We don't make Phones, we make Money.
In 2008, Apple released the MacBook Air. It could fit inside an envelope. How cool is that. Extraordinary. An envelope. In 2008 DVDs were the way to watch movies but Apple deemed the DVD player portion on the laptop obsolete and archaic, opting to remove it from their product. So it can fit in an envelope. They made an external drive available to purchase to solve this slight inconvenience that they created in order to make way for the much larger convenience of putting your laptop in an envelope. Thank you Apple.
Planned obsolescence is the company practice of designing products to break easily to keep you purchasing (think of how white goods used to be designed to last a lifetime and now you've bought 3 new refrigerators in the last decade). In the Apple way, their phones are not designed to be used, they're designed to be bought. Apple already has the technology needed for their next 20 releases, but why make a phone that does everything now when you can make 20 phones, released a year apart, that only progressively add a new feature?
The latest iPhone this is considered obsolete currently is the iPhone 8+ (which just so happens to be the phone I wrote this on, so clearly it works perfectly fine), meaning that the new updates Apple releases are no longer applied to that phone. The iPhone 8+ was released in 2017, only 7 years ago, and in under a decade this technology has become considered useless and crude to the newest iPhones.
I believe there is something to be said on class in this discussion. It is highly unrealistic to drop upwards of ÂŁ1000 on a phone every few years. So when this expectation is set, it creates heavy class divides with the phone being a symbol of status. This is a divide created solely by the company as if we look realistically, having a phone is not a choice. In modern day society is is necessary to have a phone in order to function. Your emails, your friends, your family, events, the news, it's all online and if you want to stay in this society you need a phone. So when something so necessary in modern day life is turned into something so performative, how can everyone be expected to keep up? Somebody needs to get left behind.
Pile of phones as a visual aid (NOT MY PHOTOGRAPHY)













