According to Catherine Rampell of the NY Times magazine, planned obsolescence is the act of “deliberately limiting the useful life of a product so that consumers are forced to replace it.” For example, notice how every year Apple introduces an iPhone that's only slightly better than the last. This is because they want to make previous iPhones irrelevant, but they also don't want to upgrade them too much so that they can't significantly upgrade the iPhone in the future. If Apple were to implement its best technology in an iPhone today, it would have nothing to upgrade it with in the future. But if they pushed these updates across different generations of iPhone, they could deliberately make older models obsolete and force consumers to upgrade to the newer, “better” version. Apple is promoting a wasteful, consumerist society by intentionally making its products obsolete in just a few years, which pushes American consumers to buy the latest version of the product and discard the other. In the 1980s people bought things in excess, but they didn't buy them knowing they would be improved just a few years later. A waste