Hopefully I’ve worded the question right.
I was once told (I could never verify if it was true) that a crocs company once almost went bankrupt after they made their crocs practically indestructible. Whilst the story was most likely bullshit, it makes me wonder: if a company can make a product that is practically indestructible, is it ethical for them not to make them indestructible, so people will buy more from them?
The way I look at it is, on one hand, I feel like they should make products to the highest quality if they can so that the consumer has to spend less money and that less is wasted, but at the same time if it leads to the company going bankrupt, what of the workers and their families? So I can’t decide, what do you think?
Yes, for a suitable value of “easily.” It doesn’t make sense to design every product to be as robust as possible, so there is a trade-off between robustness and other factors like cost and weight. A laptop or phone breaks easily if you drop it, but that doesn’t mean the manufacturer is unethical for not making every single one be one of those super-rugged ones with rubber corners. As the ease of breakage increases, and as the cost of making it more robust decreases, so it becomes less and less justifiable to do.
The problem here is really uncertainty and lack of knowledge. If you knew that the product you were buying was going to last for exactly 17 months, you could compare the cost over its lifetime to one which would last exactly 25 months. Then all the underhanded tactics of planned obsolescence would be far less effective. But we don’t know that, and really we don’t even know the average or likely range.
There’s also aesthetics and other factors. Most people don’t want the super-rugged phones with the rubberized bits and so on.
Another thing to consider is sometimes people don’t want to (or can’t) spend top dollar on something that will last forever. For example, if I’m new into a hobby, I’m not going to go out and buy the absolute best out there. I’ll usually shoot for somewhere in between “not shit” and “fairly decent” depending on what it is. If I get good enough and want to upgrade, then at that point I can look at the higher-end stuff and I’ll have the bonus of now knowing what properties I need to look for. If the cheaper equipment is still working I can re-sell or donate it. If not, maybe I’ll try to fix/mod it before tossing.
I generally believe most of the unrepairability we see in tech is coming from consumer preferences more than planned obsolescence. Thin, waterproof phones are inherently hard to repair. I’m sure obsolescence is a factor that motivates companies in that direction too, but reputation around longevity does influence purchasing decisions, so it’s not something which they can do “for free” as it were. Making phones thin and light, on the other hand, is positive for sales.