Your NOT-smart stove, of course.

Thanks heaven, there are still people who have the undisputably right attitude that everyone should have towards their smartphones. People who think of smartphones

“in much the same way I think of refrigerators or stoves. It’s an appliance, something I need but feel no attachment to, and as long as it keeps fulfilling that need, I don’t want to spend money replacing it for no real reason."

In a sane world, such people should be the boring norm, the ones who never make the news. Instead they do (for example, here) because one of the richest companies on Earth is forcing them to dump a perfectly good phone. Says Aaron Gordon, and I am sure many millions of people could tell almost identical stories:

“Not quite three years ago, I bought a Pixel 3, Google’s flagship phone at the time. It has been a good phone [and today it still] fulfills my needs, so I don’t want to spend $600 on the Pixel 6, which seems to be just another phone that does all the phone things."

“But I have to get rid of it because Google has stopped supporting all Pixel 3s, despite being just three years old."

Why? Because Google finds that “three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device”, which is corporate jargon for “we just want money from you at least once every three years, no matter what. So shut up and pay up”

Gordon’s personal conclusion is to switch to Apple phones because they too have an artificially short shelf life just like Android ones, but it’s a shelf life that, in this moment at least, “just happens to [be] longer."

It’s a mad world when something that is at the same time as expensive, and as persistently, wickedly unrepairable as iPhones looks more economical, or better than anything else from an environmental sustainability standpoint, of all things. A mad world indeed.

Start treating your smartphone as your stove, and demand it is made as a stove. A good old stove, of those who lasted decades. That is the smart thing to do.