Planned obsolescence vs. low impact living

This Treehugger article on planned obsolescence strikes a chord with me but being a gadget and tech freak it does give me problems. In everything else in life I make my stuff last and last and last. Most of my shoes are years old and I prefer leather soled shoes that can be repaired - some I've had since before I left England and that's a long time ago. My car is 13 years old and looks it, but still drives great and I don't have to throw lots of money away on comprehensive insurance, in fact I think I should get a deduction on what insurance I have because no one is going to steal what looks to be a real clunker. And I have lots of clothes and other small things that are definitely this years latest fashion.

Of course when it comes to tech that kind of breaks down... but I'm usually not on the bleeding edget, or not continuously. Once in a while I'll break down and buy something really current, like last time I built a computer and splurged over $300 on the processor. But that was 2002 and state of the art was a 2.4Ghz P4 with 533Mhz FSB. I didn't actually get the fastest - there was one part faster at the time but the extra $200 for another .4 Ghz clock speed just didn't seem justifiable.

However I did make it last - that computer is still running and my main home workhorse. With a recent but by no means top of the line graphics card, plus a SATA2 controller card it now is my high-def TV "Tivo" courtesy of BeyondTV sucking down gigs of TV goodness per hour and playing them back at our leisure. However it is straining now especially if I try doing something else significant at the same time. So I now find myself looking at a new computer while simultaneously regretting having to junk a perfectly good machine that I've nurtured, like some techno-child for years.

Of course I wont actually junk it - it will at the very least get donated sans hard drive. It may also turn into a low power home server so I can have my new system off most of the time. Since the case is rather huge for the later - I plan something with a micro-ATX and a low power laptop Core 2 Duo chip - I think its probably going to get donated. Hopefully just because it is a non-name DIY system it will not get torn apart - with a fresh install of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn its a great machine for web browsing and email with plenty of horses for some gaming and video.

To be honest if it wasn't for the progress in the uses we find for computers there would be no need to upgrade. I'd expect to have to shove in a new disk drive every few years since they fail every few years, but other than that it should keep going, going, going. And that is the general problem with technology perse - it does keep obsoleting itself, if it didn't then we'd all still be using an abacus, driving model T cars (or just a horse and cart) and using 5 pound monster cell phones (or just sending telegrams and writing letters).

Economists will no doubt tell you this is good for the economy since it drives demand. But is it really? It seems to me if that is true then our measures of what is "good for the economy" are seriously out of whack. If all the technology we had today was good enough and was built to last couldn't we just divert all our energies and efforts to something new, or maybe solving long unsolved problems like 100% effective contraception, cures for malaria, safe and low emissions transport systems and well, maybe peace on earth and good will to all mankind?

Now I think I would be foolish to deny that all progress is bad and that fast modern transport is what lets me fly here there and everywhere, cell phones do save many lives and just plain make things easier, and fast computers sure beat a mechanical adding machine when it comes to doing taxes. So there is no point in us all keeping our trusty horse and cart in the garage alongside the Toyota Prius. However I do think we frequently miss out on opportunities to donate that older tech to someone who would now appreciate it far more than I do, in addition tech with actual bona-fide builtin obsolescence really shouldn't be tolerated.

One example would be a UPS I bought three years ago. A hefty (quite literally) investment that served well and then one day gave up the ghost because one of its two lead acid batteries inside, a $15 part, had died (it was actually worse - that battery was fine except for a single dead cell in it). Unfortunately the battery was designed to be non-replaceable and returning it to Belkin for servicing (if that was even an option) would cost more than buying a new one. So I'm sure most of them just ended up in a dumpster somewhere - a big old hunk of steel, lead and PCBs for future archaeologist (or miners) to dig up.

Fortunately I have a degree in physics and spent many years dinking around with electronics. Hence I was able to disassembly the UPS, remove the batteries, retest them, identify the faulty part, and order new ones (yes, I'm smart enough to know I'd should replace both and keep the other as a spare). Total cost was $50 including tax and shipping but saved me buying a new but otherwise pretty similar UPS. It turns out that UPSes haven't progressed much in three years - getting a new one for new features wasn't even worth considering, but at least it looks like manufacturers have got the message and almost all have end user replaceable batteries and recycling programs for the old ones.

Since I'm just the least bit cynical I would wonder if Apple thinks making the iPhone battery non user replaceable will cause more of them to end up in drawers or dumpsters after a year or two, forcing people to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Really I fail to see how they could have not made it a really easy to replace part, if I was not cynical I'd probably say they were doing it for our own good - so there was no danger of cheap fake iPhone batteries flooding the market, perhaps exploding and perhaps leading to expensive time-wasting class action suits.

Perhaps all this talk of recylcing and longevity of systems is why I'm enjoying using Ubuntu Linux - I'm just reusing tried and tested code and designs that have been around since the 70s and I've personally been using since the 80s. Why throw all those millions of many hours of work and experience away just because we can? For that reason I'm not upgrading to Windows Vista. Sure it looks real nice, but really it doesn't do a whole lot more than Windows 2000 ever did. When I see a truly radical worthwhile change in Windows or someone gives it to me for free (that's proper free, not bundled free) then I see no reason to abandon my old XP license. I don't wish Microsoft any ill will (and I have enough friends who profit daily from its existence) but I do wish they would concentrate on incremental improvements and not breaking everything every few years so users end up being forced to upgrade.

That scenario happened to me last year when Intuit took it apon themselves to stop man of its features from working unless I updated to the latest and greatest. Truth is Quicken 2004 did everything I wanted already - as did the previous version I had before that. Instead I had to shell out more money to get the latest and greatest and relearn a bunch of stuff because the entire user interface had changed. I don't find it any easier to use myself - its just different. The funny things is right after I coughed up the upgrade fee I discovered there is an open source project that reads Quicken files and does pretty much all I ever needed (rather like Word 3.0 !!!. So Intuit, I'm afraid next time you inform me that your built-in obsolescence is forcing me to upgrade I may pull out the Joker and go elsewhere.

Still all these endless and forced upgrades must be good for the economy - I mean I make a tidy sum helping small businesses deal with just these upgrade issues. Yet another take on it is that businesses just need to keep innovating to keep up with all the new companies - and supporting all their legacy customers is too expensive since tech support and designing rock solid upgrade paths is time consuming and error prone. If they don't force upgrades or ditch product Luddites then they will become uncompetitive or have to charge their customers exorbitant fees for product support.

In the final analysis I just don't know - I'm not an economist. But my simple view says that built-in obsolescence just doesn't make sence, that products should be designed for maximum life times from the start, should be designed to be recyclable when their life time is over and that it is not a given that all progress is necessary and sufficient for a happy life.