I fix everything I own, my BMW, my Harley, my electronics, my guitars - and I help out other folks. I don't think things are planned failures - didnt say that - to sell more products, that probably just helps your competition. I should add here that I have a economics degree and have taught it in a college setting.
What I see are two things 1) Poor engineering and poor build quality 2) Poor engineering based on some mandated regulations.
This is why a 40+ year old fridge works and makes ice and a five year old expensive one fails quickly. Consumers demand frost free now, but that takes a LOT of power to heat up the freezer enough to defrost and then quickly refreeze the contents. All appliances need to be energy start rated, so they put in a circuit board to calculate the humidity and how fast it needs to heat and cool down. That is complicated and requires electronics in a humid enviroment. They built it, saw it fail and then made a new part, pretty common in most manf. circles, we would call it BETA testing. IMHO the engineers should have seen that coming, I would have. Mean time there are thousands of complaints about this issue on the web and anyone buying this unit will probably look that up and not buy it based on the circuit board issue, which is now fixed. That doesn't help Maytag sell new units, and it helps their competition.
Now to Kenwood, this problem is well known and documented on the web. Its not just this model, but the years they were made. It was probably a mistake in construction that has now been fixed, as the newer models, that have had time to fail, have not failed in the same way. Again, I don't think Kenwood did this on purpose, as their is too much competition in the market for them to make an inferior product and survive. It appears they addressed the issue.
I collect sports cars, and motorcycles and sell them occasionaly to buy new ones. When I buy a vehicle, I will probably already know the problems it will have, as thousands of other people have found the engineering mistakes/build issues and have worked out solutions. Anything will have flaws. Sometimes it takes years to see them. Sometimes the fix makes them superior to anything else on the market.
None of this matters if you just bought a CD player/tv/car/whatever and it quits on you in a few weeks, nobody wants that.
EDITED to say to zenheretic: my grandparents didn't live long enough to own CD players, but if they had, I doubt they would have been older than my circa 1989 Pioneer CD player going strong in my shop.
[/IMG]