JoeWras
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2012
- Messages
- 12,220
Remember when you bought a phone in the 80s, after the breakup, and it lasted forever. I still have an 80s phone I use occasionally. There are phones from the 50s still at work out there.
Not anymore.
This post isn't only about phones, although they are a great example. It is about everything tech these days. The shelf life is so short. It is short not necessarily because the technology or manufacture is bad, it is short because the company producing it requires one or more of the following:
- A subscription
- A proprietary way to configure it
- A kill switch
- A security update, not supported anymore, i.e. a forced update schedule
- A battery that has a short lifetime, and needs expensive replacement or just buy a new version
- Frequent time consuming monitoring of its operation
Over the last three weeks, I've been slammed by this problem.
1) Old router (2018) was end of life and insecure, it had to be replaced
2) Many devices needed a Wifi update after the router was replaced, which was time consuming and difficult on some of them
3) Amazon Echo first gen was non-configurable unless I had an iPhone, they have given up on the Android app support for first gen. Echo goes into the e-trash.
4) OBItalk is dead. All us wise guys who moved to free landline service now have to scramble, and it will require work. Is this the end of free Google Voice/Obi landline service
5) Security cameras went offline. Company who built them went bankrupt during pandemic. Fuddled around with those for a few hours getting them working with 5 year old buggy software.
6) The laptop I bought in 2018 (Lenovo) is working great. I got top of the line to make it future proof. Turns out top of the line performance didn't align with Microsoft's idea of security, so Microsoft won't support windows upgrades. Will AI chips find their way into desktop PC's in 2025? This is a solid, awesome computer, but will be trash in a year (not really, I'll Ubuntu it, but Ubuntu won't run some old software I need to configure old devices)
And so on. One thing that especially bugs me about rapid tech decay is that these companies tout how "green" they are. When looking for a new Amazon Echo, they tout their sustainability pledge. I'll give you true sustainability: How about not making us throw this stuff away after a few years?
Not anymore.
This post isn't only about phones, although they are a great example. It is about everything tech these days. The shelf life is so short. It is short not necessarily because the technology or manufacture is bad, it is short because the company producing it requires one or more of the following:
- A subscription
- A proprietary way to configure it
- A kill switch
- A security update, not supported anymore, i.e. a forced update schedule
- A battery that has a short lifetime, and needs expensive replacement or just buy a new version
- Frequent time consuming monitoring of its operation
Over the last three weeks, I've been slammed by this problem.
1) Old router (2018) was end of life and insecure, it had to be replaced
2) Many devices needed a Wifi update after the router was replaced, which was time consuming and difficult on some of them
3) Amazon Echo first gen was non-configurable unless I had an iPhone, they have given up on the Android app support for first gen. Echo goes into the e-trash.
4) OBItalk is dead. All us wise guys who moved to free landline service now have to scramble, and it will require work. Is this the end of free Google Voice/Obi landline service
5) Security cameras went offline. Company who built them went bankrupt during pandemic. Fuddled around with those for a few hours getting them working with 5 year old buggy software.
6) The laptop I bought in 2018 (Lenovo) is working great. I got top of the line to make it future proof. Turns out top of the line performance didn't align with Microsoft's idea of security, so Microsoft won't support windows upgrades. Will AI chips find their way into desktop PC's in 2025? This is a solid, awesome computer, but will be trash in a year (not really, I'll Ubuntu it, but Ubuntu won't run some old software I need to configure old devices)
And so on. One thing that especially bugs me about rapid tech decay is that these companies tout how "green" they are. When looking for a new Amazon Echo, they tout their sustainability pledge. I'll give you true sustainability: How about not making us throw this stuff away after a few years?