Am I the only one who thinks that we are all gullible mugs, caught in some great technology trap? No sooner has the latest miracle device burst onto the market than it is replaced by a shinier, faster version. Within months, the state-of-the-art gizmo on which we splashed out hundreds of pounds is considered to be obsolete. My mobile has a two-megapixel camera built in? Yours has a four-meg camera? Well, his has satnav on board and an integrated MP3 player. We can’t win.
If our gizmo goes wrong after the warranty expires, we find either that the maker no longer services it, or that it’s uneconomic to fix. We have no option but to upgrade. Why on earth aren’t manufacturers responsible for servicing their products for more than a year or two? We try to turn our homes into digitally integrated wireless-entertainment heavens, only to end up cursing the modern plague of incompatibility when cables the retailer sold us won’t fit the next- generation sockets. Where are the installation and advice services? We’re not expected to install boilers or washing machines by ourselves, so why should digital equipment be any different? Format wars abound, irrespective of the misery they cause consumers, because big companies such as Apple and Sony refuse to open up their toys to competition — so the MP3 player you purchase locks you into seeking legitimate music downloads from only one source. Shame on them.
Simon Carpenter, 41, is a quantity surveyor from Blackheath in south London who admits: “I had no idea a DVD recorder could possibly have so many (six) different disc formats. I thought DVD was, well, DVD.” While multiformat recorders have eased this dilemma slightly, the next generation of players pitting Blu-ray against HD-DVD is likely to ignite yet another format war, in which millions of consumers will be invited to back the wrong horse.
The technology cycle of development, launch, upgrade and replacement is becoming so short that many of us, as consumers, are suffering from “technoia”, a paranoid belief that the moment we buy a new gadget it will instantly become obsolete, which leads to a paralysing fear of shopping for all things electrical.
Mike Spanner, an engineer from Cardiff, shares these fears and fumes: “I object to the ‘buy and get lost’ culture of most suppliers of high-tech products. Buy online, but don’t try to find us when the product doesn’t work. We often have to dustbin gadgets because of a simple fault, or find that customer support amounts to a voice on the telephone in Jakarta.”
Growing numbers of industry observers believe the marketplace teeters perilously on the brink of open warfare as consumers grow disillusioned with technology. Adam Daum, consumer-electronics analyst at the research company Gartner, says: “The much-touted concept of the digitally connected home remains a dream because manufacturers go on launching products with formats and standards that are incompatible. When the public finds out that goods don’t work together, they will stop trusting the manufacturers completely and stop buying. A consumer backlash is a real possibility. It is a disaster waiting to happen.”
If the computing and home-electronics industries want to prevent this declaration of war, they urgently need to strike a new deal with the people. While competition may be the performance-enhancing drug that fuels innovation and slims down prices, never-ending format wars serve only to fuel our technoia. Enough! It’s tempting to think that government can simply knock heads together, but in a globalised free market, regulation would make matters worse. Do you have confidence in a quango to choose the best DVD format? The answer lies in industry decision-makers establishing common standards, which is in their own long-term interests anyway. They also have new EU environmental responsibilities to make products that aren’t fit for landfill mere months after hitting the shops.
As it is, even manufacturers with top-notch reputations for customer service seem to have brainwashed us into accepting built-in obsolescence as the norm — the inevitable price of progress. Why so? Take my own Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop as an example. Three years ago, this model was the mutt’s nuts, and pricey at £1,800. Yet it recently gave up the ghost after the processor overheated, having previously required two new batteries costing more than £100 each, and the one-year warranty had expired two years earlier. I had no option but to buy a replacement. I ruefully recalled the Dell saleswoman telling me how “future-proof” and “upgradable” the model was. Yes, right.
My replacement laptop — a mid-range Packard Bell — boasts a far more powerful and energy-efficient processor, built-in wireless connectivity, twice the memory and a hard drive five times bigger, all for £800. Far better specifications for a fraction of the cost. So why am I complaining? Well, that was still £800 I would not have spent had the old laptop been built to last longer than three years. I shouldn’t have needed a new laptop and I shouldn’t have been forced to buy one. The irony is that Dell has one of the best reputations for reliability and service. What chance do rival machines stand? With an eye on specification and price, many laptops are routinely assembled from components hailing from as many as 40 countries, in an admittedly impressive example of global supply-chain management (as Thomas Friedman explores in his book The Earth Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century). Makers might argue that they cherry-pick the best components this way, yet Joe Consumer construes this as cheap materials, cheap labour: cost-cutting that results in a machine not built to last.
Would we accept a similar level of build quality from a car manufacturer? Clearly not. Fierce competition in the automotive industry has now made three-year warranties standard, yet the electronics industry still clings doggedly to a one-year duration, with extended warranties often costing hundreds of pounds extra. We should be lobbying hard to make three-year warranties standard for consumer electronics as well.
If the technology and retail industries must start offering value, we shoppers must also buck up. The speed of technological progress, coupled with plunging hardware prices, is conditioning us into accepting electronic gadgets as throw-away commodities, mere fashion items. Such assumptions have to be wrong from environmental, cost and even moral perspectives. Are consumers enslaved like prisoners to their addiction? Unlike in previous decades, when tele- vision sets could be rented, today’s aggressive pace of change slashes their residual value to the point where financing schemes become impractical. Instead, we must arm ourselves to accept a constant process of evolution. In exchange, big business should serve us fairly.
Many observers advocate adopting a robust approach to the blandishments of marketing people. Mark Blowers, senior analyst at the IT research firm the Butler Group, says: “It is time we stood back and stopped being taken in by all the marketing hype. We need to ask ourselves whether we really need so many features on a device. The more complex gadgets grow, the more we have to spend and the more likely something is to go wrong.”
Ask yourself, for instance: If you don’t do any video editing or store movies, why do you need a computer with a 400GB hard drive? Does a seven- megapixel digital camera actually meet your family’s needs better than one with five? Are you seriously going to spend much time watching video clips on your 3G mobile phone’s 2in screen? If not, why pay more? Before going shopping, establish which functions you want the gadget to perform. If a cheaper model meets those demands, don’t let commission-hungry, jargon-spouting salespeople convince you to buy the more expensive version. Ask them to justify the extra expense. Make them explain that a high-definition “HD-ready” television will require an additional HD tuner in order to receive HD broadcasts.
