Planned Obsolescence Becoming Obsolete

For a long time, planned obsolescence has been a sad fact of technological life. Most machines are only designed to have a limited life span, then scrapped and replaced with a newer model. However, signs are showing up that signal a reversal of this trend.

What if you didn’t have to continually update all of your gadgets and devices? Wouldn’t it be great if instead of buying a new piece of hardware every year, new features and software could just be uploaded into the existing shell? Designs could be more modular, and made so that both software and hardware can be infinitely swapped in and out, drastically extending the useful life of the machine.

A recent Salon article explores this idea of continual upgrade, reflecting on the Sonos multiroom digital music system:

What’s remarkable, though, is that while its hardware has barely changed in three years, the Sonos system has improved tremendously since it went on sale. In 2006, the company issued a software update to every Sonos sold—suddenly, the system could play audiobooks. A few months after that, another update allowed Sonos players to hook into the Rhapsody online music service, which meant that for $13 a month, people could now listen to millions of tracks that they didn’t own. Later, Sonos added Napster, Pandora, and Sirius, plus a slew of free Internet radio stations. Last year, the company improved its controller’s user interface, adding a function that lets you search your tunes from the device—another feature that every Sonos owner got through a software update.

But because music players, cell phones, cameras, GPS navigators, video game consoles, and nearly everything else now runs on Internet-updatable software, our gadgets’ functions are no longer static. It’s still true that a gizmo you buy today will eventually be superseded by something that comes along later. But just like Meryl Streep, your devices will now dazzle you as they age. They’ll gain new functions and become easier to use, giving you fewer reasons to jump to whatever hot new thing is just hitting the market.

To appreciate how amazing this is, imagine if the same rules held sway in the car industry. Five years after you bought it, you could take your beater to the shop, and after a quick patch it’d be blessed with electronic stability control, a more fuel-efficient engine, and a radio that received satellite broadcasts.

Salon: “The Death of Planned Obsolescence”