There was a time not so long ago when planned obsolescence was a troubling ghost in the machine. In his 1959 book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard described engineers at General Electric who intentionally shortened the life of light bulbs, and automotive engineers who proposed limiting the lifespan of cars. Consumer advocates denounced what they saw as ethical lapses in business executives and engineers.
That was then. In today's topsy-turvy world of personal computers, obsolescence is not only planned, it is extolled by marketers as the principal virtue of machines designed to save labor and entertain. And until recently there has been hardly a peep from consumers, who dutifully line up to buy each new generation of faster, more powerful machines, eager to embrace the promise of simpler, happier and more productive lives.
The microchips that drive computers are already composed of circuits that are more complex than street maps of the entire world, and in a few years chips will contain more than one component for every human being on the planet. Superpowered memory chips that can store a billion bits of information -- the equivalent of about 130 thick novels -- are being tested, and 16-billion-bit chips will arrive well before the end of the decade.
But these chips are no longer designed to wear out; in fact, they will last for decades or longer. Even so, hapless consumers now rush back to the store ever more quickly, not to replace broken parts but to purchase new computers that will allow them to talk longer, see more vivid colors or play cooler games.
"It's become like lettuce," said Nathan Myhrvold, a former top scientist at Microsoft who runs Intellectual Ventures, an investment firm. "You buy for immediate consumption."
That's the plan of the consumer electronics industry, which is driven by the mantra of "faster, smaller, cheaper." In some cases, the so-called replacement cycle is outpacing an industry axiom known as Moore's Law, the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors on a chip (then just 50) would continue to double every 18 months on average. And because the price of each silicon chip stays the same, the cost per transistor falls exponentially with every doubling. Which means the cost of computing becomes cheaper at an accelerating rate.
Largely because of the wicked pace of competition in the computer industry, Moore's Law has ruled unabated for the past 37 years, and semiconductor industry forecasts suggest it may continue to do so for as many as 15 years before microchips shrink to their physical limit.
Moore's Law also applies to computing speed. This month at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, the premier event for computer chip designers, Intel showed off a simple processor capable of speeds up to 10 gigahertz. The new processors are more than twice as fast as the current top-of-the-line Pentium 4 microprocessors and are likely to be in commercial products by next year.
The result is a frenetic pace of change that Andrew Grove, Intel's chairman, has enthusiastically called "the software spiral," in which each new and more feature-ridden operating system and word processing program leads inexorably to another generation of hardware.
In a way, this could be Microsoft's real crime. While the software giant was convicted of violating antitrust laws, the company may actually be more guilty of locking its customers into an endless series of software upgrades that demand increasingly powerful machines.
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