The
following is an excerpt from a recent Huffington Post article:
Ever wonder why your
iPhone seems to slow down after a few years? Why the once-amazing device gets
cranky and struggles to perform basic tasks or load apps?
The answer lies in
Apple's software, and it's a key part of the company's strategy to keep
millions of people buying new iPhones.
Apple releases a new
mobile operating system every year, and that keeps a powerful cycle in motion.
Each fall for the last few years, people have rushed to download the latest and
greatest version of iOS, which is designed for -- and, as a result, works best
on -- the newest hardware that is also released around the same time. In the
months leading up to the release, many app developers furiously update their
apps for the latest operating system.
But,
this is not a new phenomenon that we are experiencing but a marketing strategy
that has worked over and over again for years.
Microsoft
follows the same strategy with their Windows OS and do the manufacturers of
computers like Dell who have to develop larger and harder HDD’s in order to
keep up with the latest and greatest programs taking up more and more space.
But
again, nothing new.
In
1980, I was in Business Grad School and we were informed by our Marketing
instructors that it would be our jobs in the future to convince people to buy
our products knowing they did not need them nor could they afford them. We were also told about a strategy called, “built in obsolescence.”
This
engineering concept simply stated means teach your engineers to design products
and have them build so that they will need to be replaced in 3-5 years because
they no longer function correctly.
But
this concept has underlying ethical issues, so the change took place to build
better and better products that needed to be replaced but not because they were
worn out but because they needed to be upgraded in order to function better
than they did before.
No
ethical concerns here…
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