Fisher & Pykel (white goods)

Apple (the noted battery life scandal) I've talked to a few of their repair staff who somewhat confirmed that it wasn't accidental.

Brother and various other printer manufacturers. Many of them have built in page counters which automatically trigger warnings and errors telling you to replace ink or other parts when there may be nothing wrong. There's some interesting articles out there telling you how to override this.

Many more examples.

Items that have a death chip need to be banned. No product should simply die due to the number of pages it prints or time in service.

I'm glad that to find out that Russian freeware offers software that will reset these death chips.

As an engineer I have to say that this is completely normal and expected for mechanical machines. You design stuff to make it last the number of years it is expected to be used because prices explode if you want to make something to last "forever", and in this world you do change things because new ones appear, not only when they break. ("Oh! Look this new SuperPhone Z3 v4!! I need one now!!").

This started in machines because forces that change over time (stuff that rotates for example) suffers fatigue, and the only way to avoid it is to make extremely big the piece, thus increasing inertia and weight. Only a few stuff is designed to last forever, and it's usually things in nuclear reactors and such, never consumer objects like cars because people will want something new after a few years anyway.

From there, other manufactures started doing the same stuff just for plain benefit (light bulbs, clothes, printers, etc) but I have to say that they are still there because people allow them to do that, and it's part of capitalism anyway (freedom for all, right?). You could create a product that does live for longer than the ones in the market, so why don't they exist? Because you earn a lot more money this way. Do you want products that last forever? Then change the main objective of a company from earning money to product value.

And it is not only hardware. Have you guys heard of Windows 10? Oh! Too bad XP and 7 had to die, right? And let's not talk about Apple and their 1-year products...

You mean like someone in charge of a product's life cycle at a given company?

edit: I could've just posted GE so my link is probably distracting from consumer electronics.

edit 2: my point was it's literally a job at many companies .

I couldn't find it but there is a another doco (BBC maybe?) where the host (young Brit man-child) makes his own light bulb by the end.

This isn't even a conspiracy it's just plainly a fact. I've heard from a number of people that work for household electronic manufactured as well as general electronics and vehicle manufactures that have stated their products have a definite designed and deliberately limited product life.

Anyone that doesn't think this happens today is terribly naive. This is all the result of our artificial scarcity system of economics. Everyone needs a job or they starve. Well if we just build items to last then no one has jobs because we're not replacing everything frequently. This is a perfect example of why we need Basic Income so people will stop creating jobs for themselves by sabotaging their work or engaging in other rent seeking behavior.