Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence

Sure, I like electronic gadgets. But I dislike planned obsolescence more. It’s one thing when the newer model really is that much better. “All About the Pentiums” exaggerated it, but computer hardware in the 1990s really was improving by leaps and bounds. (And the software was devouring those performance gains, both in demanding more resources, and being less efficient as programmers were told to optimize for their own time, not for disk space or RAM.) That eventually settled out around the time smartphones and cloud computing started taking off, which is why I was able to run a 2012 model CPU all the way through 2024. A faster PC would have been nice, but I didn’t need one yet. As I recall the tech industry freaked out when demand for new PCs dropped. There was probably a rash of “Millennials are killing computers!” articles. But smartphones were going through the same kind of rapid improvement. You could easily justify buying a new phone after only two years: it was a lot faster,…