Hardware manufacturers like Apple, Nokia, etc. etc. would love to get you to buy each new release of hardware that they make. Since computers started out as very expensive pieces of hardware, the whole computer industry was built around making computers upgradable, especially by updating the software. Smart phones and PDAs started out as relatively cheap electronic gadgets, so there wasn’t such a huge pressure to make them last. To speed up this trend, most PDA and mobile phone manufacturers do not support or even allow software updates.

Even proprietary software companies behave similarly. It doesn’t matter whether Windows 2000 was working fine for many people, Microsoft discontinued support for it regardless. These actions are also driven by their business model of selling software as if it was a physical thing. You pay for it once up front, but now they are expected to release updates even though the customers are no longer paying.

Not surprisingly, we now have a crazy cycle where the hardware is designed to be disposable. Mobile phones are often so buggy, they crash when making phone calls. This isn’t the result of some conspiracy fomented by some hidden cabal. This is the result of the way the industry is structured, and the idea that software should be treated as a physical thing. If the industry was structured around free software, we’d see very different behavior. This article outlines the issue quite nicely:

Open Source, the only weapon against “planned obsolescence”