In 2015, France did something no other country has: it made deliberately killing your phone a crime — with fines and prison time attached. Ten years and one €25 million Apple case later, the number of companies actually convicted is: zero. Here's why. Deliberately shortening the life of a product is written into the French consumer code — up to 5% of a company's global revenue and two years behind bars. In 2020, Apple paid €25 million after French investigators probed iPhones that mysteriously slowed down after software updates. But read the fine print. The charge that stuck wasn't killing the phone — it was staying silent about it. The obsolescence charge itself was quietly set aside. And in the ten years since the world's only law against planned obsolescence passed, not one company has ever been convicted for the crime itself. This is the story of how "built to die" became a crime nobody pays for — traced from a secret 1924 meeting of the world's largest lightbulb makers (the Phoebus cartel, who fined each other for making bulbs that lasted too long) to the €25M Apple case, the Epson repair raids, and the right-to-repair fight coming to a head in 2026. Your washing machine that died at year three. The printer that swears a half-full cartridge is empty. The phone that crawls the month the new one launches. You paid for all of it — and now you'll understand exactly who decided it, and why no one has ever been held to account. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES (attach exact links at publish — verify per compliance gate): • French Consumer Code / Loi Hamon (2015) — planned-obsolescence offence • DGCCRF & Paris prosecutor — Apple €25M settlement, Feb 2020 • HOP (Halte à l'Obsolescence Programmée) — criminal complaints (Apple, Epson) • EU right-to-repair directive — 2026 transposition deadline ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ▶ Subscribe for more investigations into the hidden systems behind your money: