Certainly There's Planned Obsolescence In Apple's iKit It's Just Not Planned By Apple

There's a slightly strange piece in the NYT by Catherine Rampell arguing that maybe, just maybe, Apple is using planned obsolescence in order to get people to upgrade their iPhones. The thing is, it is actually true that there's planned obsolescence in Apple's iKit, as there is in all other modern day consumer electronics. It's just not that it is being planned by Apple or any of the other manufacturers.

Rampell:

At first, I thought it was my imagination. Around the time the iPhone 5S and 5C were released, in September, I noticed that my sad old iPhone 4 was becoming a lot more sluggish. The battery was starting to run down much faster, too. But the same thing seemed to be happening to a lot of people who, like me, swear by their Apple products. When I called tech analysts, they said that the new operating system (iOS 7) being pushed out to existing users was making older models unbearably slow. Apple phone batteries, which have a finite number of charges in them to begin with, were drained by the new software. So I could pay Apple $79 to replace the battery, or perhaps spend 20 bucks more for an iPhone 5C. It seemed like Apple was sending me a not-so-subtle message to upgrade.

Rampell goes on to argue (perhaps imply is rather better) that this could be from Apple deliberately making iOS 7 more complex, likely to run more slowly on older models and thus tease or tempt people into an upgrade. This isn't quite what was happening, certainly not to the battery, as Gizmodo points out:

In those last three and a half years, that phone has been through countless firmware updates, taken untold photos, been charged improperly (they all are), been dropped (likewise). It has, in short, been used. And the more the components within it are used, the more they will degrade.

Specifically about the battery: this is a matter of chemistry, not design. Batteries work off a reversible chemical change (let's not get too complicated here) running one way when they are charged and the other way when they are providing juice to the iPhone. The unavoidable chemistry of these things is that the reactions are reversible some number of times. A thousand perhaps for the average consumer battery. And as I say this isn't a design choice by anyone: it's just that chemistry telling us that the reactions are not reversible an infinite number of times (well, they are, in that we can take the battery out and recycle it back to pure components and start again but that's not quite what we mean here).

On the software I'm actually amazed at how little modern manufacturers do bloat it to reduce the ability to run on older hardware. The archetype of this always used to be Microsoft Windows: new versions would need that the underlying machine be upgraded to the latest components if the OS was not to run like treacle. Even this has pretty much stopped with Windows 7 and 8: plenty of people have found that those two actually demand fewer system resources than earlier versions. Even to the point that the PC manufacturers are blaming Microsoft because the new versions have not boosted PC sales. People don't need the latest processor, the largest memory, in order to run the OS so therefore they're not buying the latest PCs to do so.

With Apple's iOS there have been advances of course: the new animations in iOS 7 can make a fair old call on chip processing. But it's also possible to turn them off. There's really very little software bloat in this OS.

But I do say that there is indeed planned obsolescence even if it's not Apple doing it and that's true. It all comes down to something called "tin whiskers".

If you make a solder for a piece of electronics from pure tin then that solder will, over time, grow those whiskers. They look like exactly what they sound like: a long hair or filament of pure tin grows out of the solder itself. Clearly and obviously, given the ease with which tin conducts electricity, this isn't really something you want happening on a motherboard or inside a piece of electronics. For when the whisker grows long enough it will short out that piece of electronics. And yes, this does happen and the mean time before failure (MTBF) of a board built with a pure tin solder is some 3 to 4 years.

Now, we do know how to solve this: we add lead to the tin to make the solder. But what has happened in the past few years? Correct, led by the European Union, who banned the use of lead solders in consumer electronics, the world now uses pure tin solders. So by deliberate design we've had the entire consumer electronics industry building boards and devices with that planned obsolescence. There are those of us who did warn about this before the law was passed but sadly we weren't taken note of. And it really is true too: one major reason why consumer electronics now has a shorter working lifetime than it could do is simply that the law says it must be so.

There is planned obsolescence in consumer electronics these days it's just not been planned by the consumer electronics companies. You can thank the green and environmentalists activists instead.