But the emerging prevalence—anecdotally, at least—of the gadget death wish suggests an intriguing possibility: where electronic gizmos are concerned, product obsolescence is becoming a demand-side phenomenon.Consider that most ubiquitous gadget, the mobile phone. According to J.D. Power and Associates, the typical American gets a new one every 18 months. This is not because of some time bomb in the design that renders a phone useless over that span. ReCellular, a big recycler and reseller of mobiles, collects millions of unwanted phones every year. Joe McKeown, the company’s vice president of marketing and communications, told me that many are several years old—not because they’ve been in use all that time, but because, after being replaced, they were dumped in desk drawers and forgotten. But despite this, only 18 percent of the phones the company collects are “beyond economic repair,” and thus broken down to recyclable parts. The rest either work fine or can easily be refurbished and put right back into the marketplace. The problem, if that’s the right word for it, is that new devices perform more functions, faster—and people, as a result, want them.
This demand-side obsolescence does not extend to all products, of course. I have no death wish, for example, for the three-year-old dishwasher now in terminal condition in my kitchen. But the light-speed innovations in consumer electronics have turned many of us into serial replacers. A dealer in vintage home-entertainment equipment recently convinced me that it used to be possible to buy a top-notch stereo system that really would function admirably for decades. Imagine, by contrast, that tomorrow some company unveiled a cell phone guaranteed to last for 20 years. Who would genuinely want it? It’s not our devices that wear thin, it’s our patience with them.