An interesting video: Consumerism has completely ruined technology

[ResolutionNZ]

I found this video really interesting and thought it worthwhile sharing it for those who are interested.

 

[subjonas]

He made a few good points. I agree consumerism can easily become a negative thing for everyone, but I may have missed his argument for how it ruined technology. It made technology regress?

 

[theluggage]

He made a few good points. I agree consumerism can easily become a negative thing for everyone, but I may have missed his argument for how it ruined technology. It made technology regress?

He seems to be obsessing over the price of a top-of-the-range, fully tricked-out iPhone, that offers photo, video and gaming features way beyond what older iPhones can do.

If you just want comms and personal productivity, you can get a 17e for $600 which is still new tech & better in almost every respect than the original iPhone and is still a below-inflation price increase c.f. an original 2008 iPhone 3G at $500 (off-contract). That's about as much as I'd want to pay for an iPhone if I ever switch from Android... and you can still get a perfectly good Android smartphone for $200-$300 which may not be as nice as an iPhone but will get the basic job done.

One reason for the annual iPhone mania is that a lot of people still get their phones on contract from a carrier, and the networks push superficially (if you don't do the math) free/low-cost "upgrades" with every contract renewal. Worked out a long time ago that if you plan to keep a phone for 3+ years it's usually cheaper to buy the phone upfront & SIM-free (at least in UK & EU).

If you look at Macs then - until the AI bubble hit (that's another story) - the price points have been pretty stable (what's inflation?) for decades apart from a bit of a blip when all-SSD and retina models appeared, and bangs-per-buck has grown exponentially. That's been a *benefit* of consumerism and an expanding market.

The candidates for "ruining" technology are, I'd say,

• The push towards services and subscriptions for everything (even when there's no customer benefit) and the related... let's be polite and call it "platform decay".
• Cybercrime/malware etc. which provides an excuse for companies to force obsolescence "because security vulnerabilities"
• Change for the sake of change (*cough* liquid glass *cough*)
• In Apple's case an occasional tendency towards "form over function" (*cough* butterfly keyboard *cough*)
• The current "AI" tulip mania, which is crushing everything else before it and (I suspect) will mark the end of the "zero inflation, booming specs" era in technology.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Watching now and early on the one thing that does strike me is how much of this is driven by the "need" for "new" iPhones every single year.

It's become a bit of rearranging the deck chairs every year when you could really make the case that a new iPhone lineup every 2-3 years would be actually major improvements each time.

 

[theluggage]

It's become a bit of rearranging the deck chairs every year when you could really make the case that a new iPhone lineup every 2-3 years would be actually major improvements each time.

Apple Reports 3Q 2026 Results: $29.8B Profit on $109.4B Revenue

Apple today announced financial results for its third fiscal quarter of 2026, which corresponds to the second calendar quarter of the year. For the quarter, Apple posted revenue of $109.4 billion and net quarterly profit of $29.8 billion, or $2.02 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $94.0...

www.macrumors.com

If you look at that sales graph and the huge spikes in iPhone sales every year when the new model comes out you can see why they do it. You can also see that its very much associated with iPhones and watches (hard to see how much comes from iPads because that's sitting on top of the spiky watch line) - Macs and services not so much.

If they moved to releasing iPhones every 2-3 years, would those peaks spread out into more consistent all-year-round sales, or would they just disappear? That would be a "courageous" experiment for Apple to try but I suspect that the "best" result you could hope for would simply be that total sales wouldn't go down.

I still suspect its largely driven by people on contracts - it's pretty important for Apple sales that whenever your 12/18/24 month contract is up for renewal there's a newer phone available to tempt you to upgrade...

 

[I7guy]

Apple Reports 3Q 2026 Results: $29.8B Profit on $109.4B Revenue

Apple today announced financial results for its third fiscal quarter of 2026, which corresponds to the second calendar quarter of the year. For the quarter, Apple posted revenue of $109.4 billion and net quarterly profit of $29.8 billion, or $2.02 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $94.0...

www.macrumors.com

If you look at that sales graph and the huge spikes in iPhone sales every year when the new model comes out you can see why they do it. You can also see that its very much associated with iPhones and watches (hard to see how much comes from iPads because that's sitting on top of the spiky watch line) - Macs and services not so much.

If they moved to releasing iPhones every 2-3 years, would those peaks spread out into more consistent all-year-round sales, or would they just disappear? That would be a "courageous" experiment for Apple to try but I suspect that the "best" result you could hope for would simply be that total sales wouldn't go down.

I still suspect its largely driven by people on contracts - it's pretty important for Apple sales that whenever your 12/18/24 month contract is up for renewal there's a newer phone available to tempt you to upgrade...

There are a lot of someone’s upgrading for their own reasons. that doesn’t mean everybody is upgrading yearly, it means at any given year, with over a billion users, there is a lot of opportunity for Apple to sell phones. That’s why they are on a yearly rollout plan.

 

[BrianBaughn]

A lot of human energy is wasted on developing and using just about any science. There have been highly compensated chemists out there through the years trying to make colors brighter, cigarettes more addictive, artificial flavors better and so on. Most of the time giving not much of a crap about safety.

In the meantime, other researchers have to beg for money to actually improve humanity.