I have had similar feelings, and these were made worse when I realized that my XT is actually still perfectly fit for most things people need to do (read some text or send some text on the web, word processing, spreadsheets, email). It can even do these things graphically and with low res photos via Windows 3. This means that for most people, new computers were not truly necessary. Obviously, for any large photos or for video that has even a decent quality, an XT is not enough.

This particular problem generates hundreds of millions of tons of e-waste every single year. The constant churn strips resources during production, and it pollutes during production and disposal as most of this waste is just tossed to the third world and never truly dealt with.

A major driving force behind all of this churn is actually financial. The global financial system is run by a debt based currency. More of this currency is created constantly due to fractional reserve lending, and due to government spending (all government spending in the current system creates money, and the government bonds are treated as an asset by central governments against which still more money is lent and thus created in fractional reserve systems, US dollars are then used by foreign banks as an asset to create still more money). With constant inflation, money must go somewhere. If money is sat on it loses value, thus all investment class assets see ever higher climbing valuations and any dip is temporary even though it shouldn’t be. Companies can therefore get billion dollar valuations without even having revenue (in a rational world the value of such a company is zero or even negative), and they can run off of investment despite losing money year over year. When some of these companies finally go bankrupt it’s only a momentary down turn for a given index of stocks, and nothing else really happens. This is also why, despite the 2008 crash, the housing market is still bananas and over valued. Money must go somewhere and as investors get wary of stocks they drive funds into housing. People buy properties without even seeing them because they know that land at least has some value and inflation is getting stupid… they need to put their money _somewhere_. When people have no real method of holding value and are also too poor to invest, they are incentivized to spend. If some bank actually offered interest on savings that was higher than inflation, people might save. As it is, the poor have no recourse. Spend it is. By spending, businesses get a signal to produce. The production will keep increasing in speed until either the global financial system collapses or until too many jobs are eliminated by automation. The companies using such automation to produce will then be driven into bankruptcy (not enough buyers to pay the bills), people will again gain employment (because the automated companies are no more), and the cycle will repeat. The only way to put a stop to recklessness like this is to have money _cost something_. Either governments must be responsible and have low debt to earnings (think Singapore), or countries must have hard currencies where more is only produced when the value is high enough to warrant very expensive mining operations. Such economic conditions allow for savings and more gradual paces of innovation and development where things actually get tested, go through QA, and so on (as opposed to millions of laptops being shipped with keyboards that are broken by bread crumbs or software that is so bad it allows root access if you knock on the door properly). As it is, companies cannot do those things lest they miss revenue targets and lose whatever the inflation rate is in real terms year over year.

As for dealing with it? I just accept that I will have lower performance starting year 2 of ownership of any new device, and on-going until it is finally not truly usable in the modern world.