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from the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it dept.
Mac Bowley at the Raspberry Pi blog asks about ending hardware upgrades for the sake of upgrades as well as ending planned obsolescence. The softwre for the Raspberry Pi, he notes, still runs on the first models even if the newer models are faster. In fact the old models are still being produced and bought. Fully exploiting the natural life spans of hardware would have a lot of advantages, not the least of which would be reduction of the enviornmental impact.
Some components of your phone cannot be created without rare chemical elements, such as europium and dysprosium. (In fact, there are 83 stable non-radioactive elements in the periodic table, and 70 of them are used in some capacity in your phone.) Upgrade culture means there is high demand for these materials, and deposits are becoming more and more depleted. If you're hoping there are renewable alternatives, you'll be disappointed: a study by researchers working at Yale University found that there are currently no alternative materials that are as effective.
Then there's the issue of how the materials are mined. The market trading these materials is highly competitive, and more often than not manufacturers buy from the companies offer the lowest prices. To maintain their profit margin, these companies have to extract as much material as possible as cheaply as they can. As you can imagine, this leads to mining practices that are less than ethical or environmentally friendly. As many of the mines are located in distant areas of developing countries, these problems may feel remote to you, but they affect a lot of people and are a direct result of the market we are creating by upgrading our devices every two years.
Many of us agree that we need to do what we can to counteract climate change, and that, to achieve anything meaningful, we have to start looking at the way we live our lives. This includes questioning how we use technology. It will be through discussion and opinion gathering that we can start to make more informed decisions — as individuals and as a society.
Previously:
Apple, Samsung Fined for Crippling Devices With Software Updates
Planned Obsolescence Takes a Step Forward (2014)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday February 09 2020, @11:37PM (1 child)
This is exactly where capitalism has become broken and must be fixed. It's no longer focused on selling a product to satisfy customers and make a reasonable profit. It is now all about manipulation of numbers so the stock price can be driven up by any means necessary. Buying stock at one time generally meant investing in a company in order that they had capital to use for research and infrastructure. Ideally, the company would profit over the long term and dividends would be paid. Perhaps we need to force a slow down in stock sales, if one buys stock maybe they should be required to hold it for certain periods of time (months? years?) before they can resell it. That would eliminate the computer trading of shares back and forth to boost activity (thus enticing the less wary to invest). How many companies out there are actually worth the stock prices they command?
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Monday February 10 2020, @01:51AM
From what I understand, high frequency trading has been under fractions of a second for transaction times for a while now. They measure improvements in shaving off milliseconds on their trades.
All you'd need to do is put a tax on all stocks held less than a day or require stocks to be held for at least one minute and you'd make a huge dent in that whole scheme.