Great article on e-waste. One thing though:
“Who is to blame? Consumers certainly have a role to play in the increase of e-waste—they’re buying the goods, after all. But manufacturers have given people fewer and fewer viable ways to keep older electronics functioning effectively.”
Un-true. Weak. We update devices when they’re perfectly fine, we don’t have to. A few days ago I charged my 2011 dusty phone, it works like a charm. I just checked the battery, the phone is still on with 60% of juice. We lie to ourselves as much as manufacturers plan obsolescence, let’s be honest.
You still can text and tweet with a Blackberry and you will get the same results. Technologically speaking the world runs on old ass protocols and low-level things that haven’t changed in decades. We do not need to update. We do not need to upgrade. 5 year old laptops are still powerful enough to do just fine with 99% of what people use computers for. Millions of computers less powerful than your little sister’s phone are running our world without sweating.
Yes, it will be a tiny bit better with the freshest silicon available but in the big scheme of things, it’s not important. Outside the existential question about what happiness is (is it a new device every 12 months?), how much we waste is a bigger issue and again if you have some kids you’d better curve your upgrade habits down a bit because at this rate well, I kind of feel like we are destroying everything right now at a wonderfully fast pace so… We’ll see.