Since the 80s, the most expensive Christmas gifts are usually the ones that get to the landfill the soonest. Now that Moore’s Law has run its course, it’s time to banish Instant Obsolescence as a feature of all digital tech (software too).

First, there’s absolutely nothing intrinsic to digital products that they need to have the shelf stability of an avocado, but because tech has moved so quickly and we got in the habit of knowing we’d get the next one soon anyway, we’ve accepted some badly designed products.

Dieter Rams is one of the chief inspirations to Jony Ive. It’s sort of crazy to think that not one of the products that Ive designed (the most successful commercial products ever made) would pass Rams’s Principles of Good Design (#7: Good design is long-lasting). Can’t blame him.

Just a few years ago, we could still see the pixels on our screens. Processors struggled enough for us to notice latency. For an ordinary person interacting with technology, practical, noticeable progress stopped around the iPhone X. When did you last think “This phone is slow.”

Unless you’re a video editor/3D animator/game designer/developer, you’re unlikely to see a noticeable difference on desktop ever again either. Latency is gone. Resolution is beyond our ability to visually resolve it.

The resolution of the screen in many living rooms is now higher than it is in most movie theatres (and if the people are honest, most of them can’t tell the difference from when it was only 1080HD). (Related note: There’s never been a better time to buy a TV)

These diminishing digital returns would appear to be bad news for an economy that relies on people buying a new $1,000 phone every two years and throwing the previous one away, but the products that now need to emerge are truly exciting.

We’re (finally) seeing meaningful increases in battery life (and maybe soon, we’ll even be able to replace a battery, imagine that). How would you build a phone to last 50 years? And how would you build software knowing that devices could last that long?

What if people working in manufacturing could be building things that would be handed down a generation or two? What would that do to the economy? To culture? What about all mending/repairing that would be needed as hardy devices wear over the years?

What about single-purpose devices that do one thing (writing, for example) really really well (and last 100 years) instead of trying to jam every single human activity into a one-size-fits-all glass slab?

And then (I know we’re not here yet) what if we could get computing power needs down so far that devices could be mechanically powered like the watch I’m wearing, powered only by a spring and an escapement? This is the opposite of steampunk, by the way, because there’s no steam.

One of my Christmas wishes for the world is that designers internalize (and rejoice in) their new freedom from creating throwaway things. These chips and screens are finally ready. We did it. It’s time to make the next generation of digital tools: Talismans that last a lifetime.