sunset's gemlog

Obsolescence Culture

Capitalism requires consumption. That is not a value judgment, but an observation. Unfortunately, the pace of consumption leads to waste - and this is made worse when vendors deliberately cultivate a culture of obsolescence and constant upgrades.

On Smartphones

Smartphones are over twenty years old, and have undergone huge shifts in design and capability during that period. I have a question, though - what does your smartphone today do that your smartphone a decade ago could not? For most people I've talked to, the answer is "it has a better camera" and little more, and the pinnacle of cameras a decade ago (PureView family devices) are still competitive in many ways with smartphone cameras today. Despite this, a relentless obsolescence/upgrade cycle aligns with two-year carrier subsidies to generate conditions for planned obsolescence - increasingly backed with technical means. There are a few aspects to unpack here.

Cultural aspects. Marketing has made it uncool to have an older iPhone or, to some degree, Android device. Smartphones have become status symbols. Nobody wants to be seen with an old one.

Carrier-side technical aspects. Shutting down older networks forces upgrades for devices that use them - and features like mandatory VoLTE can even create problems for recent devices, especially those running unofficial firmware, including Linux (eg postmarketOS/Ubuntu Touch) images. Mandatory carrier integration for VVM and other value-added features makes use of non-carrier-supplied devices harder; staying on the vendor path is simply lower friction.

OS / hardware vendor aspects. Android OEMs are notorious for failing to provide long-term software updates, but if one is running on an end-of-life platform - BB7/BB10, webOS, Maemo Harmattan - the situation is even worse; the heavy dependence of smartphones on server-side infrastructure operated by the OS vendor means that when a vendor decides to pull the plug, the device rapidly loses usefulness. Lack of documentation or insistence on signed boot often means the device cannot be meaningfully homesteaded by the owner, and may as well be recycled.

Hardware design aspects. Smartphones have largely become sealed systems, difficult for the user to upgrade or repair. Easily replaceable batteries are long dead.

The end result is that any smartphone more than five years old is rapidly approaching the end of its usable life - and for reasons that are essentially artificial. Why have we collectively decided this is normal?

On Laptops

The laptop situation is not as grim, but has been worsening as well. Thin-and-light laptops using ULV CPUs, in particular, have never been maintainable; hardware failures are often fatal to the device. This trend has been expanding upward. Vendors have generally justified this in the past as being the cost of a thin-and-light device - but the success of the Framework laptop says otherwise. Laptops have become sealed systems because it is easy and cheap to build them that way, and because a relatively fixed and predictable service lifetime guarantees the vendor a constant stream of upgrade revenue. Specifically, every laptop with soldered onboard storage will have a limited lifetime, after which it is not practical for most users to attempt to repair the machine and keep it in use.

On a Culture of Disposability

A computer, unless it has suffered a hardware failure, can do the same tasks it can when it rolled off the production line. The question, then, is whether the things we do with our computers - phones, laptops, desktops, and servers - have really changed so much that any machine older than five years is obsolete and any older than ten is a museum piece. Constant replacement of computers carries economic costs and a very real human cost - massive-scale resource extraction, labor exploitation, dumping of toxic electronics waste on developing countries - and it's disturbing to me that the industry's response is "meh, totally worth it."