Resilience once weaved into fabric of society now has been replaced by other materialistic values.
Lots of thing around us are designed with an expiration date in mind, my pairs of AirPods will no longer be usable once the battery degrades to the point that it could no longer hold enough charge for a reasonable listening session. Likewise, my phone will someday be obsolete and there will be no parts manufactured for replacement because it becomes unprofitable, at least compares to selling newer models of phone, that I have to discard it.
Things nowadays seems to build for convenience and limited lifespan with the assumption that people will buy newer and better models in 3 or 5 years. In some sense, this is a good design, only for certain products that innovate as said pace. Technology in smartphone used to be so fast-moving that it doesn’t make sense to keep old devices around for a long time, New technologies get introduced into this device every year and the capability of each model is more significant from the last. Thus, came the yearly upgrade cycle where iterations of a smartphone get updated with more functionalities and computing power. This was true in the past but makes less sense now because innovation has hit a ceiling, each yearly upgrade now (in 2020s) is only marginally better than its predecessor. But since the kinds of manufacturing process for such product has been to accommodate short cycle of use, they implement design decision that only allow device to last for such long of a lifespan, the reasons being that it’s competitive to do so, cutting cost while maintaining quality. This process, hinges on the expectation that people will upgrade their device, creates products that are fragile. Fragile product in essence, cannot sustain themselves through the length of time, as a matter of fact, fragile products are mostly designed to only be used under a certain duration, after which they perform with instability and increased likelihood of total breakdown. Electronics in general is a fragile product, the more sophisticated the less durable. Some of the best laptop right now (M-series Macbook made by Apple) have amazing build quality, performance, batteries and cheap price compared to similar specs laptop but are in fact fragile. They have soldered-on SSD that you cannot replace. Which means that once your SSD breaks, the whole machine stops. One point of failure lead to system-wide disability - a signature of fragility. A product that isn’t design to have its components replaced, especially parts that are statistically likely to fail such as RAM, SSD, Keyboard, Screen, etc. is not going to last long; no matter how well-build, well-design, smoothly-run it is. At some point, things will break, and when it does, if the product have no way to repair itself, then it is as good as done. The lifespan of such product is as long as the time for the first failure to occur.
This is heart-breaking because lots of my favorite product are, to some extent, fragile. I do want to keep them for a long time, do regular maintenance and replace broken parts if possible. But it is by design, an impossibility for it is to be upgraded and traded-in in a few years. However, there are companies out there that do design and manufacture decent laptop which seems to be anti-fragile. That is, they are of good build quality, repair-friendly and long support of physical components. We have the fairphone from a European manufacturer and framework laptop from a U.S based manufacturer. The fairphone strength is in its repairability and the framework laptop strength is in its modularity. Both of which are designed be be easily repaired and entitled to a highly-available replacement varieties. Both of which can function as long the customer take care and regularly repair broken parts. The lifespan of such product, then, is decided by the user, which is something that I find empowering. Unfortunately, companies like this are few and far between as the majority of phone and laptop manufacturers doesn’t follow the design philosophy of these emerging companies. It’s somewhat concerning because there are too many tales of businesses that were established to do good things, add value to this world but ended up fading to obscurity because they are not that profitable or competitive. One prime example is the Sony smartphone. They still keep the 3.5mm headphone jack for all models despite the fact that everyone else doesn’t, they do not go about mocking company for discarding the 3.5mm, nor ridicules the same company for including the notch up top or ditching the physical home button. Sony made truly risky innovation onto their devices but in the end, they did not have enough market share to justify keep their smartphone branch. Sony is one of many cautionary tales when manufacturers want to do good things but ended up risking their whole business due to unprofitability.
Perhaps people are just not interested in a durable and easy-to-repair electronics because they don’t want to keep their device for too long and never learn to repair anything let alone smartphones. Although there is a vocal minority who see through the devious choices of manufacture and voice their concerns, lobby for policies and support the likes of fairphone and framwork. But alas, the majority don’t care, they don’t care about how their phones can function so they are unlikely to give any thought on how they are manufactured, is it a good or a bad build quality, will it protect my privacy. As long as people don’t care they will get trapped with the product design that don’t care about them. For people who do, they vote with their purchase and I commend them to do so, as economics result is the meaningful indicators of success, especially for businesses.