The Apple Watch Series 4 and Planned Obsolescence

This morning as I woke up I decided to strap on the Apple Watch Series 4 and use it for part of the day. In the process I thought that I would check my EKG reading. That’s when I saw that the EKG app is no longer supported on the Apple Watch Series 4. Now is the time when that watch could be recycled. Apple no longer supports it so within half a year to a year it will be vintage.

Old Enough to Be Vintage

My Mac Book Pro from 2016 will also be vintage in a few weeks, now that Autumn is arriving. I bring this up because I had toyed with the idea of having the MBP serviced for a second time, to get the battery replaced, and other elements replaced as needed. last time the bottom half was refurbished.

With the Apple Watch and the MBP I considered getting new batteries and using them for another four years but neither of them will be supported in four years. The Apple watch has become vintage, and it’s a matter of weeks before the MBP becomes vintage in turn. Getting either of them fixed would cost hundreds of francs per device, for a device that is unsupported.

I am in two minds. Part of me thinks that it is wasteful to count devices as vintage when they still work fine, except for the battery, but another part of me thinks that because the battery has degraded on both devices, that it makes sense to good night them both.

A Second Life as a Linux Machine

Although I say that the Mac Book Pro is vintage it could have a second life as a Linux box. Just because an old machine is no longer supported by the original Equipment manufacturer (OEM), does not mean that it could not live for several more years as a Linux machine. Originally I had planned to turn my 2016 MBP into a Linux box but I got a 2017 MBP that I turned into a Linux Box machine instead. Now it’s running Ubuntu if I remember correctly.I forgot about it until I started typing this post.

The So Called Need to Upgrade

In normal circumstances I would never use a machine for eight years or more. With the Apple watch I replaced it when I saw that the battery needed to be charged two to three times a day. When a watch needs to be charged so often it becomes obsolete. I would have swapped the battery and continued using it if not for the planned obsolescence. Replacing the battery costs two thirds of the price of getting a new watch, and if you get the SE then you pay two thirds, and get a new watch.

The point is that as geeks we have to resist the urge to buy new things, and with Apple’s planned retirement of device support we are all the more likely not to resist upgrading. I am always happy to buy new devices when I have a legitimate reason, rather than just a random urge. Planned obsolescence gives me a legitimate reason.

The Opportunity to Slide

If you remember a decade ago there was a lot of talk of sliding between MacOS and Windows. It was a time when people who switched between OSes regularly were called sliders. When a device becomes old, when the battery begins to fail, an opportunity to slide is presented. In this case I mean that originally when the Series 4 battery started to be weaker I played with two or three Garmin watches, and one or two hand held GPSes. The logic behind the hand held GPS is simple. It has batteries that last for weeks of use, and it syncs with ease with the phone. This frees up a wrist for other devices.

The Cheap Trap

Before concluding this blog post I’d like to give a warning. If you go from a Suunto Spartan Wrist HR Baro to a Suunto Peak 5 then you are downgrading, and if you go from a Garmin Instinct Solar to a Garmin 45s because it’s the cheapest, you are downgrading. If you go from the Apple Watch Series 4 to an Apple Watch SE second generation you are not downgrading. You don’t have the ECG function but you have plenty of other features that make it a good lateral switch.