Fast, cheap, and out of control, part deux

Yesterday I made reference to a wonderful article by Mark C. Taylor for salon.com regarding our current fascination with what’s “new and shiny” and the dangers lurking in this form of purchasing.

I noted a bad experience with the iPod touch, which I bought for my daughters years before, and how only a few months after doing so a new and much improved model was suddenly announced and released, which angered the hell out of me (Apple knew this item was coming out but kept quiet so they could sell their inventory of iPod touch machines for the Christmas season and then started the marketing campaign for their new version of the machine).

Mr. Taylor’s article so fascinated me that I couldn’t get it out of my head and I thought back even farther, to where (perhaps) the genesis of the whole disposable tech industry began: With the desktop PC.

Many, many years ago, I purchased an IBM desktop computer with an 8086 processor.  It looked something like this (no, that’s not me in the picture):

 

I absolutely loved the machine, but a year or so later a friend of mine purchased a new machine that had a 286 processor.  It looked very similar to the one I had, but the internal mechanisms made my machine look like it was a Model T compared to a state of the art Ferrari.

I didn’t buy the 286 as much as I wanted to.  Turned out I did the right thing as the mighty 386 models were released shortly afterwards.  If the 286 made the 8086 seem like it was from the stone age, the 386 made the 286 look like it came from the dawn of time!

I bought the 386 model and chucked my 8086 and was mighty happy…until the 486 model appeared.

I eventually purchased a 486 model computer but realized something curious: The difference between the 486 and 386 wasn’t as pronounced as the 8086 vs the 286 vs the 386.

Then came the various Pentiums..

…and I came to realize that the PC tech industry had reached something of a ceiling.  Yes, the newer machines were better and faster, but to my eyes not significantly so.  Unless you were a heavy duty gamer, the “older” Pentium machines were good enough to accomplish the things you needed to do (in my case, web browsing, writing, email, etc.).

At about this time I noticed there were articles about the “fall” of the PC market, and that desktop PCs would go the way of the dinosaurs.  A curious concept.  As much as I liked laptops, the bulk of my computing was still done on my desktop.

The only difference?

My current computer was so good that I didn’t need to swap it out for a new model after a year of usage.  In fact, the desktop computer I’m writing this very blog on I believe is at least five years old.  Maybe more.

It works perfectly fine and, apart from buying a new video card, a modem plug, and exterior hard drives to protect my files, I haven’t had the desire or need to go out and buy a completely new machine.

The point here is that perhaps, perhaps, Apple and company noticed the way people like myself were willing to shell out thousands of dollars back in the day to buy the latest, best available desktop computers as they grew from infancy.  What they might have missed, however, was the reason we were so willing to buy the next generation model: Because it was significantly better than the previous one.

Can the same be said of the latest iPhones or XBoxs or Playstations?  In my case, is the Samsung S5 really all that much better than the S3 that I’m currently using?  Is the iPhone 6 truly a major step up from the 5?

Or might we be reaching a point where buying the latest, newest thing doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting something far, far better than what came before?