It's so you buy a new one every few years instead of keeping the same TV for a decade or two. Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.

If that’s true, then why is capitalism still around? Should it have died out in a previous generation in which many products did last a lifetime?

> Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.

This is totally backwards; capitalism would do fine in such an environment (in the same way that evolution does fine in an environment where organisms live more than just a few seconds; the whole reason we have the notion of a "lifetime" is that our germ line comes from a long line of ancestral DNA that made organisms that outlasted their competition.)

Individual companies might have to hustle to innovate or die, but that too is good for capitalism.