This also makes me worry about the concept of ownership. If we have no attachment to anything because the price is driven to zero, will that erode our values (craftmanship, upkeep, environmental stewardship, ...)? Sounds like a future full of walled gardens, shovelware, and products headed for the landfill.
This was most dramatically run home to me by my first Raspberry Pi, which cost me less than any of the peripherals I connect it to. Admittedly this is because I like having decent keyboards etc., but the interface is the hard part of the computing experience. Things that move are harder to build well than a few highly integrated circuits.
So yes, our computers have been disposable for a while already. EC2 delivered the killer blow at the other end of the spectrum.
Does that mean we're 'to blame'? Well in a way, yes. But I don't really feel it's a big problem. It's a side-effect of something awesome: new technology iterating fast. If you compare mobile tech between 2008 - 2014, I'm pretty amazed. But you offered a pretty extreme 5-year case. I think most obviously would say no to that. But software problems being deprecated on a 2-year old phone (that should have already been resolved anyway) is pretty weak and I don't think it's got much to do with consumers. That's a business choice for which I think enough resources should be made available to fix, unless it's not important. But we're talking a Voip call for a smartphone here, it doesn't get much more elementary than that. It's just bad practice and I don't think we are to blame for that. I wouldn't expect a Voip call to echo madly from an HTC or Apple phone and then not get fixed in the 2 years after.
I'm not at all satisfied with this stuff yet--not to the level I described. Currently these phones are indespensible (much like trips to the dentist), but what I really want is for them to feel like an extension of my soul (like a fine car). Things are too buggy, too consumer, and moving much too fast. I imagine we'll eventually hit a plateau, because I want that phone.
You can still install the latest Android version via aftermarket firmware for the first Samsung Galaxy S1. That phone was released in June 2010, only two years into the smartphone era. It will turn 5 soon and still runs great. Only downside is its small system partitions.
That is certainly part of the problem - it's exactly this mentality shift especially in mobile I am considering wrong. But I am sort of biased, an outlier maybe so I cannot objectively tell if it really is wrong in general, or if that is just my opinionated view on it. Because in the last 10 years or so I have bought electronics, tools, components of all sorts for which I explicitely chose to buy the usually more expensive one from a reputable brand because I learned by experience it would not only serve me better but also last much longer, and I never regretted those decisions (just to name some concrete things: woodworking tools like circular saw/sanders/dust extractor, bycicle components, DSLR, music player, kitchen appliances, oscilloscope). But not a phone: too much choice and not enough information available so I cannot possibly tell if I got one it would serve me like 5 years or more. So I just got a rather cheap dumb phone hoping it would last.
10 years ago it wouldn't have been out of the question to pay $2000 for a 32" LCD TV, but now even paying $500 would seem steep. Sure costs have gone down due to the technology becoming more mature, but it seems that really people don't want to spend big bucks on anything now.
If Google offered a $1000 phone with guaranteed support and updates for 5 years would you buy it? Or instead buy a $500 phone now and another $500 phone in two years with whatever shiny new technology is available then?