What I meant is that the industry wants us to buy a new car ever few years, not necessarily that they're less reliable. Think about it - how many car commercials are on TV versus the number of times in the average person's life that they go and buy a car? They also encourage leasing as much as possible to encourage people to get a new leased car every several years. This is even more troubling when you look at the "green" movement which is mostly just marketing fluff. The amount of environmental impact involved in making a Prius, for instance, is much more than the Prius will offset in its lifetime. It'd have to last decades to make up the difference, yet people are encouraged to ditch their older cars for cars like Priuses.
True. My VAXstation 4000/60 is one of my most reliable machines - it just runs and runs and runs in spite of being old enough to vote. But imagine if instead of computers going to landfills because people got fed up with viruses and trojans it was actually not painful to reinstall Windows - how different would things be now? After all, there are MANY people out there who could make excellent use out of a ten year old machine. Recycling doesn't happen nearly as often as it could because Microsoft has no incentive to make reinstallation easy (but they do have an incentive to make it difficult), so people often just buy a new computer when the old one gets too infected to work properly.
True, I didn't think about that. Gotta keep up with the neighbors!