Just to give one example, try replacing the battery on a Samsung Galaxy S7. It’s easier said than done, though, because the industry is not set up to facilitate retention and phones are not designed with ease of repair in mind. So holding on to your existing phone would be good for your wallet and for the environment. That means, said one report, that “buying one new phone takes as much energy as recharging and operating a smartphone for an entire decade”.
And as far as CO 2 emissions are concerned, a 2018 Canadian university study estimated that building a new smartphone – and specifically, mining the rare materials inside them – accounts for 85% to 95% of the device’s total CO 2 emissions for two years. No one really knows how much e-waste (electronic refuse) is generated every year, but one recent estimate put it at 53.6m metric tonnes in 2019. Planned obsolescence may be good for phone companies but it’s bad for users’ wallets and even worse for the planet, because it encourages people to treat their phones as disposable. Thus came about the baroque absurdities of American cars in the middle decades of the 20th century – all that chrome, outrageous colours, fins, whitewall tyres etc that you now only see in museums or in Cuba. The cars themselves changed relatively little in their essence, but they looked different. He introduced annual cosmetic design changes – facelifts, if you like – to convince car owners to buy replacements each year. As a marketing philosophy it goes back to the mid-1920s, when the US car industry reached saturation point and Alfred Sloan, the boss of General Motors, came up with a wheeze to keep punters buying new cars. There’s a name for this corporate disorder – “planned obsolescence”: deliberately ensuring that the current version of a given product will become out of date or useless within a known time period.
Why? Planned obsolescence may be good for phone companies but it’s bad for users’ wallets and even worse for the planet And yet the manufacturers are still, like Apple, annually releasing new models that are generally just an incremental improvement on what went before rather than a great leap forward. At any rate, they seem to be holding on to their phones for longer. Which is strange, given that these phones don’t wear out, a fact that may be getting through to users. From the viewpoint of the smartphone industry, which until now has worked on a cycle of two-yearly upgrades, I’m a dead loss. That’s three phones in 11.5 years, so my “upgrade cycle” is roughly one iPhone every four years.
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