An upgrade too far?

If you look at a lot of the announcements that companies are making at the moment, it's about how they're doing a great job reducing the amount of waste they produce. Clever new manufacturing techniques, alternative materials and new initiatives, such as the universal mobile phone charger, are all marketed as environmentally-friendly and a way to reduce waste.

You can't help but agree that this is true – to a certain point. A large volume of electronic waste is simply caused by the fact that we throw away kit too quickly.

Go back twenty years or so and it used to be that when something broke, you'd call a repair man round to fix the fault. Now, the cost of new equipment means that it's often cheaper and easier to replace a broken appliance that to pay to have it repaired.

This, you could argue, is progress. But, what about being forced into upgrading? In order for companies to make as much money as they can, it's in their interest to make you want their latest kit. Apple's one of the worst for this. Take the original iPhone, which had no built-in 3G, despite the necessary chips being cheap and readily available.

Call me cynical, but it seemed like a carefully orchestrated plan, so that people would want to upgrade when the 3G version of the phone was released almost a year later.

It's not just phones. Televisions basically didn't change that much since their launch until recently. Now with LCD, we've gone through a progression of different standards (720p, 1080i, full HD, 100Hz, 200Hz and so on), each with the express intention of making us have to upgrade.

Progress needs continue and improving technology is something that we all want, but if companies really want to bang on about their green credentials, they should make products that will last, can be repaired cheaply and aren't designed to force us into unnecessary upgrades.