One thing to keep in mind on this topic is that there is both planned and unplanned obsolescence and they often get conflated.
Planned is when the companies actively plan for it by making things difficult to repair or intentionally implementing minimal specs with an intent for failure. The former is often done by making batteries and other commonly switchable hardware permanently attached, although sometimes reliability improvements make the concepts understandable. The latter is often caused by improvements in cost reductions or simply better tech availability at a reasonable price.
As an example I’ll use phones. Improvements to cameras is mostly due to improved tech. But memory can be either. When a phone gen has three levels of storage, the top level increasing is because of reduced tech prices. But inclusing a base model where the majority of memory is used by the OS and installed apps before storage of photos and other stuff is planned obsolecence because they want you to run out of space quickly so you will either upgrade or buy the next gen to get two sales in a short period of time. The fact that they don’t list how much space is left after the OS is evudence of intent, because they are not making it easy for an informed decision.
The other changes for sealed cases and lack of removeable batteries or easy upgrades to memory is both planned and slightly justifiable for reliability. Sealing the case and permanently attaching hardware does improve phone survivability if it gets wet or dropped. But, the way they attach and seal it are done in a way that intentionally makes it harder to repair while being cheaper to manufacture. This is the most frequent planned obsolescence in my experience, going cheap on a reasonable sounding improvement, but in a way that makes it harder to fix when needed.
One thing to keep in mind on this topic is that there is both planned and unplanned obsolescence and they often get conflated.
Planned is when the companies actively plan for it by making things difficult to repair or intentionally implementing minimal specs with an intent for failure. The former is often done by making batteries and other commonly switchable hardware permanently attached, although sometimes reliability improvements make the concepts understandable. The latter is often caused by improvements in cost reductions or simply better tech availability at a reasonable price.
As an example I’ll use phones. Improvements to cameras is mostly due to improved tech. But memory can be either. When a phone gen has three levels of storage, the top level increasing is because of reduced tech prices. But inclusing a base model where the majority of memory is used by the OS and installed apps before storage of photos and other stuff is planned obsolecence because they want you to run out of space quickly so you will either upgrade or buy the next gen to get two sales in a short period of time. The fact that they don’t list how much space is left after the OS is evudence of intent, because they are not making it easy for an informed decision.
The other changes for sealed cases and lack of removeable batteries or easy upgrades to memory is both planned and slightly justifiable for reliability. Sealing the case and permanently attaching hardware does improve phone survivability if it gets wet or dropped. But, the way they attach and seal it are done in a way that intentionally makes it harder to repair while being cheaper to manufacture. This is the most frequent planned obsolescence in my experience, going cheap on a reasonable sounding improvement, but in a way that makes it harder to fix when needed.