Planned obsolescence vs right to repair

	Planned obsolescence	Right to repair
Definition	Designing or supporting a product so it becomes outdated or unsupported on a schedule, nudging customers to upgrade — often recast as progress.	The principle, increasingly written into law, that owners should be able to fix what they bought — a counter-pressure to closed, unrepairable hardware.

The difference

Planned obsolescence is a design decision: the product becomes outdated or unsupported on a schedule the maker controls. Right to repair is the counter-pressure, increasingly written into law, that the owner should be able to fix what they bought. Parts pairing sits between them: the mechanism John Deere used to bind replacement parts to a specific tractor, and the one the FTC sued over in 2025. EU Ecodesign and the Battery Regulation are making the owner's side binding.

Try it on your product

Regulatory landscape: which rules bind your product.

From the chapter of Tangibles that introduces these terms. Definitions are the book's glossary entries.

← All comparisons