Avoiding products where the manufacturer doesn't care about longevity means looking for products that are well designed. Avoiding products that are designed to fail is trickier, because even otherwise high quality products can be designed to fail. Random example, I had a nice Brother laser printer where the toner cartridges had a hard limit on how many pages they would print. This was done with a mechanical mechanism, so it was possible to disassemble it, reset it by turning a gear, and keep on printing. This took time and money to build just to make the product worse.
