Todays electronics is fast. Imagine how much natural resources could be saved if manufacturers delivered software support until device is truly unusable due to hardware limitations.
This post is being written on 3 years old flagship killer that has never dropped any frame, reached 0% battery or crashed but wont get system updates anymore because…
seemingly 3 years old 7nm flagship SoC is too weak to be used for next decade?
🇪🇺🙏
To solve this, I’d ask: What can we do to incentivize graceful degradation instead of planned obsolescence?
Planned obsolescence really isn’t as big of a thing as people think it is. The problem is that people want the newest shiny thing, and they don’t want to pay premium prices for something that’ll last a long time.
So, manufacturers will use parts that are less durable to fit a price point. It’s kinda like server hardware vs consumer hardware.
Now, development has even less to do with planned obsolescence. Development is expensive, and if only 1% of your users is using V8 while 99% are on v12, it doesn’t make sense to keep supporting V8.
This is even a thing with open source software. For example, even though RHEL7 doesn’t hit EOL until June, many software vendors have already stop providing updates (curl, for example).