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My 2007 Macbook Pro is dying out on me 4 years after I bought it. Is this because execs at Cupertino decided the hardware should last only that long? Could Apple have produced an equivalent product at less or equal cost that lasts longer than 4 years? Has the company marketed the product in bad faith? If so, is this illegal?

I only use Apple as an example. I'm genuinely curious if manufacturers deliberately shorten the lifespan of their products and if this behavior is illegal.

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While not an exact duplicate, the substance of the claim is very similar to skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1333/… – Suma Oct 7 '11 at 19:12
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When it comes to electronics, all of the small parts like resistors, capacitors etc, have a known lifespan, this is not planned but a limitation of the technology and materials used to produce them. It only takes one small part failure on a motherboard to render it useless. – Moab Oct 7 '11 at 23:52
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I work for a home appliance company that runs tests to simulate a 10 year product life. That doesn't mean we want the products to last only 10 years, we want them to last at least 10 years. It's possible to design products to last considerably longer in normal use, but the consumer costs become prohibitive. The goal is to make products that have the highest quality to cost ratio. – oosterwal Oct 8 '11 at 3:33
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Further, "bad faith" is a statement of mindset, which is out-of-scope. "Planned Obsolescence" is an emotive term to describe products having limited useful lifetimes. Examples of products with limited lifetimes are rife. Examples of trade-offs between lifetime, weight, cost, appearance, usefulness etc. are rife. To me, this makes the question rather meaningless: Yes, products have limited lifetimes. Yes, it is good engineering and business practice to do so. Yes, they could be made to last longer. No, it isn't illegal (where?); it is left to the market to reward the best compromise. – Oddthinking♦ Oct 8 '11 at 6:02
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@Oddthinking The doubtful claim is “manufacturers produce products whose lifetime is intentionally kept short through use of inferior material and / or bad engineering”. I don’t know it that’s notable but I’ve certainly heard that claim repeatedly and I suspect that it’s at least partially true. Granted, proving bad faith may be difficult but not, I believe, impossible. In particular if manufacturers demonstrably shirk best practices. – Konrad Rudolph♦ Oct 8 '11 at 14:40
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closed as off topic by Oddthinking♦ Oct 8 '11 at 5:55

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