In a comment to a post on LinkedIn, THE REVELATOR asks: “What things or products should be built to last but aren’t, and why?

The answer to what is simple. The technology products we use everyday. Our smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

There are no cross-platform standards (beyond a few cable standards the EU finally implemented to stop Apple from forcing you to buy a new charging cable and wired earbuds with every f*ck1ng iPhone release), no modular design because vendors want lock in, 2 to 4 year upgrade cycles, and the ability to sell you something lighter and thinner, even though it doesn’t matter beyond a point. If we could upgrade the memory, storage, AND CPUs, we could double or triple device lifespans since we’re pretty much hit the limits for bus speed as well as scale.

While this is not a full history, and I may be a few models, and maybe even a year, off, the original Pentium^* was 66 MHz in 1993. It wasn’t until 2001, with the Pentium III, that we hit 1 GHz. But shortly after, the Xeon hit 2 GHz (and it could be overclocked to 3.6 GHz, but not recommended). Then around 2005/2006, we got 3.X GHz base speed with the high end Pentium D and Pentium Extreme. And the speeds really haven’t increased since (even though the cost of speed has decreased over time).

However, our mobile devices aren’t designed to support any of these upgrades (and the chips are not designed to be backwards architecture compatible to force you to upgrade every few years).

The reality is that our devices could last three times as long, but without planned obsolescence, which is the answer to the why, they couldn’t collectively take us for extra trillions they don’t need (since they just waste it on stock buybacks and Gen-AI anyway).

This isn’t the only example. Many things we make could be improved, and some things could be improved tenfold, but if bulbs were made to the highest quality standard, we’d never buy another lightbulb for our lamp in our lifetime, and probably waste a lot of good shoelaces (as we have been trained to toss them with a sneaker).

And the worst part about this is that this planned obsolescence seems to inform the vast majority of enterprise software design as well.

^*And it’s still All About the Pentiums!