The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence.
That one is a gray area. My first iPhone (yeah, I know, more Apple, but whatever, it's the phone I had) became unusably slow after various updates to the OS and apps. It didn't DO anything new as far as I could tell, not one of those updates gave me tangible improvements, they were just slower. It has been my experience that they push the OS updates about one version further on old devices than they should and it results in them being very sluggish at that point. Personally I want to buy a phone, set it up with everything I want and then essentially freeze the configuration and use it like that forever. There is so much software (and websites) that are not any more useful than similar stuff 10+ years ago, they're just more bloated and slow. Some of this is "hardware is so powerful now that who cares, we don't need to optimize!" but my cynical side suspects that companies keep adding features of dubious value fully knowing it will make devices slower so people will upgrade to the latest model. PCs became a mature commodity around 10 years ago and the need to upgrade regularly dropped sharply, people interpreted that as the death of the PC but it was really just that nobody needed a new one every year or two anymore. Smartphones and tablets were selling like hotcakes at the time but now those are mature commodities, there is not much the latest model can do that a flagship from 3-4 years ago can't and that period is gradually extending.
Ah, the “but the new version didn’t add anything!” trope... here’s the thing: we forget as little things get added.
Do I remember which version of Word added a specific feature? Of course not. And unless I happen to be authoring a document that needs that specific feature, I’m unlikely to even notice it’s missing if using a version one or two versions back. But put me on a version that’s many versions back and suddenly I notice there’s a
lot missing. I’ll notice that it’s dumber about various behaviors.
I notice the same thing if I go to do something on my old iPhone 4S: there is tons of stuff missing.
Don’t get me wrong, I also hate how a lot of software, and definitely the web (so very much) has gotten slower without adding anything substantial. However, “of no tangible value” is a very loaded claim, because what it really means is “of no tangible value
to me”. But just because something isn’t of value
to you doesn’t mean it’s not really important to someone else. That’s why, for example, Word is such a beast: it has gazillions of features that most users don’t need, but which are critical to certain users. Years ago, when working on what would become Office 2007, Microsoft used the telemetry from Office 2003 to evaluate the usage patterns of millions of users. What they discovered is that while any given user uses just 20% of the features 80% of the time, the remaining 80% of rarely used features were practically
all used regularly. So they couldn’t just say “Nah, nobody uses that anyway” and jettison a feature to streamline the interface.
A ton of the “bloat” in modern software is added abstraction and automation to make it easier to use. For example: Does it add “bloat” to, for example, have code for an email program to auto configure its server settings based on the email address? Yes. But it solves a very real problem, namely, that (speaking from years of experience in tech support) email client setup is one of the most difficult for non-expert users to perform.
I don’t know what version of iOS added automatic background indexing of photos, but goddamned do I love it. (I can type “dog” in the search field and it’ll show me my photos of dogs, without me ever having tagged them.)
I don’t remember which version added the ability for keyboards to allow two autocorrect languages
simultaneously (without switching) but that fixed something that had been a thorn in my side the entire time prior.
What about all the code added to support thorough accessibility for the disabled? In iOS, which has very extensive accessibility features (including an entire alternate interaction model for the blind), that cannot be trivial. Does it benefit me directly? No. But it deserves to be there.
I’m writing this on an iPad Air 2, a model introduced in late 2014. It’s running the latest version of iOS, and it only rarely shows its age. (And when it does, it’s mostly in third party apps whose RAM requirements have gotten to the point that this iPad’s memory becomes the constraint.) Yes, there have been some versions of iOS that really did bring their respective minimum hardware to its knees. But they really put a ton of effort into that for many years now, hence this iPad (which is the minimum hardware for the current iPad OS) running very well with it.
There’s a lot I hate about current software and web design, like the giant amounts of whitespace with gigantic text, obliterating the entire point of the big screens we have. (Why have a 27” computer display? Why have a 6.5” phablet screen?) And it annoys the living hell out of me that websites take longer to load now than they did 20 years ago, and that 90% of page load time is ads and tracking, if you don’t use an ad blocker to stop that BS.
But it doesn’t mean
all progress, and the costs that comes with it, is pointless.