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.
3 Comments
November 19, 2008 at 3:32 pm
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?
November 19, 2008 at 5:28 pm
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).
November 21, 2008 at 2:17 pm
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?