Ask HN: How can we stop making disposable hammers?

The tech industry feels to me a lot like a disposable hammer factory. The hammers we make are made out of a non-durable material, and they tend to break down without constant maintenance. Every few years you have to buy a new hammer because the old one becomes ineffective. You can get a new hammer for really cheap, but it won't last long, and it really only works on nails and boards that are made to work with the disposable hammer of today.

Trying to use a Netbook with a dual core Atom processor and 1GB ram recently to browse the web was a bit like pulling teeth. I can't imagine trying with my first "fast" computer, a Compaq Prolinea with 50mhz 486DX2 and a whopping 32 megs of RAM (http://www.totalgeekdom.com/?p=356). If my Compaq could browse the web back then, it should still be able to browse the web now, but I imagine that it would be very difficult. Good luck trying to put any new files on it.

A hammer from 100 years ago, or even a telephone, works about the same now as it did then. But the technology we're making today seems like it will be completely unusable in just a few decades, or less. This is pretty wasteful and probably not sustainable. How can we stop making disposable hammers?