defeature
v. To return a product to its original or most basic purpose by removing features that do not contribute or apply to that purpose.
Other Forms
Examples
2015
Some of these new devices offer what Gardner calls “defeaturing”: a design that strips a product back to its original, traditional purpose.

The “dumbphone” is a perfect example. British designer Jasper Morrison recently launched the telephone in collaboration with Swiss tech company Punkt. The stripped-back mobile handset makes calls and accepts voice mail. That’s it.
—Laura Beeston, “How to be invisible: Designers create anti-surveillance products to protect privacy,” The Globe and Mail, October 14, 2015
2015
Defeaturing: The most important of these principles, which we called the process of "ditching the junk DNA".
—Phanish Puranam & Nirmalya Kumar, “Elon Musk, Frugal Engineer,” Insead, June 09, 2015
2014
Her solution: Defeature devices. Make them more generic. Make the overall cost go down. Providers are dealing with enormous financial pressure — so if there’s a simplified version of a device that can still lead to equal clinical outcomes, she argued, why not go with that?
—Meghana Keshavan, “Going generic: Should medical device companies ditch the incremental upgrades?,” MedCityNews, October 09, 2014
2009 (earliest)
This may seem obvious today but at the time all the mp3 player manufactures were competing on how to get more features into the player, which was a losing proposition. In the case of the Nike+, they’ve taken the idea of defeaturing the device even further. The device itself has no display and no interactions. You simply put it in your shoe.
—Roland Smart, “Development Roadmaps (Nike+ & Fitbit),” RolandSmart.com, March 16, 2009