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His books is solidly amazing, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071744223/ref=rdr_ext_tmb, definitely valuable reading if you're into that sort of thing. Another thing to keep in mind with what may be confused as planned obsolescence can be tied to the well done story about the One Horse Shay..https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Deacon%27s_Masterpiece

Give it a read, you'll come to realize that for any failure something has to break, some component, otherwise for a failure to occur every single component has to go at once simultaneously. I realized this concretely when I had repaired our garage door opener. I could see the designer using substandard material on the teeth of this horizontal slider cog that allowed it to fail first, and it happened to be an easy part to replace, rather than say having the corkscrew fail, which would be much more complicated to replace. I remember reading about the part in amazon reviews where people criticized it, but I felt it was a good choice and had a reasonable lifetime to it. If something has to break, let it be the more serviceable part!

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