You don’t need to actually replace them with equal alternatives, just enough so the digital economy doesn’t implode. Even 2015 is probably a target year in terms of performance that doesn’t destroy the entire electronics industry.
Yes. I think we should be revolted to see hardware released in 2015 being out of support for environmental reasons, but I can't feel sad for people needing this amount of status. They should be fine.
I would hope that this type of hardware can be offset by the fact that these devices don't suffer obsolescence the same way other digital devices do, which need to be replaced because there's no longer 802.11b networks around etc.
I'm of the opinion that what we have is good enough. What we need are consumer devices that are not made with planned obsolescence in mind. I have perfectly viable devices that are sitting around that I don't want to throw in a landfill, that are deprecated purely because of software changes. It's clear when we can afford to toss all of our ram / compute at running Electron applications.
I don't mean to suggest that this is a simple problem to solve. But the importance of this is far to great to ignore.
>How much stock should they keep around for the 10 extra years after 3 years on the market? (and what happens if they underprovision, will they be sued, or overprovision, throw it all in the bin? they can't sell it, or the 10 year clock starts again)
There is no reason they need to replace parts with the exact same chip they came with. If newer CPUs/chips are available they could put a new model in. There will likely need to be more standardization so individual parts can be replaced/upgraded but this is not impossible and is very common for parts like GPUs and pci cards.
There are also mountains of these parts floating around after sale. The OEM could encourage the return of unwanted electronics and then gut them for parts to use in repairs after they have been tested. Any leftovers after 10 years can be sent to recycling.
>vendors sold thinner and thinner devices, and customers preferred them over the others.
Customers preferences need to take a back seat over environmental needs. A customer can live with a 1mm thicker phone. They can't live without air and survivable weather.
None of this is trivial and it will be a massive shakeup to the status quo but there is no other alternative. In the end we will all be better off.
They are just tools. People will come up with better ones every other year, and we'll abandon the old stuff. That's ok, components should be replaceable without having to reinvent the whole thing.
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.
Except that exact same argument applies to Apple. Making it harder to reuse perfectly serviceable existing hardware simply puts an invisible hand on the balancing scale toward "buy the new shiny thing"
For the vast majority of things I buy that use chips (obviously: consoles, phones and computers excepted) they could easily be using chips from 2010 and the only difference might be a slightly higher electricity draw.
Yes, but like the hard drive market, as soon as a replacement technology comes over the horizon, all investment in improvements to the existing tech pretty much stops.
You make it seem I’m talking about sci-fi technology. I’m talking about not intentionally crippling the product to force upgrades (easily replace batteries, backwards compatible software). It’s not rocket science and we had it before.
It's about removing artificial barriers to repair (such as serialized components), not using older tech.
Also, there's no reason most things (especially wear/upgrade components lie batteries and storage) in modern devices shouldn't be replaceable but that's more about poor engineering than malicious business practices.
I don't think so because there's rarely a drop in replacement unless you designed your board ahead of time for multiple options (of course exceptions exist, there's drop in replacements for many devices including the esp8266 I mention below).
But for example, an ESP8266 hasn't really lost much value in the past few years, and is unlikely to lose significant value if it sat on a shelf for another few years, so they don't mind a bit of an overstock.
Meanwhile the current year car model will lose a ton of it's value when the next model comes out so they don't want to risk over-stocking it.
I mean it's not like most consumer hardware has to be on the latest nodes. The current hardware is more than enough for any consumer applications I can think of.
Maybe just need to reuse more hardware. Standardize and commodify replacement parts for mobile devices like framework/fairphone. Reduce the amount of IoT crap in toasters/etc. Use multiseat instead of thin clients. Upcycle old computers.
Even if the processor continued to work, the flash storage and battery in these devices aren't going to keep working forever. If we want to have longer lived devices, these parts will need to be standardised and user-replaceable
Consumer electronics are unique right now in becoming orders of magnitude more capable before the old versions even begin failing. New products sell because nothing comparable was even available before and it's inconceivable that next year's version could be better somehow (even though it will). No other category has this going for it.
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