Indeed. His engineer brother is essentially designing a component that can barely function, just like a bridge, because resources are finite.

I have never seen any example of 'planned obsolescence' which was anything more than giving the consumer what the consumer wants. Modern economy is essentially the peak optimization of cost vs utility, i.e. value maximization.

According to the poster the components their brother designs are often more expensive then the standard ones. Precisely because it takes a higher tolerance to fail between a tight time window. So it is in fact the opposite of resources are finite. They are spending more to squeeze the consumer.

But!… we don’t have any evidence yet. Just a claim. I’d love to see some evidence.

If someone is telling you something, which you have no way to verify, it's obscene to cherry pick a piece of information to believe, use that to make your point and then call out the other piece as an unverified claim because it would completely destroy the point.

The notion of a battery tied to a GPIO pin in an HVAC thermostat amounts to an extraordinary claim. Unless we're talking about a smoke detector or other safety-critical item that actually has an expiration date (in which case I'd think they would use a real chemical timer), there are no obvious explanations for the battery other than planned obsolescence.

So, yeah, I'd like to see a model number as well.

I owned an AEG washing machine.

The plastic tub that contained the rotating drum was hung up on springs just like in any other washing machine.

The holes in the tub where the ends of the springs went through were just that, holes without any reinforcements.

The inevitable happened (because the strain in the plastic where it met the unforgiving steel of the springs was too much) and over the years, the holes wore through the plastic, resembling an oblong shape more and more.

I simply pressed a metal bushing into the enlarged hole on one side and on the other, I used two small strips of steel (with holes in it for the spring) clamped to the tub with bolt and nut.

And voilà the machine easily did another two years (electronics now messed up).

This case is either a pitiable engineering failure or 100 % planned obsolescence.

Merely equipping the holes in the plastic tub with metal bushings would have easily made this part outlive every other failure.

For a less cynical take, efficient use of resources is important as well. Theoretically every bridge should just be a solid wall going straight down to the nearest bedrock beneath it, but you can build a lot more bridges with the same resources if you use various other techniques. :)