Dr Ian Cutress's youtube channel TechTechPotato has a few interesting videos regarding time and computing and why its hard, and also why it could be easier.
The point about planned obsolescence is tough to work around. Until we start designing physical devices to make it for the long haul, this problem just wont go away.
> Until we start designing physical devices to make it for the long haul, this problem just wont go away.
The problem often times isn't the hardware, it's the software that gets ever more bloated.
Was a 486 capable of surfing the internet, playing games, talking to people, writing code, etc? Certainly!
Was a Pentium 3 capable of surfing the internet, playing games, talking to people, writing code, etc? Certainly!
Are either of those capable of doing it on the modern world? No - and it's not because they're slower than what they were, it's because the complexity of software and data has grown massively.
Consider that the current CNN homepage is about 27MB of assets - half of a Win95 install.
You want to stop obsoleting stuff, buy every web developer and every Google employee a Raspberry Pi 4 with NVMe storage, and make them use it.
You won't stop obsoleting stuff until the pace of development settles down. We've gone from the telephone to VRChat in a century and a half. 20 years ago text messaging was just starting to catch on and the smartphone as we know them today was still 5 years away from existing.
If physical devices are going to start being used for the long haul it's either because hardware/software development has finally hit a wall or because the world has collapsed and smartphones are only good as a decorative hood ornament as you tear across the deserts of Mississippi on your Mad Max bloodwagon.
All I saw was one point where the author claimed his old cameras and phones were planned to be obsolete, which is stupid.
By that standard, the only camera we could ever make is whatever camera humans in the distant future consider the last (sturdy) camera.
We design physical devices to last long enough to see you in to the time we'd expect them to actually be obsolete.
Do you really think it would be a good idea to make everything super long lasting?
Imagine a world where we took this seriously. We'd have precision machined laptop cases made out of advanced alloys, wrapping ruggedised 66mhz intel pentiums from 1993. Still working, but effectively a massive waste of resources.
The better approach is to make the materials reclaimable.
The point about planned obsolescence is tough to work around. Until we start designing physical devices to make it for the long haul, this problem just wont go away.
Time waits for no man, nor machine.