If you know me, you know I do. They’re a lesser computer that facilitates a layer of lies to the customer about how a computer really works; they also encourage no thinking. But that’s not the point. While talking to Sam Lee, I think I finally realized why, beyond being an inferior computer, it elicits so much anger in me:
Irrational consumerism. People buy what they don’t need, at prices that they should know they don’t need to pay, for a product that doesn’t really actually perform with hardware that’s up to date.
I mean, look at the first-gen iPhone (there are plenty of examples, but this is an easy one). 3G had been around since 2001 and was becoming less of a novelty in 2005, and they weren’t able to put it in the iPhone. But because of his holiness Steve Jobs, people bought them anyway. Then, when the second-gen iPhone came out and had something that should have been in the first, people upgraded the Mac way: throw away a product that costs too much and does too little to buy, at full price, an almost identical inferior one. Yay for frivolous gimmicky features.
Oh, and I seem to dislike people with a messiah complex as well.
Is this a problem with shininess or people going after shininess? Should companies eliminate all shininess, or should they urge customers not to be distracted by it?
If shininess is the reason people are buying things, then that’s a problem.
If you look at the reason, then it accounts for shiny things that have minimal usefulness but are really there for the shininess (macs).
So what do you go after? Do you get people to sit down rationally and hopefully avoid a hasty purchase, or do you try to get the company to either sink or change its products and its marketing?
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