SOCIAL: Fwd: Introducing iPhone 4.

[Tom Radulovich]

It's an excellent point, Palak. These machines are the product of a  
culture that plans in obsolescence. Even if you want to hold on to  
them (as I do, not necessarily out of virtue, but rather because I am  
cheap, and don't like to have to learn how to use new gadgets) they  
aren't made to last, or the company that makes them quickly stops  
supporting them. As I write this, I am sitting in an office with four  
non-working printers that need to be disposed of. I just took a bunch  
of mobile-phone chargers to Goodwill for electronics recycling  
yesterday, and was reminded of how wasteful (and expensive!) it is  
that every phone seems to have a unique charger – while I understand  
that the EU now requires that all phones sold in Europe from now on  
have a standard charger, it seems a way off here in the US.

I started reading John Thackara's book, In the Bubble, which is about  
design. He has a great chapter on how much waste that the electronics  
industry generates:

"Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is  
heavy in itself. It's a heavy user of matter in all the hardware  
needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed sillicon age  
is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use  
of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip  
with 32 megabytes of random-access memory - a total of 630 times the  
mass of the final product. The "fab" of a basic memory chip, and  
running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight  
hundred times the chip's weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of  
potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. A  
single microchip is, it is true, a small thing – on its own. But there  
are a lot of them about – and many more to come. Promoters of  
ubiquitous computing promise us that trillions of smart embedded  
devices are on the way.

" The ecological footprint of computing is not limited to the chips.  
The manufacture of electronic devices also involves highly intensive  
material processes. A great deal of nature has to be moved during the  
production of communications equipment. Many components require the  
use of high-grade minerals that can be obtained only through major  
mining operations and energy-intensive transformation processes. One  
of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul  
Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins' Natural Capitalism is that  
the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single  
laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your  
lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in  
the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well  
as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also  
have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used  
precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into  
the consumption or production of a computer ends up rather quickly as  
either an emission or as solid waste. In theory, electronic products  
have technical service lives on the magnitude of thirty years, but  
thanks to ever-shorter innovation cycles, many devices are disposed of  
after a few years or months."


On Jun 7, 2010, at 3:55 PM, palak joshi wrote:

> I am not sure if i am supposed to feel like this but I do anyway.   
> Maybe someone will have an explanaiton that will make me feel better.
> I do understand evolution and how things get better with time..after  
> usage and with new technology. But i cant help but get a little  
> upset over the fact that the iphone that i had excitedly bought a  
> couple of years ago is now 'outdated'. It doesnt have any of the  
> things that 4 g (right) have!
> Am I supposed to stay committed to my existing phone (its cracked!)  
> or go for the better one? When does one 'settle down' with a  
> technology...does that happen when one dies or when one doesnt have  
> any money ...and to me both sound like extreme.
> What is the fine line between consumerism and getting excited with  
> new technology? I have had these qustions bother me many times...I  
> would love to talk about it if any body else feels the same way..if  
> not i will wait around for the next topic on social  :)
>
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Amy Muller <amymuller at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>

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