Planned Obsolescence and Network Effects: Apple Product Launches
Apple product consumers are likely very familiar with the company’s annual slew of presentations and events designed to garner attention for the arrival of new products. In 2021, there have been four events so far with three focusing on new physical products released this year or next, according to Juli Clover of MacRumors.1 This number of events and releases is fairly typical, if slightly increased, for Apple, but it is hard not to wonder how new iterations of mainstay products such as the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook keep garnering so many sales and so much support if these iterations are not all that different from iterations of previous years. As pointed out by Steve Kovach of CNBC, the iPhone 13 is not really all that different from iPhones of the past to most consumers (aside from increased battery life and a better camera).2 How is this cycle of product releases sustainable for Apple and other large tech companies, and how could it possibly be sustainable from an environmental perspective?
In the article “Want to save the Earth? Then don’t buy the shiny new iPhone,” tech opinion writer for the Guardian, John Naughton, asserts that this cycle is certainly not sustainable for the earth.3 Naughton cites a few measures of the waste and emissions produced from electronics production and consumption including that in 2019, about 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste were produced. Naughton explains that consumers are likely to treat their smartphones and other electronics as “disposable” in part because of planned obsolescence, which he defines as “deliberately ensuring that the current version of a given product will become out of date or useless within a known time period.” When companies such as Apple use this tactic, they are more or less trying to ensure that current consumers buy future products, so planned obsolescence may help to explain why the cycle of releases with only slight changes to products is actually sustainable for Apple and other large tech companies. If these companies ensure that the products they released one, two, or three years ago are destined to be out of date, incompatible, and/or non-upgradeable, then these companies know that consumers will be looking to buy a new product in a few years even if the new product is rather similar to the old one they tossed. Naughton echoes this analysis by emphasizing that smartphones in particular “are conceived as hermetically sealed, tightly integrated devices with, as the legal boilerplate puts it, ‘no user-serviceable components.’” It then becomes very inconvenient or nearly impossible for consumers to simply upgrade their current device’s battery, processor, or camera, so they decide to buy an entirely new device instead.
There are other explanations for the endless cycle of similar products and their success, and this explanation lies in network effects. Most pieces of technology become more valuable as the number of users increases, which is clear when a social media platform or a fax machine becomes more valuable the more people there are that use the platform or the more people that have a fax machine. These are all examples of positive externalities, or network effects. Each new set of Apple products that is launched offers greater compatibility within that set of products but not necessarily of products in previous generations. This specific compatibility factor, an example of a network effect, is referred to as the Apple ecosystem and helps enable the cycle of producing typically remarkably similar, yet successful, products. Beyond the Apple ecosystem and for many other technology giants, there is also the network effect present wherein the more people that own a specific iteration of a product, the greater the support there is for that product from other consumers as well as other companies, especially in terms of software development and troubleshooting. So it seems evident that this cycle of technology and the resulting treatment of it as highly disposable is perpetuated by many tactics employed by the companies themselves in addition to factors such as network effects.
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-event/
[2]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/iphone-13-poised-to-continue-apples-super-cycle-of-sales.html