The “pay 10x for something that lasts 10x as long” reasoning only works when the item is expected to have the same value year over year.
Some things are made of parts that last a long time, with technologies that aren’t changing rapidly, and stay roughly as effective 10 or even 50 years after they’re made. Consider a teapot, a dining room table, a simple electric heater, bicycles, many firearms. Antique store stuff. Higher-tech instances include good keyboards, good optical mice, probably good speakers, arguably good audio amps. Also some kitchen gadgets—most dishes and silverware, apple peelers, grain mills, grinders, simple food dehydrators, popcorn poppers, good knives.
Other things are made of parts that degrade over time, and/or with technologies that are still changing rapidly because we’re not there yet on their evolution toward a generally accepted standard of good-enough. Consider wall-to-wall carpeting, almost all upholstered furniture, bicycle and car tyres, car seats, smoke detectors, underwear, TVs, gaming PCs, phones.
Vintage fashion looks superficially like an exception to this principle, but I’m pretty sure there’s a huge survivorship bias component there. Some old clothes got lucky and happened to be comprised of time-friendly materials, but many weren’t—even as recently as my own childhood, polyesters and nylons and memory foams were by and large utterly horrible textures. Most “vintage” aged items with elastic are worse than useless, as the rubber perishes over time.
For phones and computers in particular, the problem with designing for indefinite repairability is twofold: First, building for modularity has its costs and tradeoffs. User-serviceable interfaces are heavier, bulkier, less efficient. Second, you can’t build modularity to specs that haven’t been written yet. You can’t future-proof a motherboard by testing it for compatibility with CPU and RAM form factors that haven’t even started development when you’re trying to build for them.
If you imagine trying to build a computer that can be easily adapted for compatibility with every component that might be introduced in the next 10 years, you also introduce a subtler form of waste by overbuilding. There are perhaps half a dozen different (and mostly mutually exclusive ish) ways that technology could go, each of which requires different support… and each of which doesn’t require support for certain features which others might. By designing electronics just-in-time, we avoid the costs of building for compatibility that we would never actually use.
I agree with your sentiment that wringing more life out of our devices is a noble goal, but in practice it’s a bit less obvious than I’m hearing you describe it as.
The “pay 10x for something that lasts 10x as long” reasoning only works when the item is expected to have the same value year over year.
Some things are made of parts that last a long time, with technologies that aren’t changing rapidly, and stay roughly as effective 10 or even 50 years after they’re made. Consider a teapot, a dining room table, a simple electric heater, bicycles, many firearms. Antique store stuff. Higher-tech instances include good keyboards, good optical mice, probably good speakers, arguably good audio amps. Also some kitchen gadgets—most dishes and silverware, apple peelers, grain mills, grinders, simple food dehydrators, popcorn poppers, good knives.
Other things are made of parts that degrade over time, and/or with technologies that are still changing rapidly because we’re not there yet on their evolution toward a generally accepted standard of good-enough. Consider wall-to-wall carpeting, almost all upholstered furniture, bicycle and car tyres, car seats, smoke detectors, underwear, TVs, gaming PCs, phones.
Vintage fashion looks superficially like an exception to this principle, but I’m pretty sure there’s a huge survivorship bias component there. Some old clothes got lucky and happened to be comprised of time-friendly materials, but many weren’t—even as recently as my own childhood, polyesters and nylons and memory foams were by and large utterly horrible textures. Most “vintage” aged items with elastic are worse than useless, as the rubber perishes over time.
For phones and computers in particular, the problem with designing for indefinite repairability is twofold: First, building for modularity has its costs and tradeoffs. User-serviceable interfaces are heavier, bulkier, less efficient. Second, you can’t build modularity to specs that haven’t been written yet. You can’t future-proof a motherboard by testing it for compatibility with CPU and RAM form factors that haven’t even started development when you’re trying to build for them.
If you imagine trying to build a computer that can be easily adapted for compatibility with every component that might be introduced in the next 10 years, you also introduce a subtler form of waste by overbuilding. There are perhaps half a dozen different (and mostly mutually exclusive ish) ways that technology could go, each of which requires different support… and each of which doesn’t require support for certain features which others might. By designing electronics just-in-time, we avoid the costs of building for compatibility that we would never actually use.
I agree with your sentiment that wringing more life out of our devices is a noble goal, but in practice it’s a bit less obvious than I’m hearing you describe it as.