5 ms·

No doubt it has been replaced by device obsolescence, where the screen, camera, wireless radio, etc. are bundled together and improvements in any one component

No doubt it has been replaced by device obsolescence, where the screen, camera, wireless radio, etc. are bundled together and improvements in any one component compels the purchase of a whole new unit.

Silhouette 14y ago
Sad, but true. Faced with the reality that well-designed, flexible, modular systems have simply become too good, manufacturers are now effectively building in forced obsolescence, either tying components together (the Apple way) or arbitrarily declaring that only certain combinations are permitted (which also works with consumables, like the way my HP colour printer refused to print a black and white document the other day until I replaced an empty colour toner cartridge). Software seems to be going the same way. SaaS is a fairly transparent rip-off in many cases. Certain big-ticket professional software vendors restrict sales to a network of resellers they can control, who dutifully pull last year's version as soon as this year's is available, so if you want to buy an extra copy to go with the 10 you already have, you can't (unless you upgrade your entire organisation to maintain compatibility). Bridging the gap nicely are drivers. Here we see a range of dubious techniques. One popular one seems to be releasing equipment with drivers for certian specific operating systems that are available at the time, but then conveniently not releasing any drivers to support new operating systems released within what would otherwise be the normal lifetime of the device, thus artificially shortening its life often by many years. Another good trick (I'm looking at you nVidia) is to take essentially the same hardware, but sell one version with nerfed drivers and another premium (sorry, "workstation") version with "certified" drivers that actually use the hardware to its full capabilities. I'm a little surprised that we haven't yet seen more people pushing back against these obviously customer-hostile trends, because a lot of people are spending a lot more money and suffering a lot more hassle than they should have to. Certainly some rip-off merchants do come unstuck; I've heard about what would have been extremely lucrative sales of very expensive specialist equipment that got flushed when the prospective customer discovered some form of artificial nerfing in software and took their cash to someone else who didn't do that. But it seems that everyday hardware and software are in one big race to the bottom. Even premium products, like those high-end graphics cards and professional software installations with their multi-thousand price tags per unit, seem to be tolerated because almost everyone is doing it now. Perhaps this is partly because the more honest competition mostly comes from smaller organisations in the hardware field or in software's case via independent software houses and open source communities, and these kinds of suppliers are (rightly or wrongly, probably a bit of both) regarded as not being up to the job of supplying Serious Business Customers(TM). What I haven't yet figured out is why this is still happening. Do you know anyone who, in either a personal or a professional capacity, actually thinks any of this stuff is done to help them, or that spending money on these things is a good deal? In a logical market, we would expect competition to spring up and exploit that vulnerability, promoting brands based on honest dealings and good quality, almost certainly charging a higher price for it, but with a greater perceived value that justifies that price. And yet, this doesn't seem to be happening, which suggests that many of the markets in technology industries are not effectively competitive, or some of the big name players are in practice dominant or outright monopolies even if they're not formally recognised as such.
- monkeyfacebag 14y ago
  To be fair, I don't think the integrated device model is worse than the beige box model per se. Tablets and smartphones afford us completely new ways to interact with computers (and each other). Recent ones, such as the Nexus 7, are reasonably priced to boot. There are some perhaps unavoidable consequences of replacing whole devices rather than individual components (environmental, to say the least), but in the abstract I think it's hard to say whether one model is necessarily worse than the other.
- cynicalkane 14y ago
  The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers. And absent a conspiracy, there's no profit in that. Actually, I'd argue that the computer world has been increasingly tending toward openness, not away from it; but consumer devices are special a use case where almost all of computer-buying humanity simply doesn't care about the things you care about. Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air. As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers. Then how do you explain the kinds of deliberate and obviously anti-customer behaviour I described before? In some cases, a single dominant player is abusing their customers because they have a captive market. This is often the case with high-end equipment or software, because once someone has committed to using a certain product range the cost of switching is prohibitive. In other cases, while there may not be active conspiracy, I can see no credible explanation for the way multiple suppliers all impose the same unnecessarily consumer-hostile policies unless there is a lack of effective competition such that those who offer consumers a better deal gain a commercial benefit from doing so. Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air. Completely modular in the sense of a tower PC case, of course not. But that doesn't mean they have to glue stuff together so even their own people can't easily repair a failed component. As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time. Perhaps. But they mostly used to suck because there were no standards, so every device/software combination needed its own version of what we now call a device driver. There's no such excuse today. Now the drivers suck because someone at the source made an active decision to screw their customers. How else do you explain a newer, much more powerful model of graphics card that somehow has severely degraded performance in some functions compared to a card of the previous generation, while much more expensive workstation cards using the same new generation of hardware under the hood do seem to exhibit the performance improvements one would expect? And what other description is consistent with releasing a hardware device that should be useful for many years, yet not releasing drivers for it when Windows 7 comes out just a year or two later? It's not as if the arrival of Windows 7 was a surprise or the manufacturers don't know how to write Windows 7 drivers for their equipment. Chances are the next product range runs just fine on Windows 7 and its drivers are probably using a lot of the same driver code as before. Obviously there is profit in these behaviours, because it forces customers to buy much more expensive high-end brands or to buy replacement equipment much sooner than they otherwise would have to.
jseliger 14y ago
I also suspect, however, that PCs are going to stick around for quite a while because they're now cheap commodities, and people respond to cheap; I've argued as much here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-going-anywhere-despite-the-growth-of-phones-and-tablets%E2%80%94because-theyre-cheap/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-... and elsewhere.
ajasmin 14y ago
Device obsolescence is also encouraged by subsidized phone contracts, aggressive marketing and the craze new hardware cause in the tech press.

Silhouette 14y ago

Sad, but true. Faced with the reality that well-designed, flexible, modular systems have simply become too good, manufacturers are now effectively building in forced obsolescence, either tying components together (the Apple way) or arbitrarily declaring that only certain combinations are permitted (which also works with consumables, like the way my HP colour printer refused to print a black and white document the other day until I replaced an empty colour toner cartridge). Software seems to be going the same way. SaaS is a fairly transparent rip-off in many cases. Certain big-ticket professional software vendors restrict sales to a network of resellers they can control, who dutifully pull last year's version as soon as this year's is available, so if you want to buy an extra copy to go with the 10 you already have, you can't (unless you upgrade your entire organisation to maintain compatibility). Bridging the gap nicely are drivers. Here we see a range of dubious techniques. One popular one seems to be releasing equipment with drivers for certian specific operating systems that are available at the time, but then conveniently not releasing any drivers to support new operating systems released within what would otherwise be the normal lifetime of the device, thus artificially shortening its life often by many years. Another good trick (I'm looking at you nVidia) is to take essentially the same hardware, but sell one version with nerfed drivers and another premium (sorry, "workstation") version with "certified" drivers that actually use the hardware to its full capabilities. I'm a little surprised that we haven't yet seen more people pushing back against these obviously customer-hostile trends, because a lot of people are spending a lot more money and suffering a lot more hassle than they should have to. Certainly some rip-off merchants do come unstuck; I've heard about what would have been extremely lucrative sales of very expensive specialist equipment that got flushed when the prospective customer discovered some form of artificial nerfing in software and took their cash to someone else who didn't do that. But it seems that everyday hardware and software are in one big race to the bottom. Even premium products, like those high-end graphics cards and professional software installations with their multi-thousand price tags per unit, seem to be tolerated because almost everyone is doing it now. Perhaps this is partly because the more honest competition mostly comes from smaller organisations in the hardware field or in software's case via independent software houses and open source communities, and these kinds of suppliers are (rightly or wrongly, probably a bit of both) regarded as not being up to the job of supplying Serious Business Customers(TM). What I haven't yet figured out is why this is still happening. Do you know anyone who, in either a personal or a professional capacity, actually thinks any of this stuff is done to help them, or that spending money on these things is a good deal? In a logical market, we would expect competition to spring up and exploit that vulnerability, promoting brands based on honest dealings and good quality, almost certainly charging a higher price for it, but with a greater perceived value that justifies that price. And yet, this doesn't seem to be happening, which suggests that many of the markets in technology industries are not effectively competitive, or some of the big name players are in practice dominant or outright monopolies even if they're not formally recognised as such.

monkeyfacebag 14y ago
To be fair, I don't think the integrated device model is worse than the beige box model per se. Tablets and smartphones afford us completely new ways to interact with computers (and each other). Recent ones, such as the Nexus 7, are reasonably priced to boot. There are some perhaps unavoidable consequences of replacing whole devices rather than individual components (environmental, to say the least), but in the abstract I think it's hard to say whether one model is necessarily worse than the other.
cynicalkane 14y ago
The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers. And absent a conspiracy, there's no profit in that. Actually, I'd argue that the computer world has been increasingly tending toward openness, not away from it; but consumer devices are special a use case where almost all of computer-buying humanity simply doesn't care about the things you care about. Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air. As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers. Then how do you explain the kinds of deliberate and obviously anti-customer behaviour I described before? In some cases, a single dominant player is abusing their customers because they have a captive market. This is often the case with high-end equipment or software, because once someone has committed to using a certain product range the cost of switching is prohibitive. In other cases, while there may not be active conspiracy, I can see no credible explanation for the way multiple suppliers all impose the same unnecessarily consumer-hostile policies unless there is a lack of effective competition such that those who offer consumers a better deal gain a commercial benefit from doing so. Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air. Completely modular in the sense of a tower PC case, of course not. But that doesn't mean they have to glue stuff together so even their own people can't easily repair a failed component. As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time. Perhaps. But they mostly used to suck because there were no standards, so every device/software combination needed its own version of what we now call a device driver. There's no such excuse today. Now the drivers suck because someone at the source made an active decision to screw their customers. How else do you explain a newer, much more powerful model of graphics card that somehow has severely degraded performance in some functions compared to a card of the previous generation, while much more expensive workstation cards using the same new generation of hardware under the hood do seem to exhibit the performance improvements one would expect? And what other description is consistent with releasing a hardware device that should be useful for many years, yet not releasing drivers for it when Windows 7 comes out just a year or two later? It's not as if the arrival of Windows 7 was a surprise or the manufacturers don't know how to write Windows 7 drivers for their equipment. Chances are the next product range runs just fine on Windows 7 and its drivers are probably using a lot of the same driver code as before. Obviously there is profit in these behaviours, because it forces customers to buy much more expensive high-end brands or to buy replacement equipment much sooner than they otherwise would have to.

jseliger 14y ago

I also suspect, however, that PCs are going to stick around for quite a while because they're now cheap commodities, and people respond to cheap; I've argued as much here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-going-anywhere-despite-the-growth-of-phones-and-tablets%E2%80%94because-theyre-cheap/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-... and elsewhere.

ajasmin 14y ago

Device obsolescence is also encouraged by subsidized phone contracts, aggressive marketing and the craze new hardware cause in the tech press.