Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Joathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for a text Stuff Tidbits probably gonna be how longer tidbits episodes? I just don't know how to do short ones apparently, But I wanted to talk about obsolescence. Uh. And this is because I read an article which I'll be talking about later in this episode that really got me to thinking about it in kind of a big picture way. And um, I really want to talk about the dangers of obsolescence, of of technology going obsolete. And I've done a few episodes where I've talked about these kind of things. I know, I as actor and I did a fun episode where we just talked about, you know, technology that no longer is really relevant. But this goes beyond that. I've also talked about this with in connection to the right to repair, and in case you're new to that phrase, it refers to a movement in which consumers and some organizations are really pressuring companies to open up options for the maintenance and repair of their products. That they produce so that you are not forced as a customer to either throw out something that no longer works and then replace it prematurely, or you have to jump through hoops to go through the quote unquote official channels to repair it. And we all know why companies want to build these kinds of systems that require users to go through official channels. And it's all called revenue. Um. If I make a widget and I sell my widget to you, well that's good for me, you know, but it's only good that one time, because you might your widget and then you're off on your married little way. But if I also make sure that I build the widgets in such a way that only I am able to do maintenance and repair on those widgets, well then you have no option but to bring the widget back to me when you need that kind of work done and then pay me a fee in the process. Or you have to throw away your broken widget and maybe you're gonna buy a new one from me. You know that either way, I make money. And when my widget company becomes a global conglomerate, you know, widgets around the world, I might end up creating a whole network of repair shops out there, and each one has to pay me a hefty license fee for the privilege of being allowed to work on widgets. And I then provide the correct tools and documentation so that people can do that, but only if they pay me the licensing fee. So that independent repair shop down the road that you have a good relationship with, well, they don't get access to in of those resources, or you know, they might be ill equipped to do any work on the product, or they might even be incapable of during doing work on the product because I've locked it away essentially, and they're not part of the system, so you can't go to them. So the right to repair movement essentially says it is unfair and anti competitive for companies to lock down their products so that you can't maintain and repair stuff yourself or to go to someone of your own choosing. And we're seeing that kind of story you play out across the world. Various governments are starting to pass laws to try and guarantee the right to repair. And this will also come into play with the concept of obsolescence. So when I say obsolescence, I'm thinking about a few possible pathways that essentially lead to the same destination. And the destination is that you've got a product or maybe a service that no longer is receiving support from the company that created it. Uh, the product or service might still work, but there are better or at least more supported options that are out there, and over time its performance will diminish. So in other words, maybe you've got a particular hardware gadget. The company that made that gadget has gone out of business, and so you don't have any way of getting in your replacement parts or anything. No one's making them because the company that did make them is gone now. So while it works, it's fine, but once it breaks down, you might be stuck with just a dead piece of technology. And this is a huge problem in tech in general. And it's also kind of what the tech industry is largely built upon, and that can be a really bad thing. In fact, it's kind of what you know, hype and product cycles are all built around. So I always think of back in the day when Steve Jobs was alive and he was Master of the Product presentation at Apple. You could really sense audience excitement in an Apple presentation. Even if you were just watching that presentation on streaming video. You could just sense how excited the crowd was, and Steve Jobs would come up on stage and pull out the latest iPhone or iPad or Mac or whatever and gush about how it blows the doors off all the other technologies out there, either like introducing something for the first time, like that first iPhone presentation way back in early two thousand seven, or showing how the latest model has become an incredible improvement over all past models, and everyone ends up going nuts. The crowd ate it up. And these were the same crowds who a year earlier would have gone gaga over the previous generation of those products and so on, But now it was almost like they were ready to throw their current iPhone or iPad or whatever into the garbage and rush out and buy a new one. Now I'm exaggerating a little bit, but only a little bit. So Back in two thousand fourteen, Rogerner of Recon dug through some data and discovered that about forty of smartphone owners were updating their phones every single year. Now, that's pretty incredible. Here in the United States, back when the iPhone first came out, it was pretty standard to sign two year contract agreements with providers like cell phone providers and it would lock you into that provider for two years. But as part of that you would typically typically get a really big discount on phone models, so your your phone choice was being subsidized. You weren't having to pay the full retail price for a phone, which was considered to be a pretty nice trade off because the upfront cost was so much lower. In fact, with a lot of phone plans, the phone would be part of the plan. You wouldn't be paying any extra. Now that money would be factored into your monthly ill, but that was monthly. It wasn't all up front, and it was just a different world back then. Like these days, you typically buy your phone outright and then you have it added on to whatever plan you happen to have, or maybe you even switch plans. It's a very different world. But yeah, back then, getting a new phone often meant that you were agreeing to a two year contract, and if you were upgrading every year, then it's not like you were renewing that two year agreement. Instead, you were having to pay the upfront cost of the smartphone and keep it on the plan that you already had, or you were gonna have to pay extra and cancel a plan. So it was pretty remarkable that still for people of smartphone owners were actually going through that process here in the US, because I mean it was not it was it was a considerable investment. Now that churn rate forty percent of the owners upgrading every year. That was great for Apple, It was tough on consumers, and it was terrible for the environ It still is. But it showed that the consuming public was a willing participant in this acceleration of obsolescence. And I'm not even getting into the concept of planned obsolescence. That's when a company creates a product or service where the company already anticipates when it will stop supporting that service or when it will replace it. Um. And that means that we already know from the get go that this thing that's going out has a limited lifespan, and after that it's kind of buyer beware. Um, I'm not even talking about that. Or you know technology that's only designed to last a couple of years and then breaks down so you are forced to replace it. That's another element of obsolescence, but I've covered it before. Uh, but yeah, that also plays a role in this. But let's think about the consequences that follow from this trend of needing to replace technology so frequent a and how those consequences can play out. Now, I mentioned environmental impact that actually is really huge. The whole supply chain, from start to finish, has a massive environmental impact, and it's rarely a good one. For example, let's look at the very beginning of the supply chain. So a lot of tech that we have requires stuff that uses what we call rare earth metals. Rare earth metals consist of a group of seventeen elements. Fifteen of them are lanthanide elements. The two others are not lanthanides, but they're frequently found in the same ores as the other lanthanides are, and as rare earth metals implies, all seventeen of the elements are classified as metals, and unlike metals like iron, these elements don't appear as visible lumps and or you're not going to find a vein of these lanthanides. They're actually not that rare um not in the grand scheme of things. Most of them are far more abundant in the Earth's crust than say, gold is. However, most of the time they're found in such low concentrations that mining them would cost more than what you would get out of what you mind, so you would be losing money on the process. So it's not that there isn't a lot of these rare earth metals out there, but that it takes a lot of effort to get enough of them efficiently to make a profit. Now, these metals are embedded in minerals and rocks, so you have to take several steps to get at the metals. One way you could do this is you could just you know, dig up a massive pit and you use explosives to break up rocks, and you shovel up all the broken pieces, and you put these pieces through a process in which you crush the rocks down and use chemicals to separate the metals from the minerals, and then you skim the metals away and you use those and you're left with a lot of waste rock and chemical mixtures that you have to dispose of properly, and all of that just to get it that low concentration of those rare earth metals, and we need a lot of those. Not just for the tech industry though, that is one that has a very high demand for these rare earth metals. But they're used in stuff like batteries, for example, and as we shift more towards depending upon stuff like electric motors to power our vehicles, the demand for rare earth metals is going to continue to rise dramatically. They're also really important for renewable energy systems like wind turbines, which is kind of ironic when you think of the potential environmental impact of mining. But we also use them for stuff like catalysts to facilitate certain chemical processes, or phosphors to illuminate stuff like screens, or use them to polish glass in order to produce high performing optics. Militaries around the world depend up on rare earth metals is a critical component in high tech military gear, everything from GPS equipment to guided missiles. So we need a lot of this stuff. And like I said, while there's plenty of it on Earth, it isn't always found in high concentrations. So this leads us to the really ugly part of that situation. I'll talk about that after we come back from this break. Okay, to have a mining operation that's large enough to get sufficient amounts of rare earth metals, and yet the operation has to be cheap enough so that it can be profitable. Certain conditions need to be present, and one of those typically is a general disregard for the environment. Putting environmental protections in place, you know, taking care not to cause damage, and addressing problems as they arise. All of that is expensive and time consuming, and if your profit depends on keeping costs down, you're probably not going to pay that much attention to environmental concerns. So that means a lot of rare earth metal mining operations are taking place in regions where there are lacks or no environmental protections in place. Some places would forego pretty much even the most basic environmental protections and would just start pumping stuff like ammonium chloride and ammonium sulfate directly into the earth, all in an effort to separate rare earth metals from the rest of the soil and rock in there. This was a pretty common practice in China. For example, the chemical waste can be environmentally hazardous. In China, it wasn't unusual to simply build wastewater pools to hold the runoff. They were kind of like massive above ground pools literally, and they would just hold the wastewater and these pools frequently had little to no protection around them, meaning that if something were to disturb the pools, the wastewater could potentially contaminate the local area. Some of the waste materials are not just toxic, but somewhat radioactive, which creates additional concerns. And I'm mostly using the past tense here because in recent years, China has started to address this issue, working toward new ways to mind rare earth metals that are more environmentally responsible. But for a couple of decades that just wasn't the case. And now there are regions in China where the locals are having to tackle monumental cleanup jobs that could take as long as a century to complete. Then, on top of the environmental concerns, we have human rights concerns. In places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mining operations are sometimes run by violent militias which sometimes rely on forced labor to operate, the mind so slavery essentially. While China is the main source for many rare earth metals, some of them do also come out of Africa and so are heavy dependence upon the materials helps support violent groups and human suffering, and that makes that obsolescence problem all the more critical, right. I mean, it's grim enough that we're having to deal with the consequences of our technological needs this way, but then to add with it this cycle in which we're encouraged to replace our tech frequently and make the problem worse. It exacerbates everything. It's it's pretty gruesome when you think about it. And then on top of that, for another environmental issue, what do you do with the old tech, the stuff that went obsolete if you can't repair it, which is you know, part of the issue. If you're not able to repair it, or even if you did repair it, but it couldn't keep up with what you needed to do because everything else has advanced beyond the capabilities of the hardware. What do you do with the hardware? The ideally you would send it to a place where it could be recycled or the materials inside it could be reclaimed and then used in other materials other products down the line. But a lot of it just ends up going to landfills. And that's awful, especially when you consider that a lot of the stuff that goes into our tech is potentially you know, it is toxic and could potentially contaminate the environment if it leaches out of the hardware. So again, this obsolescence issue is feeding into the environmental crisis. And of course there are other things we should have to think about two and these aren't quite as global a concern like They're not like I would argue, environmental impact that almost gets to existential levels of crisis. Human rights violations also obviously incredibly important. But there are some other things that we have to remember as well. There aren't that critical in that same scale, but are still important. For example, there's the burden that companies carry when they go all in on a certain system. This is how we get what we call legacy systems. So let's use a hypothetical picture to understand this, all right, So we've got this business um, and this business company does business e stuff in the business world in the nineteen sixties, and the company decides to purchase a brand new computer system in order to run certain critical operations. That's going to free up people so that they only have to work an hour a day, at least, that's what we all believe back in the day. It turns out that work will fill up all the available hours, even if we offload some of the workload to machines. Anyway, the company's processes lean very heavily on this new technology. Some of it's automated. All these different special proprietary programs have been written, and these very key functions are moved onto this machine. Now, meanwhile, the company grows and expands, It adds to its services, it invests in new systems, but in an effort to be as efficient as possible the but it continues to rely on this older computer system to run that certain group of mission critical processes because building a comparable new system to handle those tasks and then migrating everything over to the new system would be costly and time consuming. So time goes on. Now we're at a point where modern systems aren't compatible with the older one at all, but we still need to run those those old processes. They're still part of our business. We might even be at a point where no one on staff really has the knowledge that the company had relied upon in the past. So building a new version of the old system is even harder because no one remembers how the old one was built. Right, You have this loss of knowledge over time. This does happen in companies, so then the company continues to try and support the old computer system, now an ancient computer system that's running this original process because those processes are still important to the business, and the company really has to scramble whenever the old computer system breaks down. And all things breakdown over time, gosh darn it entropy, so this is not easy. By now, the company that produced the original computer system might be out of business, or maybe it is in business, but it's long stop supporting that piece of equipment, so you have no one to turn to when things go wrong in that case. Now, this happens all the time, particularly for companies that have to build out really customized systems to handle stuff that might be unique to that one company. So every time they upgrade their processes or their systems, management has to decide whether or not they should invest even more money to migrate stuff off of old platforms or just to keep relying on the old ones. And sometimes the idea of migration really feels like you're reinventing the wheel. So it kind of is hard to go to different stakeholders in the company and say, hey, guys, I know we've already done this, but we kind of need to do it again in on this new system so that we can operate with fewer risks, and invariably someone's going to say, well, what's wrong with the old one? Now? The same thing holds true for tons of individual consumers to One of the things that always blows my mind is when I look at the market share for various versions of the Windows operating system. Now, I know I'm talking about software in this case rather than hardware, but software does relate back to hardware because one of the issues is as operating systems get more complex, they require more advanced hardware to run. That means if you are stuck with an older computer, right you can't afford to buy a new one, maybe you don't have access to a new one. You could be in a part of the world where you have an old computer and that's that's as good as it's going to be for you. Well, you have no real access to newer operating systems because your hardware isn't capable of running them, so you're stuck on the older models. I decided I wanted to look at the distribution of current Windows market share on desktop computers. So more than eight of those computers are still using Windows ten. I should remind you that's not the latest version of Windows, but it is by far the most popular version out there. However, point four nine per cent of desktop systems are still using Windows XP. Now, I know point for nine is tiny, it's literally less than half a percentage point, but keep in mind Windows XP first came out in two thousand one, more than twenty years ago, and Microsoft ended all support for the operating system back in. That means there have been no patches, no updates for about eight years, and there are a whole bunch of reasons why that means sticking with Windows XP is a bad thing. Interestingly, there's still more folks using Windows XP then there are using Windows Vista. Windows Vista accounts for just point one nine of all desktop Windows machines, and Vista came out in two thousand seven. It was actually meant to be the successor to Windows XP. So you see how that went. All right, I'm gonna be ranting a little bit longer, but actually probably get a drink, so we're gonna take another quick break. Okay, before the break, my point was that people rely on computers running on Windows XP no longer have support for that operating system. Microsoft does not support it anymore, and any vulnerabilities in the operating system are going to stay there no matter what. There's no hope of the security patch. Now, you could argue that because the market share is so low that so relatively so few people are actually using Windows XP, no one would really bother to try and exploit a vulnerability that's there anyway, because the target population would be too small to make it worth your while. In other words, you could create malware, but you would be hitting so few people. What would be the point that? That is a an argument security through obscurity, But when companies in support, it means folks can be left without options. And I want to be clear, I am not saying that companies are obligated to continue to provide support, and definitely that would be unreasonable and frankly impossible unless we all just collectively said, yeah, we're good, we don't we don't need things to be any better than how they are right now. And you know that doesn't sound likely. So it's more that I just want folks to be aware of these consequences, that these things happen, and to plan for that, to take that into account. So let's relate this back to that right to repair movement. So another reason it's so in hordnant to have the right to repair is because companies can and do in support for certain products, whether they are hardware or software. Sometimes the company does this by choice because they want to focus on newer products. Sometimes it's by necessity because the company might just go out of business so there's no one left to provide support. But then, what happens if you depend upon that company's older product. What if that's critical to your business. Well, for small stuff, it could be an annoyance, right, maybe a tiny hardship for you to go out and find a replacement. But let's think about bigger things, like massive pieces of equipment or more critically, medical gear. So first let's talk about heavy equipment. So some of the most passionate folks in the right to repair movement are farmers. They want the ability to do maintenance and repair on farming equipment, which they rely upon for their livelihoods and which, due to heavy use, can frequently require maintenance and repair by companies like John Deere have essentially locked away the ability to make those kinds of repairs so that you can only do them if you have the access and tools to do them, and John Dear reserves that access to licensed repair shops and dealerships. That means if you are a farmer and your equipment breaks down, you can't fix it yourself. You have to take that to one of these licensed entities to get work done. You probably won't have many options in certain regions, which also means you're going to get locked into whatever the price to repair the thing is right at that place. You can't shop around. In the words, you can't say, oh, well, this repair shop gave me a quote of X thousand dollars, let me go ask this other one. You might not have those options. So it's the very definition of anti competitiveness. But what if John Deer were to go out of business entirely. Now, that's not likely to happen, but let's assume that it did for some reason. If the equipment is all locked down with proprietary systems, and if there's no way to increase access to those systems, then that equipment is obsolete. That doesn't mean the equipment is just going to spontaneously stop working, but does mean it's living on borrowed time. If a formerly licensed repair shop goes out of business in a region, that could mean that the farmers in that area have no local options when it comes to maintenance and repair, which would put additional hardships on the farmers. So you can see how obsolescence paired with a proprietary approach to repair can be really harmful. Now, the whole reason I decided to dedicate an episode to this is I read a very upsetting piece in the I E E E Spectrum and it's titled their Bionic Eyes are Now Obsolete and Unsupported, which like science fiction, but it is science fact. The piece covers the story of how a company called Second Site Medical Products developed retinal implant systems that could restore some site actually not even really restore, but provide digital vision to visually impaired and blind people. It is not ultra high definition resolution images or anything like that, but it would provide some visual capabilities to people who otherwise would be living without them. And by some I mean there were a couple of different models. The first one had sixteen pixels a vision. So imagine that your vision consists of sixteen blocks, and those blocks can either be white, gray, or black. That's kind of what people were experiencing. UH. The follow up to that had sixty pixels, so a better resolution, nothing close to what we experience with typical human site, but ill better than nothing, in fact, significantly better than nothing if you're using it to help navigate your environment, avoid obstacles, that sort of stuff. But in this company, Second Site was teetering towards bankruptcy and ended support for its Argus line of retinal implants, which meant that if a recipient's implant began to fail, there was no way. There's no support, there's no support to address a failure, the recipient would become technologically blind. And again, the implants did not just all spontaneously fail once the company got into trouble, but as problems would come up for a person, that person found they had few options available to them. Here's another example. Because of the elements in these implants, you couldn't go and get an m r I done because mr I uses very powerful magnetic fields and elements in the implants could end up being damaged. It could end up damaging the patient, it could damage the m r I equipment. So before you ever got an MRI I done, you were supposed to contact the company and talk with them about this possibility, but with the company in financial turmoil and ending support, there was no answer on the other end of the line. So it wasn't just that the technology was failing, but that when other things were cropping up, like health issues, there was no way to chat with the company and work out an approach. So it gave very few options available to the people who had received one of these retinal implants. They could have the implant surgically removed, but that process is obviously an invasive process. It's expensive and potentially quite painful. Typically, these implant surgeries are done under local and esthetic, not like general So for many of us, when our tech goes obsolete, it creates an inconvenience. You know, it could be a significant in inconveni It's depending on how far in you were. Like if you were one of the people who bought an HD DVD player and bought an entire library of HD DVDs, thinking this is the future of video. When HD DVD went under, you're probably a little frustrated that you were stuck with this library. It was never going to expand beyond what you had, and if your player breaks down, it's kind of game over. But when we're talking about medical technology, this goes well beyond that. It becomes a real impact on quality of life or perhaps even the ability to live. It can be a life or death matter, depending upon the technology. Second Site, by the way, held a public offering in one This was essentially an effort to raise more funds and to pursue the development of a new brain implant system called Orion, which is that the company has a very limited kind of pilot program where they have the Orion system. Now, the Orion is not a retinal implant, it's a brain implant. It's also meant to provide artificial vision to recipients, so it is a vision system, but it involves a brain implant. So if you think a retinal implant is a risky thing to remove, imagine having a brain implant where you've had something surgically implanted into your brain and the company responsible for the technology is potentially going out of business. That is terrifying. So for the six people who received the Ryan implant so far, one has already chosen to have it surgically removed, which could not have been an easy decision. Second Site, the company continued to struggle. The initial share price of Second Site when it had its public offering was five dollars per share, but in February, like this month, the price had fallen down to a dollar fifty per share. The founders pretty much all left, like all the leadership had stepped down, almost all the employees were laid off, almost all the equipment had sold off at auction. And now what remains of Second Sight is merging with a company called Nano Precision Medical. And there's still a lot of unanswered questions regarding the Argus and Orion products. So the question like, is the merged company going to restore support for the argus retinal implants. I don't know the answer to that, although I feel like there's an ethical obligation to do so. But again, we're not talking about whether or not your smartphone can support you know, the latest OS here, we're talking about actual vision. The Second Site story also reminds us of the importance of standardization. There are other companies out there in the biomedical space. They're creating text that can provide digital vision to the blind, but it's not as simple as someone with a failing argus to retinal implant going to a competing biotech company and getting a tune up. Right, They can't just swap out parts. These are all proprietary approaches, sometimes fundamentally different approaches to try and get the similar result. And I feel the second site story really illustrates the risks involved in adopting a technology. Now, if the payoff for that technology is significant enough, like if we're talking about a return of vision, you can convincingly argue to me that the risk is worth it. Right, that risking the possibility that the company that creates the tech could go under and you are left with technology that has a limited lifespan that might still be worth it to you. I think that has to come down to the individual. But I feel that this does help us frame what we should be thinking about when we evaluate any company's products. And the more critical the product is, the more closely we should look at the company, and it behooves us to ask really tough questions like what happens if that company should go out of business. We're looking at all these companies talking about the metaverse right now, with some of them offering up virtual real estate in virtual environments, Well, one of the questions I ask is how likely are those environments to survive long enough for whatever the metaverse ends up being to really be a real thing, you know, not just bits and pieces Star Citizens style, but an actual, full, cohesive and coherent thing or many things in the case of multiple metaverses or whatever. If you don't feel like that one company is going to last the test of time, it makes no sense to buy virtual real estate that the company is providing, because those servers may just not even be on by the time there's anything useful to do in the metaverse. So that's something that I'm seeing right now, Like that's a Those are questions that I think a lot of people need to be asking themselves before they start getting into this virtual gold rush of the met to verse and web three and all that stuff. So, yeah, this episode covered a lot of ground, but it really all comes back to taking that big picture look when it comes to our relationship with technology. I feel it's our responsibility to to do that every now and then to step back and to understand what our love of tech means not just to ourselves, but to each other and to our environment and two people in other parts of the world. We need to be aware and understand that so that we make decisions that make sense and we're not just buying the next new shiny thing because it's newer and shinier than the stuff we already have, and maybe taking a little more care when it comes to adopting text so we can make the price we pay actually worth it. Right. What if you go out and spend a couple of thousand dollars investing into technology and the whole thing goes could put It's not just that you lost a couple of thousand dollars, which is already a big deal, but all those other prices that are paid throughout the supply chain, the environmental price, all these things like that's part of it too. And that's why I think it's good to take this critical thinking and compassionate approach to approaching tech. Uh. And you know, I'm someone who uses a lot of tech myself. I've got a smartphone, I've got a couple of different computers, I've got a television, and you know, various components connected to it. So I am I am part of the system too. I'm not saying this is some sort of techno hermit who has decided to stand away from any technology whatsoever. I'm just trying to make it more of my process to take these sort of things into full consideration before I jump in on stuff. I feel like it's the responsible thing to do as a consumer. All Right, that's it for this episode. I'm gonna jump down off the soapbox. It's feeling like it's a little tall for me. And if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Joathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for a text Stuff Tidbits probably gonna be how longer tidbits episodes? I just don't know how to do short ones apparently, But I wanted to talk about obsolescence. Uh. And this is because I read an article which I'll be talking about later in this episode that really got me to thinking about it in kind of a big picture way. And um, I really want to talk about the dangers of obsolescence, of of technology going obsolete. And I've done a few episodes where I've talked about these kind of things. I know, I as actor and I did a fun episode where we just talked about, you know, technology that no longer is really relevant. But this goes beyond that. I've also talked about this with in connection to the right to repair, and in case you're new to that phrase, it refers to a movement in which consumers and some organizations are really pressuring companies to open up options for the maintenance and repair of their products. That they produce so that you are not forced as a customer to either throw out something that no longer works and then replace it prematurely, or you have to jump through hoops to go through the quote unquote official channels to repair it. And we all know why companies want to build these kinds of systems that require users to go through official channels. And it's all called revenue. Um. If I make a widget and I sell my widget to you, well that's good for me, you know, but it's only good that one time, because you might your widget and then you're off on your married little way. But if I also make sure that I build the widgets in such a way that only I am able to do maintenance and repair on those widgets, well then you have no option but to bring the widget back to me when you need that kind of work done and then pay me a fee in the process. Or you have to throw away your broken widget and maybe you're gonna buy a new one from me. You know that either way, I make money. And when my widget company becomes a global conglomerate, you know, widgets around the world, I might end up creating a whole network of repair shops out there, and each one has to pay me a hefty license fee for the privilege of being allowed to work on widgets. And I then provide the correct tools and documentation so that people can do that, but only if they pay me the licensing fee. So that independent repair shop down the road that you have a good relationship with, well, they don't get access to in of those resources, or you know, they might be ill equipped to do any work on the product, or they might even be incapable of during doing work on the product because I've locked it away essentially, and they're not part of the system, so you can't go to them. So the right to repair movement essentially says it is unfair and anti competitive for companies to lock down their products so that you can't maintain and repair stuff yourself or to go to someone of your own choosing. And we're seeing that kind of story you play out across the world. Various governments are starting to pass laws to try and guarantee the right to repair. And this will also come into play with the concept of obsolescence. So when I say obsolescence, I'm thinking about a few possible pathways that essentially lead to the same destination. And the destination is that you've got a product or maybe a service that no longer is receiving support from the company that created it. Uh, the product or service might still work, but there are better or at least more supported options that are out there, and over time its performance will diminish. So in other words, maybe you've got a particular hardware gadget. The company that made that gadget has gone out of business, and so you don't have any way of getting in your replacement parts or anything. No one's making them because the company that did make them is gone now. So while it works, it's fine, but once it breaks down, you might be stuck with just a dead piece of technology. And this is a huge problem in tech in general. And it's also kind of what the tech industry is largely built upon, and that can be a really bad thing. In fact, it's kind of what you know, hype and product cycles are all built around. So I always think of back in the day when Steve Jobs was alive and he was Master of the Product presentation at Apple. You could really sense audience excitement in an Apple presentation. Even if you were just watching that presentation on streaming video. You could just sense how excited the crowd was, and Steve Jobs would come up on stage and pull out the latest iPhone or iPad or Mac or whatever and gush about how it blows the doors off all the other technologies out there, either like introducing something for the first time, like that first iPhone presentation way back in early two thousand seven, or showing how the latest model has become an incredible improvement over all past models, and everyone ends up going nuts. The crowd ate it up. And these were the same crowds who a year earlier would have gone gaga over the previous generation of those products and so on, But now it was almost like they were ready to throw their current iPhone or iPad or whatever into the garbage and rush out and buy a new one. Now I'm exaggerating a little bit, but only a little bit. So Back in two thousand fourteen, Rogerner of Recon dug through some data and discovered that about forty of smartphone owners were updating their phones every single year. Now, that's pretty incredible. Here in the United States, back when the iPhone first came out, it was pretty standard to sign two year contract agreements with providers like cell phone providers and it would lock you into that provider for two years. But as part of that you would typically typically get a really big discount on phone models, so your your phone choice was being subsidized. You weren't having to pay the full retail price for a phone, which was considered to be a pretty nice trade off because the upfront cost was so much lower. In fact, with a lot of phone plans, the phone would be part of the plan. You wouldn't be paying any extra. Now that money would be factored into your monthly ill, but that was monthly. It wasn't all up front, and it was just a different world back then. Like these days, you typically buy your phone outright and then you have it added on to whatever plan you happen to have, or maybe you even switch plans. It's a very different world. But yeah, back then, getting a new phone often meant that you were agreeing to a two year contract, and if you were upgrading every year, then it's not like you were renewing that two year agreement. Instead, you were having to pay the upfront cost of the smartphone and keep it on the plan that you already had, or you were gonna have to pay extra and cancel a plan. So it was pretty remarkable that still for people of smartphone owners were actually going through that process here in the US, because I mean it was not it was it was a considerable investment. Now that churn rate forty percent of the owners upgrading every year. That was great for Apple, It was tough on consumers, and it was terrible for the environ It still is. But it showed that the consuming public was a willing participant in this acceleration of obsolescence. And I'm not even getting into the concept of planned obsolescence. That's when a company creates a product or service where the company already anticipates when it will stop supporting that service or when it will replace it. Um. And that means that we already know from the get go that this thing that's going out has a limited lifespan, and after that it's kind of buyer beware. Um, I'm not even talking about that. Or you know technology that's only designed to last a couple of years and then breaks down so you are forced to replace it. That's another element of obsolescence, but I've covered it before. Uh, but yeah, that also plays a role in this. But let's think about the consequences that follow from this trend of needing to replace technology so frequent a and how those consequences can play out. Now, I mentioned environmental impact that actually is really huge. The whole supply chain, from start to finish, has a massive environmental impact, and it's rarely a good one. For example, let's look at the very beginning of the supply chain. So a lot of tech that we have requires stuff that uses what we call rare earth metals. Rare earth metals consist of a group of seventeen elements. Fifteen of them are lanthanide elements. The two others are not lanthanides, but they're frequently found in the same ores as the other lanthanides are, and as rare earth metals implies, all seventeen of the elements are classified as metals, and unlike metals like iron, these elements don't appear as visible lumps and or you're not going to find a vein of these lanthanides. They're actually not that rare um not in the grand scheme of things. Most of them are far more abundant in the Earth's crust than say, gold is. However, most of the time they're found in such low concentrations that mining them would cost more than what you would get out of what you mind, so you would be losing money on the process. So it's not that there isn't a lot of these rare earth metals out there, but that it takes a lot of effort to get enough of them efficiently to make a profit. Now, these metals are embedded in minerals and rocks, so you have to take several steps to get at the metals. One way you could do this is you could just you know, dig up a massive pit and you use explosives to break up rocks, and you shovel up all the broken pieces, and you put these pieces through a process in which you crush the rocks down and use chemicals to separate the metals from the minerals, and then you skim the metals away and you use those and you're left with a lot of waste rock and chemical mixtures that you have to dispose of properly, and all of that just to get it that low concentration of those rare earth metals, and we need a lot of those. Not just for the tech industry though, that is one that has a very high demand for these rare earth metals. But they're used in stuff like batteries, for example, and as we shift more towards depending upon stuff like electric motors to power our vehicles, the demand for rare earth metals is going to continue to rise dramatically. They're also really important for renewable energy systems like wind turbines, which is kind of ironic when you think of the potential environmental impact of mining. But we also use them for stuff like catalysts to facilitate certain chemical processes, or phosphors to illuminate stuff like screens, or use them to polish glass in order to produce high performing optics. Militaries around the world depend up on rare earth metals is a critical component in high tech military gear, everything from GPS equipment to guided missiles. So we need a lot of this stuff. And like I said, while there's plenty of it on Earth, it isn't always found in high concentrations. So this leads us to the really ugly part of that situation. I'll talk about that after we come back from this break. Okay, to have a mining operation that's large enough to get sufficient amounts of rare earth metals, and yet the operation has to be cheap enough so that it can be profitable. Certain conditions need to be present, and one of those typically is a general disregard for the environment. Putting environmental protections in place, you know, taking care not to cause damage, and addressing problems as they arise. All of that is expensive and time consuming, and if your profit depends on keeping costs down, you're probably not going to pay that much attention to environmental concerns. So that means a lot of rare earth metal mining operations are taking place in regions where there are lacks or no environmental protections in place. Some places would forego pretty much even the most basic environmental protections and would just start pumping stuff like ammonium chloride and ammonium sulfate directly into the earth, all in an effort to separate rare earth metals from the rest of the soil and rock in there. This was a pretty common practice in China. For example, the chemical waste can be environmentally hazardous. In China, it wasn't unusual to simply build wastewater pools to hold the runoff. They were kind of like massive above ground pools literally, and they would just hold the wastewater and these pools frequently had little to no protection around them, meaning that if something were to disturb the pools, the wastewater could potentially contaminate the local area. Some of the waste materials are not just toxic, but somewhat radioactive, which creates additional concerns. And I'm mostly using the past tense here because in recent years, China has started to address this issue, working toward new ways to mind rare earth metals that are more environmentally responsible. But for a couple of decades that just wasn't the case. And now there are regions in China where the locals are having to tackle monumental cleanup jobs that could take as long as a century to complete. Then, on top of the environmental concerns, we have human rights concerns. In places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mining operations are sometimes run by violent militias which sometimes rely on forced labor to operate, the mind so slavery essentially. While China is the main source for many rare earth metals, some of them do also come out of Africa and so are heavy dependence upon the materials helps support violent groups and human suffering, and that makes that obsolescence problem all the more critical, right. I mean, it's grim enough that we're having to deal with the consequences of our technological needs this way, but then to add with it this cycle in which we're encouraged to replace our tech frequently and make the problem worse. It exacerbates everything. It's it's pretty gruesome when you think about it. And then on top of that, for another environmental issue, what do you do with the old tech, the stuff that went obsolete if you can't repair it, which is you know, part of the issue. If you're not able to repair it, or even if you did repair it, but it couldn't keep up with what you needed to do because everything else has advanced beyond the capabilities of the hardware. What do you do with the hardware? The ideally you would send it to a place where it could be recycled or the materials inside it could be reclaimed and then used in other materials other products down the line. But a lot of it just ends up going to landfills. And that's awful, especially when you consider that a lot of the stuff that goes into our tech is potentially you know, it is toxic and could potentially contaminate the environment if it leaches out of the hardware. So again, this obsolescence issue is feeding into the environmental crisis. And of course there are other things we should have to think about two and these aren't quite as global a concern like They're not like I would argue, environmental impact that almost gets to existential levels of crisis. Human rights violations also obviously incredibly important. But there are some other things that we have to remember as well. There aren't that critical in that same scale, but are still important. For example, there's the burden that companies carry when they go all in on a certain system. This is how we get what we call legacy systems. So let's use a hypothetical picture to understand this, all right, So we've got this business um, and this business company does business e stuff in the business world in the nineteen sixties, and the company decides to purchase a brand new computer system in order to run certain critical operations. That's going to free up people so that they only have to work an hour a day, at least, that's what we all believe back in the day. It turns out that work will fill up all the available hours, even if we offload some of the workload to machines. Anyway, the company's processes lean very heavily on this new technology. Some of it's automated. All these different special proprietary programs have been written, and these very key functions are moved onto this machine. Now, meanwhile, the company grows and expands, It adds to its services, it invests in new systems, but in an effort to be as efficient as possible the but it continues to rely on this older computer system to run that certain group of mission critical processes because building a comparable new system to handle those tasks and then migrating everything over to the new system would be costly and time consuming. So time goes on. Now we're at a point where modern systems aren't compatible with the older one at all, but we still need to run those those old processes. They're still part of our business. We might even be at a point where no one on staff really has the knowledge that the company had relied upon in the past. So building a new version of the old system is even harder because no one remembers how the old one was built. Right, You have this loss of knowledge over time. This does happen in companies, so then the company continues to try and support the old computer system, now an ancient computer system that's running this original process because those processes are still important to the business, and the company really has to scramble whenever the old computer system breaks down. And all things breakdown over time, gosh darn it entropy, so this is not easy. By now, the company that produced the original computer system might be out of business, or maybe it is in business, but it's long stop supporting that piece of equipment, so you have no one to turn to when things go wrong in that case. Now, this happens all the time, particularly for companies that have to build out really customized systems to handle stuff that might be unique to that one company. So every time they upgrade their processes or their systems, management has to decide whether or not they should invest even more money to migrate stuff off of old platforms or just to keep relying on the old ones. And sometimes the idea of migration really feels like you're reinventing the wheel. So it kind of is hard to go to different stakeholders in the company and say, hey, guys, I know we've already done this, but we kind of need to do it again in on this new system so that we can operate with fewer risks, and invariably someone's going to say, well, what's wrong with the old one? Now? The same thing holds true for tons of individual consumers to One of the things that always blows my mind is when I look at the market share for various versions of the Windows operating system. Now, I know I'm talking about software in this case rather than hardware, but software does relate back to hardware because one of the issues is as operating systems get more complex, they require more advanced hardware to run. That means if you are stuck with an older computer, right you can't afford to buy a new one, maybe you don't have access to a new one. You could be in a part of the world where you have an old computer and that's that's as good as it's going to be for you. Well, you have no real access to newer operating systems because your hardware isn't capable of running them, so you're stuck on the older models. I decided I wanted to look at the distribution of current Windows market share on desktop computers. So more than eight of those computers are still using Windows ten. I should remind you that's not the latest version of Windows, but it is by far the most popular version out there. However, point four nine per cent of desktop systems are still using Windows XP. Now, I know point for nine is tiny, it's literally less than half a percentage point, but keep in mind Windows XP first came out in two thousand one, more than twenty years ago, and Microsoft ended all support for the operating system back in. That means there have been no patches, no updates for about eight years, and there are a whole bunch of reasons why that means sticking with Windows XP is a bad thing. Interestingly, there's still more folks using Windows XP then there are using Windows Vista. Windows Vista accounts for just point one nine of all desktop Windows machines, and Vista came out in two thousand seven. It was actually meant to be the successor to Windows XP. So you see how that went. All right, I'm gonna be ranting a little bit longer, but actually probably get a drink, so we're gonna take another quick break. Okay, before the break, my point was that people rely on computers running on Windows XP no longer have support for that operating system. Microsoft does not support it anymore, and any vulnerabilities in the operating system are going to stay there no matter what. There's no hope of the security patch. Now, you could argue that because the market share is so low that so relatively so few people are actually using Windows XP, no one would really bother to try and exploit a vulnerability that's there anyway, because the target population would be too small to make it worth your while. In other words, you could create malware, but you would be hitting so few people. What would be the point that? That is a an argument security through obscurity, But when companies in support, it means folks can be left without options. And I want to be clear, I am not saying that companies are obligated to continue to provide support, and definitely that would be unreasonable and frankly impossible unless we all just collectively said, yeah, we're good, we don't we don't need things to be any better than how they are right now. And you know that doesn't sound likely. So it's more that I just want folks to be aware of these consequences, that these things happen, and to plan for that, to take that into account. So let's relate this back to that right to repair movement. So another reason it's so in hordnant to have the right to repair is because companies can and do in support for certain products, whether they are hardware or software. Sometimes the company does this by choice because they want to focus on newer products. Sometimes it's by necessity because the company might just go out of business so there's no one left to provide support. But then, what happens if you depend upon that company's older product. What if that's critical to your business. Well, for small stuff, it could be an annoyance, right, maybe a tiny hardship for you to go out and find a replacement. But let's think about bigger things, like massive pieces of equipment or more critically, medical gear. So first let's talk about heavy equipment. So some of the most passionate folks in the right to repair movement are farmers. They want the ability to do maintenance and repair on farming equipment, which they rely upon for their livelihoods and which, due to heavy use, can frequently require maintenance and repair by companies like John Deere have essentially locked away the ability to make those kinds of repairs so that you can only do them if you have the access and tools to do them, and John Dear reserves that access to licensed repair shops and dealerships. That means if you are a farmer and your equipment breaks down, you can't fix it yourself. You have to take that to one of these licensed entities to get work done. You probably won't have many options in certain regions, which also means you're going to get locked into whatever the price to repair the thing is right at that place. You can't shop around. In the words, you can't say, oh, well, this repair shop gave me a quote of X thousand dollars, let me go ask this other one. You might not have those options. So it's the very definition of anti competitiveness. But what if John Deer were to go out of business entirely. Now, that's not likely to happen, but let's assume that it did for some reason. If the equipment is all locked down with proprietary systems, and if there's no way to increase access to those systems, then that equipment is obsolete. That doesn't mean the equipment is just going to spontaneously stop working, but does mean it's living on borrowed time. If a formerly licensed repair shop goes out of business in a region, that could mean that the farmers in that area have no local options when it comes to maintenance and repair, which would put additional hardships on the farmers. So you can see how obsolescence paired with a proprietary approach to repair can be really harmful. Now, the whole reason I decided to dedicate an episode to this is I read a very upsetting piece in the I E E E Spectrum and it's titled their Bionic Eyes are Now Obsolete and Unsupported, which like science fiction, but it is science fact. The piece covers the story of how a company called Second Site Medical Products developed retinal implant systems that could restore some site actually not even really restore, but provide digital vision to visually impaired and blind people. It is not ultra high definition resolution images or anything like that, but it would provide some visual capabilities to people who otherwise would be living without them. And by some I mean there were a couple of different models. The first one had sixteen pixels a vision. So imagine that your vision consists of sixteen blocks, and those blocks can either be white, gray, or black. That's kind of what people were experiencing. UH. The follow up to that had sixty pixels, so a better resolution, nothing close to what we experience with typical human site, but ill better than nothing, in fact, significantly better than nothing if you're using it to help navigate your environment, avoid obstacles, that sort of stuff. But in this company, Second Site was teetering towards bankruptcy and ended support for its Argus line of retinal implants, which meant that if a recipient's implant began to fail, there was no way. There's no support, there's no support to address a failure, the recipient would become technologically blind. And again, the implants did not just all spontaneously fail once the company got into trouble, but as problems would come up for a person, that person found they had few options available to them. Here's another example. Because of the elements in these implants, you couldn't go and get an m r I done because mr I uses very powerful magnetic fields and elements in the implants could end up being damaged. It could end up damaging the patient, it could damage the m r I equipment. So before you ever got an MRI I done, you were supposed to contact the company and talk with them about this possibility, but with the company in financial turmoil and ending support, there was no answer on the other end of the line. So it wasn't just that the technology was failing, but that when other things were cropping up, like health issues, there was no way to chat with the company and work out an approach. So it gave very few options available to the people who had received one of these retinal implants. They could have the implant surgically removed, but that process is obviously an invasive process. It's expensive and potentially quite painful. Typically, these implant surgeries are done under local and esthetic, not like general So for many of us, when our tech goes obsolete, it creates an inconvenience. You know, it could be a significant in inconveni It's depending on how far in you were. Like if you were one of the people who bought an HD DVD player and bought an entire library of HD DVDs, thinking this is the future of video. When HD DVD went under, you're probably a little frustrated that you were stuck with this library. It was never going to expand beyond what you had, and if your player breaks down, it's kind of game over. But when we're talking about medical technology, this goes well beyond that. It becomes a real impact on quality of life or perhaps even the ability to live. It can be a life or death matter, depending upon the technology. Second Site, by the way, held a public offering in one This was essentially an effort to raise more funds and to pursue the development of a new brain implant system called Orion, which is that the company has a very limited kind of pilot program where they have the Orion system. Now, the Orion is not a retinal implant, it's a brain implant. It's also meant to provide artificial vision to recipients, so it is a vision system, but it involves a brain implant. So if you think a retinal implant is a risky thing to remove, imagine having a brain implant where you've had something surgically implanted into your brain and the company responsible for the technology is potentially going out of business. That is terrifying. So for the six people who received the Ryan implant so far, one has already chosen to have it surgically removed, which could not have been an easy decision. Second Site, the company continued to struggle. The initial share price of Second Site when it had its public offering was five dollars per share, but in February, like this month, the price had fallen down to a dollar fifty per share. The founders pretty much all left, like all the leadership had stepped down, almost all the employees were laid off, almost all the equipment had sold off at auction. And now what remains of Second Sight is merging with a company called Nano Precision Medical. And there's still a lot of unanswered questions regarding the Argus and Orion products. So the question like, is the merged company going to restore support for the argus retinal implants. I don't know the answer to that, although I feel like there's an ethical obligation to do so. But again, we're not talking about whether or not your smartphone can support you know, the latest OS here, we're talking about actual vision. The Second Site story also reminds us of the importance of standardization. There are other companies out there in the biomedical space. They're creating text that can provide digital vision to the blind, but it's not as simple as someone with a failing argus to retinal implant going to a competing biotech company and getting a tune up. Right, They can't just swap out parts. These are all proprietary approaches, sometimes fundamentally different approaches to try and get the similar result. And I feel the second site story really illustrates the risks involved in adopting a technology. Now, if the payoff for that technology is significant enough, like if we're talking about a return of vision, you can convincingly argue to me that the risk is worth it. Right, that risking the possibility that the company that creates the tech could go under and you are left with technology that has a limited lifespan that might still be worth it to you. I think that has to come down to the individual. But I feel that this does help us frame what we should be thinking about when we evaluate any company's products. And the more critical the product is, the more closely we should look at the company, and it behooves us to ask really tough questions like what happens if that company should go out of business. We're looking at all these companies talking about the metaverse right now, with some of them offering up virtual real estate in virtual environments, Well, one of the questions I ask is how likely are those environments to survive long enough for whatever the metaverse ends up being to really be a real thing, you know, not just bits and pieces Star Citizens style, but an actual, full, cohesive and coherent thing or many things in the case of multiple metaverses or whatever. If you don't feel like that one company is going to last the test of time, it makes no sense to buy virtual real estate that the company is providing, because those servers may just not even be on by the time there's anything useful to do in the metaverse. So that's something that I'm seeing right now, Like that's a Those are questions that I think a lot of people need to be asking themselves before they start getting into this virtual gold rush of the met to verse and web three and all that stuff. So, yeah, this episode covered a lot of ground, but it really all comes back to taking that big picture look when it comes to our relationship with technology. I feel it's our responsibility to to do that every now and then to step back and to understand what our love of tech means not just to ourselves, but to each other and to our environment and two people in other parts of the world. We need to be aware and understand that so that we make decisions that make sense and we're not just buying the next new shiny thing because it's newer and shinier than the stuff we already have, and maybe taking a little more care when it comes to adopting text so we can make the price we pay actually worth it. Right. What if you go out and spend a couple of thousand dollars investing into technology and the whole thing goes could put It's not just that you lost a couple of thousand dollars, which is already a big deal, but all those other prices that are paid throughout the supply chain, the environmental price, all these things like that's part of it too. And that's why I think it's good to take this critical thinking and compassionate approach to approaching tech. Uh. And you know, I'm someone who uses a lot of tech myself. I've got a smartphone, I've got a couple of different computers, I've got a television, and you know, various components connected to it. So I am I am part of the system too. I'm not saying this is some sort of techno hermit who has decided to stand away from any technology whatsoever. I'm just trying to make it more of my process to take these sort of things into full consideration before I jump in on stuff. I feel like it's the responsible thing to do as a consumer. All Right, that's it for this episode. I'm gonna jump down off the soapbox. It's feeling like it's a little tall for me. And if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.