A new phone for every month

[Commentary] We are about to enter an age of seriously conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous, that is, for its wastefulness. One assumes that middle-class technology consumers' buying behavior will eventually catch up with the idiosyncrasies of the rich, the era of two-year contracts tied to a specific phone may be nearing an end. The same thing, incidentally, is happening to the personal computing market, with consumers increasingly turning to low-price Netbooks, increasingly powered by lower-cost Linux, to make computer purchases less painful...and less permanent. Is this a good or bad trend? It's obviously bad from the standpoint of the environment. The mobility of these devices may make them easy to trash, but that trash has to go somewhere.