Even the phrase has gone out of style.

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A Google search on "planned obsolecense" brings up less than 200 pages. At least a handful of these seem to be from a review of a handheld (not cellular) phone that someone is so enamored of that he excuses his use of something so retro by telling us that it's "an oasis, not planned obsolecense". Many of the others seem to use the phrase in critical reports on the computer industry - and in a way which I think is inaccurate. After all, new and improved chips, larger memory space, new storage devices, and the like, are truly and honestly being developed and marketed. When we, the consumers, want these instead of our earlier hardware (and software as well) and pay good money to buy them, it's not because what we had before was obsolete, but because we want (and often don't need) the new power and capabilities.

A case can be made for the claim that new games and programs no longer run on old hardware, and because of that the hardware really is obsolete, but even in this case, it's less a question of planning, but of development that has run so far ahead of our real needs, and of our understanding of those needs.

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Go to: Of course you want this!, or
Go to: Confessions of a conservative technology freak.