Five years is still an arbitrary interval though, so I&#x27;m not sure that really does fix most of the problems.<p>For some devices, five years might be well into the range where a significant proportion of devices would be expected to fail even without artificial breakage. For example, it might be unreasonable to expect a minimum 5 year warranty on a typical consumer hard drive being hulked around in a laptop. It&#x27;s possible to build more reliable drives with better components and more robust cases with improved physical protection for those who need better resilience, but it makes the products more expensive, and the market has already provided for this with a range of different product types at different price points.<p>On the other hand, I have plenty of white goods in the kitchen of my home that have been working just fine for a decade and there&#x27;s no reason they shouldn&#x27;t be. Fixing a 5 year warranty period regardless of context might have been an open invitation to the manufacturer of my fridge to build in something that would break after 61 months (which seems a lot closer to what you seem to get with more modern kitchen white goods today).<p>I still think full disclosure is probably the best way to fight this trend. You can artificially cripple your device if you want, but like the warnings on cigarette packets, you have to use at least 30% of the space on your packaging prominently warning users that your product is deliberately broken and explaining exactly how so they can make an informed decision about whether they still want to buy it. I&#x27;m going to guess a lot fewer manufacturers would be so keen on nerfing their products if they also had to come clean about it to their prospective customers <i>before</i> they got their money.