CE is FUBAR
This today from everyone’s favorite critic, John Dvorak – Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone
But I’m not writing to comment on the major topic of the article. I want to point to a specific paragraph that everyone will recognize as an absolute truth of consumer electronics (bolding is my own).
The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well
as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough.
These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half
a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately
successful, will be passé within 3 months.
So what’s wrong with this? On the one hand, nothing; style and fashion are fine and normal. But the costs of this model are enormous. I’ll break them down into three sections.
1 – High costs for producers – this is obvious but bears spelling out. When your company’s survival depends on churning out (and supporting!) tens if not hundreds of different product lines each year it becomes difficult to reap any of the benefits that come from real economies of scale. Every product line becomes an island (more like a sinking ship really) that is constructed, promoted (maybe) and set free into the world only to be forgotten about in the span of months by everyone, including the producer.
2- High costs for consumers – this may not be as obvious but it’s deeply and insidiously true. You may get a cheap device based on the initial purchase price but it’s not cheap for long. Add up the time you spend struggling with it’s shoddy design, getting it to work with other devices, backing it up, etc etc and the result may surprise you. Another price we pay for high style is planned obsolescene. I don’t know how many cell phones, MP3 players, portable video gadgets and/or gaming devices you have in your house but if you’re anything like me you have a bunch. How many do you actually use? How about power adapters? You see my point? The expense is not the initial purchase. It’s the burden over time that this approach heaps upon us all.
3 – High cost to the environment – if you agree that we all have lots of gadgets lying around unused I would bet that a big reason is you can’t get yourself to chuck them. Why? Because we all know how much crap is in them and don’t want it to end up in a land fill somewhere. Luckily this is changing and it’s getting easier to dispose of our electronics but you can’t tell me that the >1 billion cell phones sold each year are being safely recycled. So where does all the heavy metal and other toxic stuff in these devices end up? You guessed it. Who pays for that? We all do. Or maybe our kids or grandkids. Click here for an interesting article on the subject.
What’s a potential solution? I think we can take a cue from this article in the NY Times titled "How to Improve it? Ask those who use it". It discusses a trend that is in it’s infancy but will completely transform what we, as customers, expect/demand from our vendors; namely a much bigger, if not total, say in what gets made, when, where and how. We may actually ditch the notion of "vendor" entirely and just make everything ourselves. Especially if Niel Gerhenfeld has his way. The point being, we’ve seen enormous shifts of control from producer to consumer in the digital world (just think Tivo). We’re going to see it happen in every facet of our lives – including CE.
