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All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years. AFAICT, this didn't stop being the case until it became common for every singl

All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years. AFAICT, this didn't stop being the case until it became common for every single piece of electronics to run an operating system, at which point tech got caught up in large software companies' compulsion to constantly rearrange things. I think it's really about the cloud. I kept my last iPhone way past a typical phone's lifespan, and got to experience watching it slowly revert back to being a dumbphone. In the same way that smart home devices have a nasty tendency to stop working as soon as the vendor decides to stop maintaining some critical server the product needs to be able to ping just to turn on properly, apps eventually stop working with the latest OS your phone can run, and pretty shortly after that some service running in the cloud will stop being able to talk to whatever version of the app you're stuck on. In the case of Apple's or AT&T's apps, this happened almost immediately after the first version of iOS I couldn't upgrade to came down the pipe. In the case of others, it was 6 months or a year later. The web browser died in its own special way, choked to death by more JavaScript than it could handle. I get the economics behind why companies do this, but it's sad, all the same. A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand.

ubermonkey 9y ago
"All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years." I think you have odd perspective here, because you're talking about tech lasting for a decade, but you're also explicitly omitting anything with a computer in it ("run an operating system"). "A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand." The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. Durability wasn't the issue; the rapidly increasing capability of newer and more capable computing platforms was. We're at a point now where Moore's Law & related phenomena seem to have slowed a bit. Ten or fifteen years ago I always upgraded my laptop every 3 years. Now I can go longer, and typically only upgrade when there's a compelling reason (higher RAM ceiling, e.g., or external factors like the economics of extended service plans). Phones are the same; in the earlier years of the cell phone era, I got a new phone nearly every year because that meant smaller and more powerful and therefore more useful. In the Smartphone era, two years became the norm, and nowadays it's routine to see folks with 3 or even 4 year old phones. The tl;dr is that there's no conspiracy or malignant intent here; it's just that shit gets better, and so the upgrade makes sense for most people. I mean, maybe you can get a 35-year-old Commodore running as a novelty, but I sure wouldn't want to try to do my job with one.
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  > The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. No, but it can do all the things it promised to do when it was first sold. By contrast, one of my old iPads is thinking about enrolling in a job retraining program to learn to be a trivet. This despite all of its components being in perfect working order. I never suggested this was a conspiracy, just that it's a travesty.
  - jxdxbx 9y ago
    With the exception of battery life 1G Apple Watches and iPads typically work just as well as they did on day 1. Cloud support will start to fall away at some point. But these products are very durable. Huge numbers of iPad 2s are still in use. FWIW I think developers should support old hardware as long as they can, but only the lastest operating system for each particular supported model.
    - bunderbunder 9y ago
      I'd support that if commercial OS vendors wouldn't keep ratcheting up the resources the OS requires with every release. My newer iPad is a horrible laggy mess since I upgraded it to iOS 11.
      - daveFNbuck 9y ago
        You're complaining that it can't continue to be upgraded and do new things, not that it can't still do the things it used to do.
        bunderbunder 9y ago
        I am very much complaining that it can't still do the things it used to do. Because mobile apps tend to rely on cloud services, and apps that rely on cloud services tend to be relatively quick to introduce breaking changes that cause old versions of the app to stop working properly, and at some point you stop being able to upgrade the app because of library compatibility issues. To some extent, RMS is right on this subject: When your devices rely on the cloud, it means you don't really own them, because any cloud-dependent functionality continues to exist at the pleasure of others.

ubermonkey 9y ago

"All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years." I think you have odd perspective here, because you're talking about tech lasting for a decade, but you're also explicitly omitting anything with a computer in it ("run an operating system"). "A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand." The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. Durability wasn't the issue; the rapidly increasing capability of newer and more capable computing platforms was. We're at a point now where Moore's Law & related phenomena seem to have slowed a bit. Ten or fifteen years ago I always upgraded my laptop every 3 years. Now I can go longer, and typically only upgrade when there's a compelling reason (higher RAM ceiling, e.g., or external factors like the economics of extended service plans). Phones are the same; in the earlier years of the cell phone era, I got a new phone nearly every year because that meant smaller and more powerful and therefore more useful. In the Smartphone era, two years became the norm, and nowadays it's routine to see folks with 3 or even 4 year old phones. The tl;dr is that there's no conspiracy or malignant intent here; it's just that shit gets better, and so the upgrade makes sense for most people. I mean, maybe you can get a 35-year-old Commodore running as a novelty, but I sure wouldn't want to try to do my job with one.

bunderbunder 9y ago
> The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. No, but it can do all the things it promised to do when it was first sold. By contrast, one of my old iPads is thinking about enrolling in a job retraining program to learn to be a trivet. This despite all of its components being in perfect working order. I never suggested this was a conspiracy, just that it's a travesty.
- jxdxbx 9y ago
  With the exception of battery life 1G Apple Watches and iPads typically work just as well as they did on day 1. Cloud support will start to fall away at some point. But these products are very durable. Huge numbers of iPad 2s are still in use. FWIW I think developers should support old hardware as long as they can, but only the lastest operating system for each particular supported model.
  - bunderbunder 9y ago
    I'd support that if commercial OS vendors wouldn't keep ratcheting up the resources the OS requires with every release. My newer iPad is a horrible laggy mess since I upgraded it to iOS 11.
    - daveFNbuck 9y ago
      You're complaining that it can't continue to be upgraded and do new things, not that it can't still do the things it used to do.
      - bunderbunder 9y ago
        I am very much complaining that it can't still do the things it used to do. Because mobile apps tend to rely on cloud services, and apps that rely on cloud services tend to be relatively quick to introduce breaking changes that cause old versions of the app to stop working properly, and at some point you stop being able to upgrade the app because of library compatibility issues. To some extent, RMS is right on this subject: When your devices rely on the cloud, it means you don't really own them, because any cloud-dependent functionality continues to exist at the pleasure of others.