Many of us are fed up with constant news of perfectly serviceable hardware becoming obsolete, due to the security issues caused by lack of ongoing software updates. I realise a lot of this is driven by the profit motive, but my concern is that our environment shouldn’t have to dispose of, or recycle, machinery/technology (and that doesn’t just mean computers and mobile phones) that otherwise work just fine.
We don’t have the raw materials, as a planet, to continue in the same rate we are currently having to invest in new technology. For instance, there is an iPhone 4 sitting in a drawer. It works perfectly, but as its iOS can’t be upgraded past v.7, and apps all need v.8 or higher, it’s basically unusable in any safe capacity (other than as a phone – oops, that wasn’t the design of this product, was it?!). And a number of site visitors here prove that XP machines still live on. The recent Wannacry ransomware threat exposed a high number of XP-based machines, especially in environments where stability is required, such as in health care sectors, etc.
I’m saddened by recent news of Microsoft’s ever-shortening life-span of computers, and acknowledge they are not the only culprits/offenders. But how are we ever going to convince such corporate giants that our planet, and future generations, deserve a higher priority than their corporate greed/profit imperative?
