Planned obsolescence isn’t even in my top 10. The worst things about Big Tech are existential, like its use for mass espionage and murder by evil regimes.
Planned obsolescence is a symptom of something which is, or aught to be, in your top 10 issues with big tech.
planned obsolescence wastes precious resources and massively contributes to climate change and our enslavement through consumption. its absolutely in my top 10
Unless your planning on running your own infra for everything… I would argue planned obsolescence is a much greater and immediate threat.
Research is never long term. Imagine if the last 20yrs had been invested in increased ram and battery storage. Instead we have had a 20 halt on innovation in the residential side. Why big Phone wanted to stick with 4gb phone. And then 8gb so much so the reason they stopped was because it was becoming more expensive to make 8gb chips.
Unless you only pay cash, dont use Amazon to ship, google to research, Microsoft to compute… You are being tracked, the only difference now is the focus of the companies were for greed.
Planned obsolescence helps those things too, creating many more targets to support for open projects aiming for compatibility with proprietary hardware, or proprietary formats, or even proprietary software (for Wine), or de-facto proprietary Web.
That’s because you’re a proud consumer who doesn’t realize how maximizing profit is the motivation for everything you’ve mentioned.
Do you think you’re being insightful or something? That’s not even true, states sometimes compel and coerce firms for that information even when it may harm the profit incentive through reputational damage.
Right. It can’t be that you’re a proud consumer, because then you’d have to acknowledge your own contribution to the problem and criticize a culture you’re dependent on.
Can’t have that.
Again, I have no clue what you’re talking about. I’m not going to live in a hut in the woods and neither are you.
Marketers manage to convince tech-savvy people that their device is almost unusable by manipulating percentages. For example, “50% brighter screen, 30% more energy efficient”. It even worked for me when I didn’t want to buy a previous phone model just because the latest generation had a 50% brighter screen. But then I realized that I was perfectly happy with the screen of my 4 year-old phone.
Seriously. People need to realize they should have a need before a product, not the other way around.
The “upside” of planned obsolescence is that devices are markedly cheaper if you’re willing to not live on the bleeding edge (which is itself just marketing fomo bs…)
Case in point… recently had to replace my phone. Since I now feel like a liability carrying around newish £500 one I took a look at some 2-3 years old. I eventually picked one I sort-of wished I’d gone for last time around except now I was spending 20% of what it would have cost me back then. So it’s a little closer to the point of being obsolete than what it’s replacing. But seriously. The amount of money people spend desperate to stay at the pinnacle of camera technology (that they can’t really tell the difference on) or for Apple “AI” (I mean… god… really… you’re a smart independent person. How has Apples marketing team gotten this far into your brain?) is crazy. But the massively cheaper deals for what are, objectively, still amazing devices is something that only happens because of technology churn and “planned obsolescence”.
The “upside” of planned obsolescence is that devices are markedly cheaper if you’re willing to not live on the bleeding edge (which is itself just marketing fomo bs…)
Except the pace with which said edge moves too depends on how frequently most people replace their devices.
Meaning that without planned obsolescence combined expenses for tech of an average person per period of time would be the same.
people spend desperate to stay at the pinnacle of camera technology (that they can’t really tell the difference on)
Yes. People pay actual money for things they can’t explain in words other than “new cool” or “3.141 times faster” or “14.88% better”. I’m of an opinion that this concerns all computer things. Not even only personal computing. It’s a tulip bubble that hasn’t yet burst. A very big one.
If the essence of things we do with PCs hasn’t changed since year 2003, but we do it the harder and more wasteful way due to vanity, there has to be an implosion.
or “14.88% better”
🤨
What? I always felt there’s something Nazi-like about Apple.
That’s not true. Businesses charge the most people are willing to pay.
I’m sorry you’ve been convinced that lowering your standards resulted in cheaper prices. It did not. It only resulted in worse products for us and higher profits for businesses.
I’m sorry you’ve been convinced that lowering your standards resulted in cheaper prices.
It literally resulted in a cheaper price
When smartphones first appeared, batteries were always removable.
Glances at Gen 1 iPhone
The iPhone 3g would be the first modern “smartphone” from Apple; before that it didn’t allow adding more applications, same as the “dumb phones” before it. It just had a capacitive touchscreen and a better web browser
Even then, the batteries weren’t glued in and it was significantly easier to replace
The App Store was there since the first gen. Steve jobs announce already included it and there were dummy apps like pretending to drink a beer from the iPhone. With the iPhone 3G they changed the SDK in a way that either you released apps for the first two gen or for the newer generations that made the fist two generations almost useless (planned obsolescence you said?)
Jobs was specifically against the App Store when the first gen came out
It was added as an update to the first gen after the 3g came out
You know what scares the hell out of corporations? People like me. We replace the wonky rubber harmonic balancers with aluminum ones, we replace phone batteries using a heat gun to remove the screen, we replace capacitors in 90’s era Walmart CD players because it still works. We are the anti consumers. We fix what you throw away. We will build our future golden city with the refuse from your broken appliances. We are the future and it terrifies the consumer corporations.
Big capacitor loves you though
My one and only request : operating system security fixes, updates for years
Yes! I think part of the right to repair is the ability to install your own software on devices you own, when the vendor stops fixing it.
Not even when the vendor stops fixing it. Anytime you want.
If vendors are either forced by law to keep every device they produce up to date with security fixes, until is patents and copyright expires, or have to allow end users to install any alternative software, without loosing any features advertised and provided by the hardware. I would be fine with that compromise.
That has been a thing for longer than most of us have been alive.
One day we’ll wake up from this absolute nonsense. A star, long worshipped, will burn in the red. Disused and empty shell: icon of an old world.
Conscience awakened, we’ll take it from there.
The pessimist in me asks “will we ever have the chance?”.
By the time we “wake up” would we even have the opportunity to do anything about it? Or just accept it like other rising costs like, rent and food, because let’s be honest, technology is a necessity.
My interpretation of the closing lyrics of this song are “by the time we’ve fully understood the destruction we’re causing, the Sun will be about as close to death as it can be. Once the Earth is a husk, then we’ll start to make a change.”
Give them money reward the behaviour
I refuse. Just got a Pixel 4 off eBay. If the battery’s bad, I’ll replace it.
My last phone I had for about 6 years before the battery became so bad it couldn’t keep charge for more than a few hours and opening the camera had a 50% chance of just powering it off.
I’d have replaced the battery, but all apps and the web had become so bloated by then, that it was struggling to really run anything reliably, even without the battery issues.
Because of that I always bought Xiaomi.
I’m on the 9 pro, works perfectly well for everything.
Just hoping they won’t enshittify themselves, or be caught in some USA / China gang war.
One thing to keep in mind on this topic is that there is both planned and unplanned obsolescence and they often get conflated.
Planned is when the companies actively plan for it by making things difficult to repair or intentionally implementing minimal specs with an intent for failure. The former is often done by making batteries and other commonly switchable hardware permanently attached, although sometimes reliability improvements make the concepts understandable. The latter is often caused by improvements in cost reductions or simply better tech availability at a reasonable price.
As an example I’ll use phones. Improvements to cameras is mostly due to improved tech. But memory can be either. When a phone gen has three levels of storage, the top level increasing is because of reduced tech prices. But inclusing a base model where the majority of memory is used by the OS and installed apps before storage of photos and other stuff is planned obsolecence because they want you to run out of space quickly so you will either upgrade or buy the next gen to get two sales in a short period of time. The fact that they don’t list how much space is left after the OS is evudence of intent, because they are not making it easy for an informed decision.
The other changes for sealed cases and lack of removeable batteries or easy upgrades to memory is both planned and slightly justifiable for reliability. Sealing the case and permanently attaching hardware does improve phone survivability if it gets wet or dropped. But, the way they attach and seal it are done in a way that intentionally makes it harder to repair while being cheaper to manufacture. This is the most frequent planned obsolescence in my experience, going cheap on a reasonable sounding improvement, but in a way that makes it harder to fix when needed.
