I’d always suspected as much, but this interview with Giles Slade illustrates the increasing speed at which we are not even waiting for appliances to stop working before replacing them.

In 2003, over 63 million working PCs were trashed, In 2004, that number jumped to 315 million.

Of course, manufacturers are also busy attempting to shorten their product lifespans as much as possible as well.

The British designer known for creating the iPod, Jonathan Ive, probably didn’t have anything to do with the battery inside the iPod. His job was to make the iPod beautiful. But Tony Fadell, the guy in charge of the engineering team and a top executive of Apple, knew very well that the battery would fail after 11 months; it would’ve been his decision to put it inside, where it couldn’t be replaced.

Slade also ties this in to wider cultural differences between more and less material societies.

Related: General Motors Reports Record Sales Of New Disposable Car

Snipshot - basic image editing online. Adobe not very scared yet.
Scrapblog - scrapbook creator / online design tool. From the interface, I’d guess that the people behind Zazzle may be involved. Only seems to work properly in IE at the moment.
Worldprocessor - lots of world stats, and some very pretty globes.
Finetune - music discovery and playlist builder site. There’s a sample playlist at the top right of this page. The interface is nice and simple to use, there’s all the usual stuff like a tag cloud and AJaXy features. Unfortunately, each playlist has to have a minimum of 45 tracks becuase they’re using an Internet radio licence. The ability to skip through multiple tracks on an embedded playlist seems to have been crippled as well.