The headphone socket on my MP3 player has become somewhat unreliable. Now, most people would just bin a four year old device. But I don’t intend to.

The battery still holds a charge. The hard disk is still turning quietly. The broken part, and I know this because I’ve managed to buy one or at least something similar in Maplin, costs 80p. As opposed to over £200 for a new player of the same standard. So in a few minutes I’ll find the soldering iron and start fitting it. 

Widget manufacturers have become very cunning at the repeat business game. From iPods where you have to return them to Apple for a new battery (another reason to buy a Creative instead) to devices that obviously have a design lifespan after which they will break in a manner that makes them unrepairable. But ehre is another insidious trick they’re pulling, and more people need to notice it. Enforced obsolescence.

A couple of years ago one of the big chains announced that due to lack of demand they would no longer stock floppy disks. Think briefly, when was the last time you saw a new PC with a floppy drive? Manufacturers have engineered a lack of demand by leaving the drives out of PCs.

I accept that a USB drive is a better bet, but for those of us who like messing around with old hardware a supply of floppy disks is somewhat essential. I even have a pile of the old 5.25in floppies, which are good for innuendo if nothing else.

The same thing is happening with CDs, although here it is slightly more sinister. One major high street chain has already announced that they will not be selling CD singles due to downloading, and commentators have been forecasting the death of the CD for some years. Mind you, they’ve been saying the same about vinyl since the 1980s and new pressings are still being released.

The sinister part is that once we move away from buying a hard copy to buying an intangible collection of data we lose a lot of control. With music or software on a CD we have a hard copy. In the event of a system crash we can just reinstall it from disk. If the data exists only on your hard disk and cannot be copied due to protection measures then what happens? Do you have to buy it all again? What happens if the media company decides to change their policy and lock all the stuff you have paid for, making it unusable unless you pay extortionate subscription fees?

It is obviously in their own interests to escape from hard copies. Making, transporting and selling a CD costs far more than putting the contents on a paid for download site, where almost all of the track price will be profit. It also gives them more control over how the consumer is able to use the music or software they have paid for. 

We seem to have turned into a society of mindless consumers who don’t care about the deeper implications of these things so long as we have our shiny new iWidget before the rest of our clique. If you’ve ever tried explaining why DRM is a bad thing for consumers to the average airhead then you will understand what I mean. People just don’t want to know, and giving a damn now makes you uncool.

Because it’s cool to spend £200 on a new device rather than 80p on a spare part…