Products designed to fail. A game that could have consumers losing trust in companies
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/magazine/why-apple-wants-to-bust-your-iphone.html?_r=0
The term to focus on here is, “planned obsolescence”. A real estate broker first coined the term during the great depression. He suggested that the US government should place untrue expiration dates on goods to make consumers buy new ones before necessary (New York Times). In modern times this term is relevant to all different forms of technology and one prominent one, that many of us use everyday, is the iPhone. Does Apple purposefully have their devices decay to an unusable point after two years? If so what kind of risks are they taking on by doing this? The number one risk is losing customers. By making products that are doomed to fail Apple is playing a game. They have an extremely large number of choices in this game. Some of these choices are how long they want their product to last, as well as other moves such as the release of software that overloads old hardware. Should Apple make a phone that fails after a year? Should ios 7 be made fully compatible with the iPhone 4? The other player in this game with Apple is the consumer. If the iPhone lasts longer you could think of the consumer as winning. However the consumer would have to pay more for the initial product so they also lose. Apple’s goal as the other player is too decide how much consumers value a long lasting product versus the cost that a more durable product would inevitably entail. Apple also wants to increase their gain while pushing the consumer as far towards a “loss” without them becoming overly dissatisfied.
Apple is also facing new players in this game. Other smartphone brands have made large improvements in the quality of their hardware in recent years. This means the moves that Apple may have made before, such as limiting the battery lifetime to a year and a half, may not be such a good choice going forward. Perhaps the extra cost of biting the bullet and providing longer lasting batteries, will have to be taken by Apple as more players become involved in this expanding game. However, it’s important not to get stuck on the battery here. As I said before there is a very large number of moves for apple to make. The article discusses one of them being what new features to add to a new phone. When releasing a new phone the new features that are added to it cost Apple extra money. They have to pay for the product development and then ultimately pay for the more advanced technology. However a consumer that has an old iPhone that no longer functions in a satisfactory manner, won’t want to stay with Apple brand if the new phone available is not noticeably different from their previous one. Thus Apple will lose customers if they don’t pay to develop new technologies. So in making this move Apple wants to find the least number of improvements that they can make while still keeping the customer happy with how different the new phone is from the last.
Overall this is a far more complicated game then we will ever be able to solve in class. There are dozens of players at hand if you consider other hardware brands as players as well. Still, there is a matrix of outcomes based off of the moves of the different companies and the consumer population. It may not be possible to look at the payoff matrix and immediately discern its meaning due to its complexity and size; but it is certainly calculable. Whether the consumer is aware or not it’s likely that most moves made by tech companies have been thoroughly reviewed in terms of how much they will cost and the increase in popularity they will provide. All consumers are part of this game, and an interesting part of the game is that many are not aware.