This is what I meant when I said capitalism was very efficient at producing massive amounts of shit that we don’t need:

It’s a well known industry secret that Nokia was not at all happy that their 6310 model lasted for years and years. People loved that phone. Hung on to it for ages. Nokia fired the man who made it. Their average handset is engineered to last for two years. Based on my own experience, the iPhone is not much better.
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Now, 1.2 billion phones were sold last year. If I’m to believe what I see in the grey market in Africa, that number is even higher. About half of those went to first-time buyers. The other half, replacements.
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I want you to take a few seconds and picture the heap of junk that 600 million mobile phones are going to create.
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Landfill, anyone?

The curse of the innovation age

(via Umair Haque on twitter)

(Note: Nothing I say is original; it’s mostly me summarizing/synthesizing what I’ve lately been obsessively reading.)