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Let’s Upgrade – Don’t Worry About The Landfill

ByBrainTrust

Technology Breakdown

When you take a top-down look at technology items today and think about the following:

  1. What essential functions is your device providing?
  2. How much does it cost to manufacture, including the whole production pipeline from raw minerals through to finished product?
  3. How much does it cost to operate?
  4. How much does it cost to dispose of?

While the first question will immediately pop into everybody’s mind, you would be hard pressed to find a single person who could answer the remainder of the questions. Are they really less important, or is they just conveniently swept under the carpet.

Technology Upgrade Criteria

Now let’s ask a few more questions relating to your decision to upgrade your device:

  1. Who is initiating the need to upgrade?
  2. What new features are offered that actually increase the device’s usability.
  3. What is your upgraded device going to cost per head of population? Remember that a large portion of the world has people who do not have your technology item.
  4. What are you going to do with your obsolete device?
  5. What is the cost of responsible recycling of the old device?

Again, most people will be able to give you 101 reasons to upgrade and boast about the new features that are included in the new product, however, all they are actually doing is paraphrasing what the manufacturers are putting in their sales pitch. Their rational evaluation of ethical options, have been replaced by the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

Did you know that you can still use an Apple iPhone 5 (released September 21, 2012) anywhere in the world and connect to mobile networks everywhere as they all still have 3G or 4G/LTE capability, take photos and videos and have a respectable 40 hr battery life.

I am taking Apple smartphones as a representative sample of a technology item that is constantly pushed onto the consumer with a clear goal, which is not related to giving you a better or fulfilling life. It is simply a means to make money for the Apple shareholders.

The marketing is always very clear:

  1. Feed the FOMO addiction
  2. Add the fear that the new iOS operating system will no longer work on your current model

To put things in perspective, Apple is certainly not alone in marketing this way. Microsoft is marketing MS Windows in the same way. Let me explain what they have in store for you.

Microsoft Windows 11 – Forces Hardware Upgrade

The next major landfill catastrophe is currently being initiated by Microsoft’s requirement that you need “new” hardware to run Windows 11. The design decision behind locking the new version of Windows into a hardware device on modern motherboards (TPM chip) has a major impact which will not be realised until 2025, when Microsoft will no longer provide support for Windows 10.

What this means is that if you have a PC manufactured before 2021 (without the TPM chip), your hardware will only be fit for landfill.

Make Your Own Hardware Upgrade Choice

When you begin to understand the factors that are influencing your purchasing decisions and worse still, the consequences to our environment of those decisions, you should seriously look at making your own decisions. Look at alternatives.

Let me just give the two solutions, specifically related to the examples I provided in this article. Remember you should give the same consideration to all of your next technology upgrades, including cars, gadgets, fridges, washing machines, toasters and everything else with a technology component.

  1. Keep your current phone until it stops working. Apple stores will still replace batteries in an iPhone 5, so you really have no excuse.
    If you have any of the Android based smartphones, chances are that any phone with 4G/LTE capability and Android 4.1 or later, will do a perfectly good job today, regardless of what Google or Samsung or whoever sold you the phone says!
  2. Keep your current PC and replace MS Windows operating system with Linux. The current versions of Linux still work exceptionally well with hardware that is over 15 years old. In most cases, all you would need to do, to get snappy performance, is install an extra memory module and an SSD drive and your machine will run as fast as a modern PC running with Windows 11 for most of your everyday business and private computing. (I regularly update machines that are up to 15 years old for use by people who would like to use online resources but do not have the money to buy modern equipment.)

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