tech has won and we're all to blame

The other day, I settled down to watch a programme looking at the history of steam railways on BBC4.  In it, one of the presenters was talking about cooking pots (no, stay with me on this), and that the progression from cooking over coal to different types of heat saw a change in pot design.  This change meant that pots which previously lasted hundreds of years and were handed down from generation to generation were replaced with items that lasted "only" twenty years or so.

The point of all this pot stuff is because I recently made a YouTube video where I talked about the possibility of getting a new computer to replace my 2017 iMac, and opined that it would be a choice between updating either that or my iPhone X.

After I watched the TV programme I re-visited and watched my video back, and I found myself getting really cross.  With myself mainly but also at what we (well many of us at least) have become at the hands of tech companies.

It seems we have fallen into the upgrade cycle trap.  A trap created by tech companies that exists because we are conditioned to believe that the three-or-four-year-old piece of equipment which works absolutely perfectly and does exactly what we need is somehow now flawed and useless and only fit for the recycling bin.

Both my phone and my computer work faultlessly.  As do the two iMacs dating from 2007 and 2012 that I've given away.  OK the 2007 one can't run certain modern pieces of software and I certainly wouldn't trust it security wise, but it still works perfectly well.

This whole upgrade thing was highlighted even more this week when I saw a review of the latest Tesla electric car.  It seemed to me that Tesla want to get us in the same mindset about our cars as we are about a phone.

Small, incremental upgrades that chip away at our otherwise perfect bit of kit.  Chip, chip, chip until you can bare it no longer and you buy a new one.  Then, two years later...

...rinse and repeat.

I've since decided that I don't actually need or even want to upgrade my phone, my computer, my camera or anything else for that matter.

Of course, if we all felt that way then I'm sure tech companies would ensure we'd buy new stuff by engineering redundancy into their products at a more rapid rate than they probably do already.

We're doomed.  Doomed I tell ye...