Planned obsolescence in software

How bizarre is it that you can buy a €2,000 computer and then, from the moment you start using it, just hope it lasts as long as possible? You have no idea what is happening inside it, or how the way you use it affects its lifespan. Sometimes it suddenly stops working as well as it did. You hit restart and hope it magically works again (it always does!).

A computer usually lasts a few years. But think about it: why doesn’t it last ten years, or longer? Because the updates stop coming? That’s a design choice. Because the hardware is worn out? What if you could make it last longer?

We believe computers could last much longer than they do. They don’t, because they are designed to become obsolete after a few years of use. That’s a shame, given all the precious metals and other materials that go into these complex machines. And it isn’t just a shame. It’s a luxury we simply won’t be able to afford for much longer.

That’s why we’re building Tribograph.

The black box on your desk

Your car has a dashboard. It tells you your speed, your fuel, your engine temperature, and when something needs attention. Nobody would buy a car that hid all of that.

Your computer hides almost all of it. You get a battery percentage and a spinning wheel when things go wrong. Battery health is buried several menus deep. How worn out your storage is? It isn’t shown anywhere. The machine measures all of this about itself. It just doesn’t tell you.

So you’re left guessing. And when you’re guessing, “it’s getting old, time for a new one” sounds perfectly reasonable.

What actually wears out

The interesting thing is that none of this is mysterious. A computer wears out in a few specific, measurable ways.

The battery. Lithium-ion batteries age with every charge cycle, and they age faster when they’re kept hot or sit at 100% for days on end. Apple designs MacBook batteries to keep 80% of their original capacity after 1,000 cycles. That’s the design target. Whether you reach that point in three years or eight depends largely on how you charge and how hot the machine runs.

The storage. The SSD in your computer can only be written to a finite number of times before it wears out. In modern Macs it’s soldered to the main board, so when the SSD dies, the whole board goes with it. And you’re probably writing to it far more than you think.

The memory. When your apps need more memory than the computer has, it starts using the SSD as overflow memory. This is called swap. It keeps things running, but it slows everything down and adds a lot of extra writes to that SSD.

That’s also why the restart trick always works. Restarting doesn’t fix anything. It clears the memory, empties the swap and resets the symptoms. Then the cycle starts again.

The other way computers die: on paper

Then there’s a way computers die that has nothing to do with wear at all.

Apple has said that macOS 26 Tahoe is the last version that will run on Intel-based Macs. Millions of machines that work perfectly well will stop getting new versions of their operating system, and eventually stop getting security updates. Apps follow, then browsers. A computer that works fine becomes a computer you’re told not to trust.

That isn’t physics. It’s a decision.

Why this matters more than your wallet

The real cost of a computer isn’t paid at the checkout. It’s paid when the computer is made.

According to Apple’s own product environmental reports, most of a MacBook’s lifetime carbon footprint comes from manufacturing it, not from using it. Every new laptop starts its life deep in the red, and every year you keep your current one is a year you don’t pay that bill again.

Then there are the materials: gold, copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, mined in difficult conditions and assembled into a machine the size of a magazine. In 2022, the world produced 62 million tonnes of electronic waste, and less than a quarter of it was documented as properly collected and recycled. The rest is burned, dumped, or lost.

We keep treating these machines as disposable. They’re some of the most resource-intensive objects most of us will ever own.

That’s why we’re building Tribograph

Tribology is the science of friction and wear. A tribograph is our name for an instrument that records it.

Tribograph is a Mac app that does exactly that. Every day, it records what’s happening inside your machine: battery capacity and charge cycles, how much is being written to your SSD, free disk space, swap usage and temperature. Then it turns those numbers into plain findings: what is actually wearing your Mac out, and what you can change about it.

It isn’t a cleaner app that promises to make your Mac “fast again.” It isn’t trying to sell you a new computer. It’s the dashboard your computer should have come with.

Because when you can see what’s happening, you can decide for yourself when your computer is done. Not a software update. Not a marketing cycle. You.

The most sustainable computer is the one you already have. Let’s make it last.