Rant 10 - 10/1/12 Subject: Planned Obsolescence

Well - if nothing else I've made it to double figures!

Rant number 10

As discussed earlier in the week my phone is broken - which has really pissed me off.

It's also got me thinking about the deliberate & planned obsolescence which is present in so many of the products we buy today.

Now - to clarify for anyone who is not familiar with the term; planned obsolescence in a product is the practice of manufacturing something with a specific useful life cycle in mind. Once this is exceeded - the product will break, one way or another - forcing you to buy another.

Ipso facto: you are not buying a product - you are renting it - until it becomes as useful as a house brick.

Mobile phones (as with my bloody phone,) are a prime example of this. 

My last phone for instance - came up to its 2 year contracts completion and, because I was about to be made redundant - I decided to not upgrade. I went instead for a cheap residual contract of minutes and texts only.

If I remember rightly - the phone made it a further 3 weeks before it practically disintegrated.

Now as luck may have it, I did have a new job by this point and was able to get a shiny upgrade to my current (crappy) phone. 

Not quite 2 years later - here we are again.

Maybe its just that I don't look after them with the appropriate kid gloves that they deserve? 

I presume that the correct way to use your phone is to wrap it in cotton wool, bubble wrap, packing peanuts and bury it in an ebony box (under a full moon of course.)

Other examples are items which use rechargeable batteries. I have literally lost track of the amount of cordless phones that won't charge any more for instance.

I genuinely do not mind true obsolescence through innovation. That is how we as humans move forward. 

My first mobile phone (a Nokia 3310 - purchased for me for Christmas when I was around 13!) for instance had a LED screen in fetching green & black, buttons and - on top of the standard ability to deal with calls and - mightiest of all, snake 2 (on which I spent many an hour.)

This product would now be - quite fairly obsolete. In the modern world it would be outclassed and out-gunned by even the cheapest of modern phones.

This is an acceptable part of technological evolution.

What annoys me is being cheated! All manufacturers do it I'm sure- but phone companies seem to make it the most obvious.

Bastards

Rant over.