Amanda Fortini has an interesting article about the iPhone on Salon today. It speaks to our increasing disloyalty to objects: with technology getting better/faster/cheaper/smaller with each passing month, the idea of keeping a TV or a phone for more than a couple of years has become passe.  The result is that there’s such a plethora of obsolete objects getting tossed out each day that even the needy are expecting that handouts won’t be more than one or two versions behind whatever is new. Try to give away a non-smartphone cellphone on Craigslist and you’ll be faced with an inbox with nothing in it. My local Goodwill recently started to turn down donations of televisions and monitors that aren’t flat screens.

“Planned obsolesnce” is often the culprit when this problem is discussed. The technology powers-that-be are constantly figuring out new ways to get us to spend more money to buy the same things over and over again; there’s a direct correlation between companies’ cunning ability to build relatively inexpensive self-destructing objects and consumers’ lack of patience with anything that isn’t working well. Spending $50 and two hours on the phone with the Geek Squad is somehow far more annoying than purchasing a brand new computer in ten minutes for $200.

I particularly liked the Fortini’s discussion of the iPhone’s buttons—or lack thereof. Push buttons are a subject of one of the essays in OBSOLETE. It seems to be modern man’s goal to solve problems that never really were problems to begin with. Have you heard anyone complain about how hard it is to push in a button? Ever? Nevertheless, there is an anti-button movement afoot. Elevators are starting to go un-buttoned. The Mac Tablet that everyone is speculating about has no buttons. And, of course, the iPhone has just one — cyclops-like. As I write this, I’m using a friend’s Apple mouse, which has no buttons; a massive, three-pane menu window keeps popping up whenever I tough the thing, which means that I’ve mostly been moving the cursor using sheer willpower (and the arrow buttons on the keyboard. It may be unfair of me, but I’m going to guess these two issues are related.  Excuse me now while I go scream into a pillow.