Heirloom consumer electronics and computers. Moore's law is failing, and the only reason we keep having to replace electronics is planned obsolescence and the fact electronics are still just designed with replacement expected by momentum.
Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing for a long term and mature computer industry.
There used to be an expectation of longevity in the electronics we purchase. Even while Moore's law was in full effect, you could find good uses for a 6 year old computer. Today's computer hardware can easily remain fully usable for a decade. The notion of buying a laptop or phone, let alone headphones, every year is ludicrous and actively harmful to the environment.
Planned obsolescence for electronics is a recent development in terms of human history. My parents remember times where hardware was incredibly reliable and you can buy things that lasted for years and years and years.
I don't think you understand the extent of what's going on.
It's not that people are trying to make hardware last forever. It's that these devices are being deliberately designed to break down in a couple years. There are actual design decisions to force consumer behavior into purchasing new things every couple of years.
This doesn't just apply to things that follow moores law. Almost every product in existence nowadays is literally designed to break earlier then they usually do. Companies in certain cases actually spend more money creating a design that ensures that a product will break early so that consumers will buy a new thing within some years.
This includes cars, computers, phones, microwaves, lightbulbs. Etc.
Your personal need to buy a new car, new phone and new clothes is the result of market manipulation over the last 10 decades or so... morphing our culture from one where we kept tools around for years into one where we need to buy new things all the time. It was not like this at least 1 or 2 generations ago.
The result of this endless buying behavior is good for business and the economy but it has devastating effects on the environment and our resources.
In the case of technological products, make no mistake: the consumer does not want products to last 10 years.
You can surely run a 10 year old computer, but what are you going to do with it? Does anyone want a 5 year old cell phone?
So long as we continue to make advancements at the pace we're moving, there is no demand for consumer electronics that last that long. So long as each generation gets cheaper or better (which for the most part is true) and we figure out a decent recycling process (and I think we have) let's just keep moving.
I think it's a very fair point in other, slower-innovating industries.
Something to consider is that the trend of replacing consumer electronics, namely phones and computers, every 2 years might be getting to a stop as new hardware no longer offers considerable improvements over old hardware.
In general, the things which survive are over-engineered. The wires are several guages larger than they need to be, there are backups for the backups, and the underlying technology (magnetism, switching) is hundreds of years old. In contrast, many of our electronics use components which are barely larger than they need to be (if at all), and rely on technology which is younger than a single generation.
Now then, we do still create technology which lasts - it's just not as frequently found in consumer tech. Take stoplight timing switches as an example. They use electronics, and work in some incredibly extreme environments, and are reliable more often than not.
It is a matter of business. Computers could be built to last 30 years and more. Ex: Control system in nuclear reactors and satellites. But modern electronics are engineered to last a limited time. This is due to 2 reasons. It helps companies sell stuff perpetually thus staying in business. But also because it keeps costs down and gets consumer cheap products. It is due to this engineering to such narrow tolerances that we can buy a laptop for a $1000 instead of $10000.
Imagine if computers cost $10000 and I got a core2duo machine years ago. I would be very reluctant to get it originally because of the cost and because I know there would be faster systems on the market in a few years. Engineering devices to have a limited lifetime has supported innovation by helping companies make money and by making things affordable so that normal people can buy the latest gadgets.
I know this has been bad for the environment and for those of us who would like things to last forever (I'm one). But, we can't discount the fact that a lot of tech innovation today is due to this very reason.
And every year 80+ million people come of age such that they become electronics consumers, buying smartphones, laptops and so on. A billion new electronics consumers every ~12 years. The world is going to need a lot more chip manufacturing capacity over the next few decades.
2-3 years for a consumer device and 10 for a telecommunications device s em both massively too short by a factor of 2 or more.
Do we really want our devices to stop working physically, at the chip level, in less than a decade? Some people still play on game consoles decades old; these are most certainly consumer devices.
I’d much rather we over-design stuff to last decades, at least at the chip level where overedesigning is super cheap.
Solid state electronics was supposed to mean longer life for everything. No tubes to burn out, no mechanical parts to wear out. It would suck so bad if we nickel and dimed what should be fundamentally physically robust devices to last for much less time than complicated mechanical devices from the past.
There has been planned obsolescence in human economic activity whenever it could be made advantageous to do so.
You also discount the increasing capability of electronics, which in many cases involve including more or more complex circuitry, which reduces the lifespan. You can certainly design for reliability, but this generally increases the cost, and consumers almost always opt for the cheaper product.
The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel).
Current tech is not durable or reliable enough to last anywhere near thousands of years without frequent maintenance and a supply of replacement parts. Even simple things like analog electric circuits with no moving parts degrade over time.
You've perfectly summarized why the only way we'll reduce e-waste is by introducing legislation that requires our electronic products last longer. This is exactly why the issue of planned obsolescence can't be left up to the market: making short-lifespan products presents a better ROI.
Some may argue that this would stifle innovation and we would likely not have foldable phones today if such requirements were in place. But in my opinion if such innovations can't be made durable, then the world would be better off without them.
Cellphones have a typical 2-4 year life, so these will disappear pretty quickly. I expect many of those 30 items to have a relativly short lifespan - maybe 5-10 years at best.
We're adding more and more connected devices:
Phones, tablets, desktops, laptops all typically have a short life..
Smart home devices with WiFi, well, those claim an incredible life - but I really pity anyone putting today's consumer "IoT" devices in. Those things are often out of support before you even buy them. I doubt they are lasting 10 years, and even when I do, I doubt they'll still be safe to leave in place.
TVs and TV set top boxes - this one really bugs me. I want a good quality dumb panel, because the smarts are out of date well within two years, and the TV itself should be good for way longer. TV Boxes, they go out of date too - but there cheap, so get replaced way more often.
Long story short - I think the devices we're buying today are not designed to stand the test of time. They will IMO die out or be removed from your home much faster than we all hope.
Edit addition: also, forgot to mention - I had lots of stuff that was WEP only. Much of it well after WPA2 came out. There all long gone, I expect the same will happen to the vast majority of people.
Design and advertising are used to make devices look obsolete when they're actually still perfectly good to use. Consumers choose to buy new devices instead of repairing/upgrading their old devices. Devices become harder to repair, making repairs more expensive. Consumers repair even less.
Even if we curbed consumerism our current appliances, infrastructure, agriculture and transportation still gobble up large amount of energy / emit carbon. They will need to be replaced one way or another.
Nobody is proposing we magically manufacture billions of new units of everything tomorrow and kick out all the stuff we purchased yesterday.
Turnover takes years or decades anyway. Just like the EU did not make possession of incandescent light bulbs illegal, they just mandated that all new ones sold beyond a certain date must meet energy efficiency standards that can't be met by incandescent ones.
> We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years.
Cars already last more than a decade. As long as moore's law is not entirely dead cell phones will be obsolete simply by advances in the underlying hardware and software exploiting those hardware advances, you don't even need planned obsolescence for that.
And ultimately it depends on the individual product whether it requires more energy to build or during its lifetime. Without checking I bet a space heater will burn significantly more energy during its operation than manufacture, and replacing it with a heat pump would be a net gain at almost any point in its lifecycle.
Whenever I'm making a purchase, I try to think about whether or not I'll still want to use that item in a few years. The way many of us buy new gadgets and throw them in the trash the second the next generation comes out scares me. Food and biodegradables will disappear over time, but the cell phones and laptops we toss in the trash for that next version of Android or iOS will sit in landfills forever, or until someone in a third world country melts it down in a home-made crucible. Even recycling electronics is a gamble--when I went to visit an HP recycling center 5 years ago, they admitted that much of what they reclaim stays in storage or goes otherwise unused because it's not cost-effective. (Maybe things have changed since then).
A history professor of mine once said that the legacy the Greeks and Romans left behind is bronze and marble; the legacy we leave behind will be all plastic.
I feel we need the manufacturers to provide a design lifespan for each device, and that should mean that at least half the devices sold must reach or exceed that age without significant degradation -> like a half-life.
Nobody wants to buy a laptop that will only last 2 years, so the manufacturers would either have answer some tough questions, or design things to last, and to be repairable (because that's one way of making them last).
Obviously careful through is needed towards the fine print - one should allow some parts to be replaced, like batteries, but not accept that a device lasts 10 years if you spend more on repairs than the device has cost in the first place.
Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing for a long term and mature computer industry.
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