern products, it is so far away from modern products that it is probably difficult for a younger person to even imagine it today. Back then, you expected a fridge, washer, dryer, freezer, whatever, to last at least 20 years and hopefully more.... today, not so much!
[...] any product that has a "planned" lifetime (e.g. a product with a lithium ion battery that cannot be replaced) is an example of premeditated murder (planned obsolescence).
Ehhhh, no. A battery that can’t be replaced is where you expect the device to be gone sooner anyway. A human death analogy might be that someone starves to death because your ship ran out of food after 6 months at sea, even though the trip was only scheduled to last 3 months.
For products that people throw out for other reasons than the battery dying, I would agree... but what if the battery dying is the reason it gets thrown out?
My phone (a Galaxy S5) is on its 5:th replacement battery (so far!). The battery is a wear item that gets replaced when it gets worn, which takes me less than 2 years, typically (constant heavy use, phone gets hot, etc. etc.). Other than the batteries wearing out, nothing else on the phone shows any signs of wear, it runs the apps I want at an "OK" speed... so, how high on my list of priorities should a new phone be? The day I get so old that I can't think of something more fun to spend my $$$ on than upgrading a phone that doesn't need upgrading, I will volunteer for euthanasia!
Like... it used to be that a car was junk by 100K miles [...] Is 10 years the target lifespan? Probably. But they certainly aren’t taking parts that would last 20 or 30 years and then strategically weakening them to fail at 10 years.
At one point in my professional life, I worked in the automotive industry - as QA manager for a major component/subsystems maker. Granted, this is long ago now, but things change very slowly in the auto industry. Basically, all components are specced for a 10 year, 100K mile life, no matter who manufactures them. No car maker uses a different spec. If the car maker has to remove a component that has failed in service before its contractual expected life span, it is the component maker that has to "eat it", including the labour costs for replacing it... so, QA gets taken very seriously and is a pretty exact science.
The way it plays out is that everything gets engineered to last the required time, but no more. For example, metal components get subjected to salt spray tests to see how fast they corrode. The thickness of the anti-corrosive coating is related to cost... so the plating is applied only exactly as thick as needed to pass the tests... and no thicker. The same philosophy applies to every other design and manufacturing decision.
So you see how we don't actually take "good" parts and strategically weaken them - what we do is make "good" parts that last exactly as long as they should, under the worst case use conditions specified by the customer (the car manufacturer).
What then happens in the real world is that our highly optimized 10 year life parts can last a lot longer if the operating conditions are more benign than the worst case they were designed for. So, you can make a car last much longer than the 100,000 mile spec if adult driven and well taken care of, in a benign climate. But in the worst case specified conditions - 10 years is all you can expect.
Moving on from how good engineers are at hitting a lifetime target (very good!), we also have the policies of the automakers, for example, they will rarely stock spare parts for much longer than 10 years - the best ones do 15 years, depending on the popularity of the model in question. So, at some point, even a perfectly preserved car becomes literally obsolete due to no spares being available any longer...
Seen in the bigger picture, the whole concept of planned obsolescence is not actually evil. It is always going to be a matter of striking a good balance overall, and how to strike that balance is worth a whole bunch of posts on its own... this one is already long enough!