Not this particular example, maybe, but the concept of a device remaining usable in failure runs counter to planned obsolescence.

Not necessarily, if the point of failure is the battery connect then this is able to continue until complete failure. It’s the opposite of one way planned obsolescence is done of putting the expected point of failure in a position where it is no longer operable at all or repairable

This concept is infact compatible with planned obsolescence. You can design things that break overtime on purpose, have that thing still work, just work not as well over time.

Yes, you could have both ideas in the same product: it retains some functionality as it fails, but it fails in a planned way to ensure it's lifespan is short enough.

And oddly, the example of the flashlight isn’t even an example of either. Support for heterogeneous batteries is a feature, but it’s a stretch to call it “degradation”. It’s not like batteries fail randomly before they run out of juice.

I feel like the opposite is your multifunction refusing to scan because it needs ink.

I'd argue that planned obsolescence is about designing something to break early and shorten its useful life, while graceful degradation is about designing things that are resilient, that work even after being broken, to give them as long a useful life as possible.

In that vein, the flashlight is a useful analogy even if you could argue it's not an exact example - it works when it power source is at full, it works when it has fewer power sources, it works when it has less energetic power sources, it just tones down its output to match the power it has available.

Apple, on the other hand, went out and said "if you don't buy a new phone we're going to make your old phone run slower". I think the battery life was just an excuse - did Apple really think its customers would rather have a slower phone than a phone with shorter battery life? Sounds ridiculous.

If you want a better example of graceful degradation in technology, think about solar panels. Solar panels gradually become less efficient with age - a 20-year-old solar panel is working at about 80% of its original efficiency. And for high efficiency needs, like powering a house where you have limited space to put solar panels, 80% might not be good enough anymore. But a solar panel that works at 80% is totally functional for other uses where less power is needed, so you can repurpose it and swap it out. And as long as somebody doesn't drop a rock on the panel and break it, it can keep going for decades more.

Less efficient panels can be repurposed for systems that need less power. Older computers can get new operating systems and be repurposed for less demanding uses. Some things can be repaired indefinitely, and some can't, but even things that gradually and inevitably decline in efficiency can be repurposed instead of being discarded. That's the sort of resilient design we need for a sustainable future.

It does extend the life of the device though. If your connectors/wiring/bulb fail anywhere on a single circuit flashlight (which most are) then your flashlight is dead. This flashlight has separate bulbs and a separate connection/port for each battery due to the non-sequential layout, so over time if any of them fail the others still function and the flashlight isn’t a total loss.

It rendered devices almost unusable, rather than just dim the backlight. And as you said, that was a consequence of other fuckery, so they rightly got flak for it.

It's not about the planned obsolescence of the flashlight, but of the batteries.

Suddenly, I don't need to buy a new pack of batteries if just one stops working.

The proper term isn't graceful degradation, but fault tolerance.

It just describes how many core systems or components can fail before the device itself stops working.

For example, a jet will have multiple redundancies for almost all major systems which allows many of them to fail in the air without causing the plane to crash or force an emergency landing.

That's how you end up with Frankenstein scope creep.

Sometimes escalators also become meat grinders though. Less graceful.

"Escalators temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

Escalators are usually not safe to use when broken. So this is a good example of the idea in a spherical cow sort of way, but not practically.

Don't put yourself down describing your D-Cell as a AAA