The iPod Shuffle

Here’s the latest in the area of planned obsolescence, and I’ll bet you didn’t know this when you bought your fancy new iPod. Get ready to throw it in the trash, and remember to back-up your files:

"These days, the champion of audio obsolescence is Apple," writes Giles Slade in the March/April issue of Mother Jones. The iPod is the poster child for products that are designed to be disposable. Apple limits the lifespan of iPod batteries and constantly introduces new products - an alarming fact considering that iPods are crammed with lead, mercury and other toxic materials that can end up in landfills and contaminate groundwater. Apple is hardly alone in generating toxic waste. For example, Microsoft's new memory-hogging Vista operating system will effectively render many existing PCs obsolete.

On April 9, 2007 it was announced that Apple had sold its one-hundred millionth iPod, making it the biggest selling digital music player of all time.
100,000,000 of those little bastards, all designed to be disposable. That's great. Is anybody besides me feeling used? By the way, I think it's interesting that they sell leather and Body Glove cases for those things that may actually last longer than the player itself. What is the case protecting?

And I'll bet all those "accessories" that they sell to go with the iPod - the docking speakers, the car adapters - all will last a lifetime, so you'll be stuck with all that extra junk while the iPod is dead. Then, you'll say, "Gee, I have the other stuff, I guess I'd better buy another iPod."

I guess it isn’t surprising that Apple and Microsoft have us by the shorties, and we are a willing participant in their little end-game that they call Keep Buying Stuff. We love to buy stuff and they love selling it to us, so it’s a match made in disposable Heaven. It works on the corporate level, too, because companies are under constant pressure to increase their earnings. Why bother to make a product that will last ten years when they can make something that has to be replaced every two years? You don't have to be a Wharton School grad to know that.

I see those iPods strapped to the arms of happy listeners all over the place, and I wonder how many of them know that the battery re-charge train will soon come to a halt? I hope they don’t throw it in the trash can, but I have a feeling that's where they are going to wind up ... eventually.

Long ago, I wrote about our throw-away society and how things seem to be made to be discarded. It’s a shame that we have such sophisticated technology, yet we allow these things that we work so hard to accumulate to be thrown away without a second thought. Not only does it make for bad landfill material, but it works in a subversive way at something that is irreversible.

Even though I have no children of my own (that I know of), I think about the influence that we adults are having on kids with the various silly and wasteful habits that we perform as though they were second nature, and I think it sets a bad example.

In light of recent events, I'm wishing that guns had batteries that went bad. Then, we could throw them out and replace them with something more useful.

There's something I wouldn't mind seeing in a landfill.

.