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Consumers Buy Less Tech Stuff, Keep It Longer
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times reports that there are indications that a sea change is taking place in consumer behavior as a result of the great recession: Americans are buying less tech stuff and making it last longer (reg. may be required). Although in many cases the difference is mere months, economists and consumers say the approach may outlast a full recovery and the return of easy credit, because of the strong impression the downturn has made on consumers. For example Patti Hauseman stuck with her five-year-old Apple computer until it started making odd whirring noises and occasionally malfunctioning before she bought a new computer for Christmas — actually, a refurbished one. 'A week later, the old one died. We timed it pretty well,' says Hauseman, adding that it was not so much that she could not afford new things, but that the last few years of economic turmoil had left her feeling that she could be stealing from her future by throwing away goods that still had value. Consumers are holding onto new cars for a record 63.9 months, up 4.5 months from a year ago and 14 percent since the end of 2008, according one research firm. Industry analysts also report that people on average are waiting 18 months to upgrade their cellphones, up from every 16 months just a few years ago. 'We're not going back to a time of our grandmothers' tales of what they kept and how they used things so carefully,' says Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at the Harvard Business School and a historian of consumer behavior. 'But we'll see a consistent inching or trudging towards that.'"
The good news here is that the computer buying public is getting more educated about what they need and what's available, and starting to find better deals.
The bad news is that the tech industry has to compete more with itself which means its scrambling over a smaller total of dollars available.
Although I have an EyeTV for my Mac and can record TV shows when I need to... my day to day TV recording needs are still met with my VCR that I've had for the past 10 years.
(I also bought my first CD player in 1993...what's that 10 years after CDs started getting produced)
(and I have a twenty-year old VAX 4200 minicomputer running OpenBSD as my home firewall)
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
The bad news is that the tech industry has to compete more with itself which means its scrambling over a smaller total of dollars available.
The good news is that as the installed base of five-year-old PCs and netbooks increases, publishers of commercial software may finally realize that the common practice of increasing published system requirements rather than the efficiency of algorithms, commonly called Wirth's law, is costing them customers.
and keep it for years than have the latest and greatest every year. Sadly, it is getting tougher and tougher to find those quality products,
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The summary said " Americans are buying less tech stuff and making it last longer"?
No worry, manufacturer are making everything last shorter
1) Consumers will go back to their old "disposable" life style just as fast as you can say "mo' money".
2) But why does every just take fro granted that the economy will return to "normal" any time soon?
:T:R:A:N:S:
When people have less money they keep their items for a longer period. They have functional items and don't have the money and there is less peer pressure to buy the latest since for many the money is tight. They dont waste their money by buying new items they don't need.
This more or less always happen when the economy are bad.
Just saying it like it are.
The environment will be happy.
From the perspective of the wealthy one percent--whose greatest concern is finding a bank of historical Swiss virtue with a fresh coating of wikicaulk--the Gini has delivered unfathomable riches.
In America, with the repeal of the estate tax, tau is better than ever. The majority of the population who tacitly supported the "death" tax revocation against their present interests--in favour of interests they wish someday to have--now find themselves pinching their threads. Who would have guessed?
Here's an interesting theoretical question. Under what conditions does accelerated inequity appeal to the majority of a democratic population? And how long can you keep the descending majority from figuring out they have more to gain by repealing the obsolescence tax (which they actually pay) rather than the death tax (as aspirational indignity increasingly far from reach)?
I used to purchase a new computer every couple years. Now I find with the exception of high end gaming my 4-5 year old computer will still do everything I want to do at an acceptable speed. Even the gaming works, just not at maximum settings.
It wasn't that long ago that if you were a couple years behind the curve then many operations were extremely slow. That does not hold true anymore, at least in my case.
I think that, at least for the average user in their day-to-day tasks, five or six year old computers still perform adequately, and people really have no reason to upgrade. My uncle has an eight year old IBM ThinkPad which he still uses as his primary computer, and it runs Windows XP, Outlook Express and Office 2003 just fine - and that's all he needs. Given, it's more or less approaching the end of its life, the battery doesn't hold a charge and the HDD is as slow as a dog, but having seen his friends' bad experiences with new hardware and the bloated mess that was Vista, he's reluctant to upgrade.
And that bloat I think is causing a lot of this. New hardware isn't much faster than the old if it's dragged down by a bloated OS. And I think it's fair to say that most of these new 'features' aren't really necessary at all, so people don't see a need to upgrade. Why do you think XP still has such a large market share? Because people already have it, it does what they need it to, and there's no real need for them to upgrade.
I don't see this as a return to frugality - I see this as a warning shot for the industry.
Innovation in the electronics and technology industry is stagnating. What really separates a high-def TV, smart phone, or computer from one of 5 years ago?
Consumers seem to think not much.
As much as I love my new Verizon iPhone - it's not really leaps and bounds better than my old 3GS I gave to my wife. My company switched to Verizon, so I was forced to "upgrade". If I was paying for it, I wouldn't have made the switch.
I think TV manufacturers saw this trend coming a couple of years ago, so they scrambled to put 3D in to every TV they could hoping it would spur another round of upgrades - and most of the world said meh...
The low-hanging fruit is gone - the tech world will need to really think creatively to create the next round of stuff that people find useful.
-ted
I tend to hang onto all of my stuff until it breaks beyond repair or is no longer functional for me. I hung on to my Dell Dimension 8100 and kept it going with upgrades and replacements for almost 10 years. It's still usable, but I needed more computing power for number crunching so I got a new computer.
I used my Tungsten T3 for 4 years until it accidentally got washed in the laundry. Replaced it with another one and still using it 3 years later.
still watch tv on a 10 year old 23" CRT
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
vs deflation.
In a deflationary environment, money becomes more valuable over time, so when people spend some, they look for products which are going to last longer or which are higher quality items. As a result, producers who produce higher quality, do better than those who produce cheap crap.
In an inflationary environment the reverse is true, it is more important to get rid of the money, and in fact getting into debt also makes sense as well. The quality matters less because you can just buy another one using money which is devaluing anyway.
Deleted
"For example Patti Hauseman stuck with her five-year-old Apple computer until it started making odd whirring noises and occasionally malfunctioning before she bought a new computer for Christmas"
Yep. I have a five year-old Mac Mini which I upgraded the CPU in (1.5 CoreSolo->2Ghz Core2Duo), a three-year old MacBook Pro, my wife has a five year-old MacBook (the original one). They are all doing fine for the moment, though ominously it looks like Lion is 64-bit only and so the original 32-bit MacBook will have to go.
This isn't a Mac-only thing either. I'm sure someone would be able to point me at their five year-old PC laptop and say pretty much the same thing - basically unless you're doing really demanding tasks or gaming, anything from the last five years is fine.
I have two applications where I wish I had slightly more modern hardware - Logic 9 (music production) stutters at times when I use a lot of audio effect plug-ins, and I wouldn't mind more than 4Gb so that I could run virtual machines a bit more smoothly. That's it - my day-to-day existence is more than catered for with this hardware, indeed it's pretty much overkill.
Cheers,
Ian
Welcome to the normal way of living America!
that it gets worded that she worries about stealing from her own future, rather then some kids or grandkids. That is a bigger shift in mentality then this short term frugality. Used to be that people planned long term for not just themselves but also the next generation or so. Now it is all me me me, with no care for even their own kids (except as perhaps status symbols "look it got enough free time that i can take care of my own child" or insurance when age finally kicks the legs out from under you), much less any generations more remote.
The corporate propaganda/marketing machine should be proud, it have shown that people can have their habits changed if one maintain a message long enough.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Am I the only one appalled by this part "Consumers are holding onto new cars for a record 63.9 months"?
Cars don't really go obsolete that quickly. What sense is there in buying new cars all the time? However, this figure doesn't account for the large demographic who buys used so maybe that duration would prove to be much higher? Basically the early adopters vs. the average consumers in the auto industry.
I think some people just had a wake up call. I think its silly how fast some people toss good items for something slightly better sometimes. People should hold on to cars for more than six years and cellphones longer than 2 years. My last car had 200,000 miles on it before it crashed by someone else. I keep cellphones as long as they work most of the time. I think my wifes phone was going on 4 years before we upgraded it this last time.
It's just smart money management. I know this does not help the economy monster, but when the economy was only held up by people living above their means. It was bound to crash sooner or later.
Windows 95 killed the P1, Windows 98 killed the P2, the CD killed the tape player, digital broadcasts kill the rabbit ear TVs. I think the main exception is display devices. I guess that doesn't explain the cars and toothpaste economizing, but I'm always amazed how many people attribute most obsolescence to hardware planning. Most hardware "planned obsolescence" occurs in hindsight - lack of support for repairs, parts, ink, etc., most major changes are driven by software.
Gently reply
Well, if you're from NZ and wasnt born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or been brainwashed by the consumerism monster. We tend to keep and use things..
Same phone for the last 8 years. Works fine. Same laptop since 2005, works fine. The way I see it, the money I dont spend on technology junk I dont *really* need to live my life, I can spend on something fun, like travelling.
I think that the reason is much simpler : the advances is hardware are becoming less significant. When I compare my brand new iPhone 4 to my previous original iPhone, there are not so many huge changes. My wife is perfectly happy with the previous one :-)
And same for desktop computers : faster, cheaper, quieter, and that's pretty much it. If I compare today's iMac with the one I am typing this on (3 years old), the changes are only incremental ones.
I'm just a barista, and I don't make a lot of money, but even I manage to buy a new Apple device almost every month.
Each month, I put all of my first three weeks of earnings toward buying a new iPhone or an iPad or an iBook or an iPod. I already have 14 different types of iPods, and 8 iPhones. Next month I think I will save up for a new Mac mini (it will be my 12th).
It's my duty as an American to buy as many Apple products as I can, even if it means that sometimes I don't have enough money for rent, and sometimes not even enough money for food.
Before switching to Apple, I was going through a PC laptop every 12 months. My MacBook Pro is going on three years and I really have no need to upgrade despite the allure of the new models. It's not hard to see many older MacBook models floating around. I wonder how much of the increased shelf life is due to the increase in Apple switchers?
Instant Karma's gonna get you - John Lennon
too ...
(emerge is still running)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"I find it remarkable how they expect people to keep buying and buying."
But that's exactly what people do till they are trillions and trillions and trillions in debt.
Companies owe the banks lots of money, it has to be paid back or the thugs come rounds and break some legs.
You have to keep buying. There must be Growth!
Deleted
I still have (and use) my computer that I bought ten years ago. Sure, it might not be powerful enough to run the newest games (although, surprisingly, it can run quite a few games that I would expect that it couldn't), but it works for my needs. In this case, buying another computer just for the sake of buying one is rather pointless.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Bad news Patti Hauseman, Apple has taken note of your unacceptable buying behavior and has decided to revoke your membership in the Cult of Jobs. Only those that blindly upgrade their hardware multiple times a year are permitted to maintain their memberships.
If you wish to have your membership re-instated, please provide proof of purchase for an AT&T iPhone, a Verizon iPhone, an iPod (Touch or Nano only), MacBook, and iPad. Note that refurbished models DO NOT count.
In times of less money people don't want to replace everything and they want the tech they buy to last more than six months before shitting out on them. Actually people want that all the time but then if stuff doesn't break why would people buy the same stuff again and keep this sham we call an economy going.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Five years is the typical standard for a magnetic hard disk to fail.
Which can be replaced by a local computer repair shop with another hard disk, not necessarily another computer. As I understand it, hard disks and RAM are the components most often designed to be replaced, even on laptops.
"Consumers Buy Less Tech Stuff, keep it longer"
Than non-consumers?
I don't know about you guys, but I try not to swap new gadgets all the time not just for economical reasons. It's also a hell of a lot less of a strain on the environment if you can use something longer.
.: Max Romantschuk
I'm sending this from a 2004 iBook. First computer I bought was a LCII. Had to throw it out ten years later. It still worked. Bought a Bondi Blue iMac to send to college. Gave it away ten years later, still working, replaced it with a MacBook Pro. Replaced the LCII with a Power Mac G3. Had to discard it ten years later. It still worked. Where it used to sit is an eMac bought for a student. It still works, and I am looking to give it away. It was replaced by a MacBook. Bought an iMac a couple of years ago because the eMac was too slow.
Only hardware problem I ever had was in the G3, which had a loose connection inside. While it was in the shop, I bought a used Mac Plus in a thrift shop for $5. Used it to word process. When the G3 came back, I put the Mac Plus in the garage and used it to write on when all the other computers were occupied.
I have tossed or given away a lot of retail value because they just got overtaken by technology.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I looked up "runaway1956" on IMDB, but only got this. Have you produced anything I might be familiar with, or was it all indie stuff?
The tendency to look down on "indie stuff" solely because it hasn't been reviewed by the mainstream media is characteristic of someone who accepts or even benefits from a divide between those who create works and those who "just consume". It is in the mainstream media's interest to downplay prosumption because it competes with products of entertainment conglomerates that own the mainstream news media.
She finally caved 2 months ago, and now she can't stop raving about all the benefits of the new TV.
Has she yet figured out that one can hook up a PC to an HDTV and surf the web from the couch? That's the biggest tangible benefit of switching from a working CRT SDTV to a new LCD HDTV that I can think of, especially if you're not yet willing to pay extra to the cable company and the video rental store for high-definition sources.
When I was 18, I had an 11-year-old car and kept it for 51 months. Then I got a 10-year-old car and kept it for 39 months. My current car was 7 years old when I got it, and I've had it for 52 months.
I'm still waiting for someone to report me to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
http://lkcl.net/laptop.html - i am advocating a hardware design approach which would fulfil the criteria of being upgradeable as-and-when. using, for example, the recently-announced "Bloom Laptop" concept for the casework, and Embedded SoC CPUs for the hardware, as a modular design. this approach simply is not possible with Intel or AMD CPUs.
Guys, hey guys. Seriously though. The new Macs just came out a couple days ago. Clearly, we can make some exceptions here.
When hardware is too *old* to run windows effectively any longer, it becomes a LINUX server in my house. While 2gb of memory or less may tax Microsoft applications, a LINUX fileserver (samba) and Openoffice for the kids homework is just fine. Tighter kernel, less bloat. We just got our Son starting College a new laptop, it came with W7. At 1st glance I see no great advantage to this new OS, all the other Windows systems we use are running XP, it it does what we need. W7 may be much better than VISTA, but unless forced I will use what works and causes me the less maintenance (we don't get paid for maintaining home systems now do we :-) ) I am a UNIX Admin and would like to let that sleeping dog just lie....
I had hoped to be able to replace the 3 laptops I bought the Fam in 2007 by now, but given the economy, not possible. Unless it dies completely (overheated cpu/gpu due to insufficient cooling) or another child starts College, I will have to limp along with what I have, and re-purpose from Windows to LINUX to extend hardware usage.
The only exception to this was my cell phone, now I actually have a Droid. Hard to imagine that hardware making technological improvements by leaps and bounds, for me the apps are what make it very useful for now.
Hell I'm still using a SDTV and plan to do so for quite some time. If it dies, I have access to hundreds of perfectly good TVs people are getting rid of while they upgrade to HD for next to nothing.
To some people, HDTV offers only a quantitative improvement: sharper picture. I used to believe this until I realized that HDTV offers a qualitative improvement over SDTV: most sets have an input for video from a PC. This means one can surf the web from the couch, watch YouTube, or play indie video games on one.
I agree that everyday software has reached a level of maturity that makes frequent updates less urgent. Or maybe it is a lack of innovation. Either way, Windows XP from 2001 does not look much inferior to Windows 7. I'll grant Microsoft that they have improved somewhat, but it is less than I'd expect from the eight years of development between XP and 7.
Maybe as a side effect, the race to more performance and memory is not as urgent anymore. For most tasks, a typical PC from 2007 is still perfectly satisfying (your laptop for instance). Exceptions are
-Games (some titles seem to require a better graphics card than my 2007 Geforce 8600GT now, even if you are willing to turn down detail levels)
-Video editing/encoding, which was always demanding and a modern PC just can handle it better.
On top of that, it seems to me that the increase in performance has actually slowed down a little. So it makes perfect sense to keep your PC longer.
Same for TV: HDTV is nice but at least in Germany the TV stations are far from offering everything in HD. So shelling out big bucks for that new TV set is somewhat questionable...
C - the footgun of programming languages
Big surprise... people are starting to buy the things they NEED vs the next "Oh, new shiny! Must have". I think the only real exception is teenagers (who for the most part spend mom and dad's money, or have disposable income because mom and dad pay for the rest of their life).
I work at a big university in the IT department. A good job, but we haven't seen a "real" raise in at least 6 years. Whatever little raise we might get (1% maybe, 0% several of those years) is eaten up by increases in health care premiums and other fees. So wages are very flat or less. It's made everyone really think hard about what you NEED. I'm typing this on a 5+ year old dell dimension that someone threw away. Literally, not from my work either. It needed a new hard drive. I added ram ($14) and hey howdy, it runs GREAT, faster than the even older machine it replaced. For a total of $14 + $39 for a new SATA drive on sale. And an hour of my time. It even runs Win7 with Aero (tried just for fun).
Same with TVs. Do I *want* a new LCD? Sure. Am I willing to pay $300+ for a cheap one when my 32" tube still works fine? No. Not yet anyway. Once it goes, or starts ghosting or flaking out, yes, then I will go shopping. Its that way with a lot for the new middle class - the ones who seem to be getting screwed from all sides. My family has conserved in every way we can, and we just make it. I even drive a 10+year old car, with 170,000miles on it, cause hey it's paid off and even repairs once in a while are a lot cheaper than a guaranteed car payment every month.
Welcome to the new economy.
We have computers that can, for all intents and purposes, replace the TV and stereo. We have phones that can, in some instances replace a computer. We have cameras that keep getting more megapixels but the noise issue is back-burnered. We have cars that, while styling has changed, haven't really changed. We have TV's that only seem to be able to play "reality" programs and sports. We lock into a game console that hasn't been updated in years. We have kitchen gadgets that sit there as we go out to eat. How much more do we need?
The problem is is that we've overbought and if we take a moment to look at it all, how much of it is important? The answer, my smartphone.
Seriously... 5 years and 3.9 months. People barely get them paid off and then go back to the loan well and buy a new car. Come on people cars are not that disposable 10 - 20 years in the life span of an average car. If you take care of it you can have it for 50 - 75 years no problems. Look at all those 55 Chevys still on the roads today.
Increasing the efficiency of algorithms is in most cases neither possible nor necessary. Because
a) mature and efficient algorithms for the problem at hand are known, and it would take a major breakthrough to improve them.
b) merely keeping the existing level of software optimization would lead to faster sytems (system meaning hardware and software) because the hardware improves.
In mobile, I agree, but in desktop, I disagree. Desktop CPU frequencies have topped out at around 3 GHz, with each generation adding more cores. Taking advantage of more cores for a single application takes better algorithms, and yes, computer science researchers are working on algorithms that parallelize better.
Tools are the opposite. My father's jigsaw, which is about 20 years old now, still goes strong in my shop. My old childhood hand tools (going on about 40 years now) are still quite useable in my shop. My first sewing machine, which I bought 15 years ago still works and looks like new. I have a tektronix oscilloscope that is about 20 years old. It is still going strong. I have a friend who has a table saw that is about 50 years old. It is still humming and cutting wood quite well. My electric drill and skill saw are about 15 years old and they look and act like brand new.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
I have at least two or three shirts that I made about 15 years ago. They have outlasted much stuff that I bought.
I have talked with someone who has one of the first clear raincoats that I made about 10 years ago. He uses it very heavily and it still looks like new.
I have a home made tote bag that I use *very* heavily (inluding carrying my laptop to and from work on my bike) and it shows no sign of wear.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
i can't think of the last thing i flat out replaced for no good reason... i've been driving the same car for 10 years. i've had the same cellphone for 5 years. etc etc
sounds like people have learned to not be retarded.
Still using an Apple PowerMac G4 "Sawtooth", still have an original production-run Sprint Palm Pre... why toss it if it's still awesome? Of course, they've all been upgraded a bunch - I thought that was the whole point? I see so many people complaining about the lack of upgradability in certain products who then go and buy entirely new machines/phones/whatever every 6 months. I guess people just like to complain?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
My 3 year old laptop has Vista, and it isn't "bloated" at all. It boots up and runs and I click on whatever program I want, and everything works perfectly. I can leave it running for weeks with no problems.
Bought JLab USB Laptop Speakers. Kinda bulky, but better than buying a new laptop. Also, they sound really good.
My car is 12 years old, only has 72,000 miles (thanks to my employer who gives me a car to drive!) I've kept it because it is dependable, a MUSTANG, and PAID OFF. No car payments. My other tech toys, the home computer is only 9 months old, which replaced a 7 year old computer, the printer is a year old, the old one was 6 years old (died), dSLR is less than a year old (old camera was 5 years old). My cell phone is about the only thing I replace yearly.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/more-on-the-future-implications-ibm-watson-technology/#comment-534
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Only in brick-and-mortar stores. I grew up with those, and avoid them now.
For oversized or heavy products, shipping can become expensive compared to borrowing a family friend's truck. And if a product doesn't live up to its review, or it ends up unusably unergonomic (especially screens, keyboards, and touch screens), you have to pay return shipping, and I've found that online stores are more likely to charge a 15 percent restocking fee for returned merchandise.
I do the pay as you go thing and $140 is probably about right per year.
And a lot of people posting comments to Slashdot stories about smartphones appear not to understand this. They can't fathom why I carry a separate PDA and dumbphone (Archos 43 and Audiovox 8610 on Virgin Mobile USA) rather than upgrade to a smartphone with a data plan and a minimum qualifying monthly voice plan. They pay for a month of service what I pay for a year. And they can't fathom why people would keep land line service instead of buying a separate cell phone for each member of the household, even children.
I have been trying to decide if to upgrade, as I use my iphones features all the time, or if I keep my iphone 3G going for a fourth year(I am currently 2.5 years into it).
Assuming "$" means a United States dollar: AT&T really wants you to buy a new phone. Unlike T-Mobile, which offers a SIM-only plan called Even More Plus that knocks $10 off voice or $20 off voice+data, AT&T doesn't offer a discount for bringing your own unlocked phone or keeping a phone past the contract period.
The great depression changed the people that lived through it for the rest of their lives. I knew a couple, and their saving and spending habits amazed me. For example that last scoop of potato's left over from dinner were put away for tomorrow, how dare they throw them away. As this depression was not as bad, what percentage of people will keep their thrifty ways, or perhaps what percentage of thriftiness will the population as a whole retain?
Is targeting DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 that much different from targeting both the Wii and the Xbox 360 in a multiplatform title?
the devices and applications have already matured way past the needs of the everyday user. and even gamers. even in gaming, the leading edge of computing devices with its excessive demand for processing power and memory, the point which a normal person would notice any difference is long past. we are getting great realism with great visuals and in high framerates. most cards and games already offer framerates past a person's visual detection ability already. and the ones who are still pushing for more generally seem to be performance enthusiasts. people who aim for 120 fps and on. so, if even in gaming we have reached a saturation point in regard to devices - imagine how it is like for ordinary internet usage, office usage, and casual usage. we just dont need to replace what we have.
Read radical news here
even with many times in the bank that what he has I refuse to buy a "smart phone" or similar. Too me it seems that the name was a give away. Make the owner feel important, pretentious even, and fleece him behind his back because they know he will justify it to himself!!! I deserve it. We have a running joke at my work, the support people drive better (read : more expensive) cars than the programmers and admins. I do not understand the need to pick up a near 800 dollar lease, that damn car's MSRP is near the person's income who drives it.
Its like wandering into Starbucks and seeing all the expensive hardware on display. People are far to convinced that the items they are seen with define them. I will drive my little TDI and smile. Its a flipping car, just like its a flipping phone, laptop, etc. They are meaningless in a world when anyone can go in debt to have them.
Having expensive toys does not make you rich or special.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well, if only Patti had replaced the failing CPU fan, she could have kept that 5-year old machine going....
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
And by the way, why target commercial software only? Open source is just as susceptible to bloat. Take OpenOffice and its derivative for example
I didn't say proprietary; I said commercial, and I meant it in the sense of any computer program that is distributed to the public for a fee, or for which the maintainer offers a paid support service. For example, Oracle Open Office (formerly StarOffice) is a commercial distribution of OpenOffice.org.
Your title makes no sense, if demand is limited, why would the company keep producing at the same rate, or even increase it?
Demand is infinite before the price is set, so if there aren't enough sales, then the manufacture could drop the price and demand would increase, or they could stop manufacturing so much.
Your PC had a video card, but a lot of PCs don't.
every video card for the last decade has had s-video and composite out
Please read what I wrote. A lot of PCs, especially laptops, are sold without a video card. Instead, they have an integrated graphics processor in the northbridge or CPU. These rarely if ever have S-Video and composite outputs. You get VGA, and HDMI if you're lucky. And how do you plan to address the eyestrain issue of trying to read a 1024px wide layout over a composite cable that can barely manage 320 distinct pixels* across the screen?
* Technically, analog video doesn't have pixels, but it does have limited frequency bands. Luma in NTSC can fill 0.0-3.0 MHz before it starts to color-fringe into the chroma band at 3.0-4.2 MHz. The 3 MHz bandwidth implies a 6 MHz sample rate to reconstruct per Nyquist's theorem, or just under 320 samples per 52.15 microsecond scanline.
The summary said " Americans are buying less tech stuff and making it last longer"?
No worry, manufacturer are making everything last shorter
The "enlarge your penis" people aren't.
I have noticed this odd trend. More and more users (including companies) hold on to old computer hardware. The argument is that it is good enough. But when the same people install and run the latest software which require a more powerful computer they blame the software engineers. This happened with Vista and is a common complaint with Firefox.
If older hardware really is good enough there is no reason to install the latest software with the latest features. But there is a mismatch here. Users now expect to get new features that require more memory and CPU power but still run it on computers P4 2GB XP computers. This makes no sense.
Growing up during times of scarcity programs people to think this way. For my father, it was the ration period of WW2 when he was a small child, and he has what I consider almost OCD bargain-hunting habits, which unfortunately also lead to pack-rat impulses. People who learn the idea of making ends meet like that do not appreciate the idea of an opportunity cost, as someone growing up in relative bounty might. It's a huge psychological difference to consider your time of non-zero monetary value, and stop worrying about pennies here and there by over-shopping and over-analyzing everything.
My wife and I have similar backgrounds, and are relatively non-consumer compared to our peers, in spite of probably having higher income than most of them. We make some high-value choices once in a while, but live a level of austerity that others might consider miserly. It suits us, to be somewhat divorced from the equally OCD cycle of consumption we see all around us.
Many of our western goods can last much longer than people tend to imagine.
The usefulness of the slightly faster model (cell phones, computers) has slowed down lately. THou this is mostly due to home user software not doubling it's resource demands every ~7 years like the hardware does. While I feel we are at more of a temporary plateau then a trend that will last a long time. It's also due to the spread of tech. While in the 90s a lot of the buyers were techies who wanted the newest, coolest best thing, more and more it's facebook and retired housewife normals sending email
I don't remember the last new computer I bought. I've got about 25 or so right now (business + personal), but none of them are new. I don't even know how old they are. I don't see the point in buying a new computer. Buying new computers makes even less sense than buying new cars. They drop in value faster than cars, and they don't wear out as quickly (if at all). I'm glad that other people buy new, though, because the supply of refurbished machines of all kinds is huge! I average $200 for a really good desktop machine, $350 for a really good laptop, and $400 for a nice blade server with RAID 2 or 5 and all redundant stuff.
I don't respond to AC's.
yea LAPTOPS were one of the first to come with tv out built in
I know; I used to own one. But new laptops have since dropped SDTV output in favor of VGA and HDMI output. With the rise of HDTV and limited space on the case, HDMI has replaced S-Video out.
and this "obscure" pc to tv adapter really? [try Google]
Yeah, I found mine using similar methods. But "try Google" doesn't help a median end user who isn't aware that they exist and therefore doesn't know what to type into Google.
prosser speeds on pcs have pretty much stone walled. pretty much all apps and game are still only using 2 cores and quads have been around for a cuple years now. meaning the prosser in your pc doesn't really mean to much as long as its a dule core. good amount of ram and a decent gpu can last you years and even then probly just a new gpu. i genrely get a 5 year life-cycle from my desktops of course buy good eq to start with not some low end junker you have to replace in a year couse it was junk to start out with. and of course if your not a gamer a pc can last you much longer hell until it no longer works. other devices haven't been all that new and great just a new smartphone every 30 days and i think people have gotten tired of that. does my 2nd gen ipod work yep does it play pretty mutch any app yep what i cant run some crapware games i wouldn't buy anyways oh no heh. you get the idea.
The first computer mouse I ever bought for myself in 2001 finally lost its marbles a month or two ago, alternating between intermittent unresponsiveness and randomly darting the cursor off in various directions with a slew of phantom middle- and right-clicks, enough to crash browser windows that had the misfortune to find themselves caught in its path of destruction.
In the last month or two it forfeited Scrabble games, wrecked unsaved paragraphs of my resume, opened and changed system settings and made a right senile nuisance of itself. Before that, however, it stuck with me through eight jobs, seven houses, four PCs, three long-term relationships and, at a rough guess, well over ten thousand hours of use.
So thank you little mouse, you did well. Rest in peace.
Yep... completely agree.
At my workplace, we were just discussing this because our servers are all 7-9 years old now (and still running just fine, with the exception of one box that suffered from a defective Adaptec RAID controller card last week). Our company is small and struggling to make ends meet, so we can't afford to just buy new systems for the sake of having new tech. When we took an old PIII class system out of service 4 years ago, I dropped a P4 motherboard in it, salvaged from a desktop PC that had a bad power supply, and built a Linux-based web proxy server out of it. It's still going strong for us today, and we'll probably keep on using it until it dies on us.
The consulting firm we use is trying to scare us into upgrading everything to the latest servers and proclaiming that "in the world of servers, nobody keeps one more than 5 years". Unfortunately, they DO have a legitimate point there, simply because after 5 years or so, it becomes difficult to source replacement parts. The manufacturers keep changing up the standards for sockets, slots, power connectors, and everything else. Eventually, you're just buying new as "insurance" against extended downtime while you struggle to get suitable replacement parts for something old.
But considering our systems are all in climate-controlled, relatively clean computer rooms? They've really been running quite well. It seems far cheaper to swap a bad hard drive or a failed video card once in a while than to keep buying new servers every few years, in the hopes that nothing will age enough to fail on you.
I've been saying this for years. Unless we want true mass unemployment to really shake the foundations of society within our lifetimes at least, we need to move on this, soon. A basic income guarantee would do much to soften the blow for those left without a job even as the productivity of the economy increases. A massive underclass of unemployed people leads both to a large increase in hopelessness and by extension crime and, in the long term, political instability.
Just look at what's happening in North Africa right now, you're kidding yourself if you think that's happenning because of a lack of democracy, even if pro-democracy activists are trying to use the situation to their advantage. The revolutions are happening because of the feeling of hopelessness and severe economic situation of large portions of the population in those societies, and the same thing can happen in the western world if things turn ugly engogh for a sufficiently large portion of the population.
I have had absolutely horrible luck trying to not buy new stuff. Because the old stuff usually dies long before I'm ready to buy something new.
I would still be using the first PC I ever built, which I slapped together in 2003, except that the motherboard died. Twice. Neither lasted more than 3 years. This machine was ancient by today's standards (Athlon XP, 1 GB DDR RAM, one of the first SATA-capable motherboards) but it ran Windows 7 RC just fine. Sure wish it still worked, but it hasn't been worthwhile to rebuild with a "new" old Socket A motherboard.
Same deal for the power supply in my newest desktop. It's on its second motherboard, as the first one was defective out of the box. Second video card, too - it didn't quite work right within a few weeks of purchase.
Similar deal for my roommate's PC. Roommate's power supply died a few months ago; then, a few weeks ago, she had to put in a new motherboard, too. Neither component was more than 3 years old.
Don't get me started on monitors and netbooks. Ask me how I learned Acer is a 4-letter Chinese word for "junk."
I hear this crap repeated and it is just that: Crap. Things last plenty long. Cars, one of the examples used, are a wonderful example. As machining gets higher precision cars last longer and longer and longer. They even need less maintenance. That "Change your oil every 3000 miles," stuff? Gone on new vehicles. They are so well built that you can run for a lot longer on a single oil change. Tighter controls on alloys, more accurate cutting, all that kind of things lead to machines that are built far better and work for longer.
What you are probably going on about is cheap electronics, which just shows a massive ignorance of things. Yes, a $20 DVD player today does not last as long as a $2000 DVD player from 1997. Guess what? There were no $20 DVD players in 1997. Get yourself a $2000 or even a $500 DVD player today and it'll be well built and last a long time.
What happens is that as things develop they can be made cheaper, and so are. It makes them more accessible to many. However it requires cost cutting and thus quality cutting. Doesn't mean that everything is made that way though. I personally buy high quality electronic goods. I pay a lot more for them than most people do, but they last me.
How many people here could have easily fixed Patti Hauseman's old Mac? How many people here even need to consider the symptoms for more than two seconds in order to think of all the probable causes? Now think of all that waste. Now think of all those extremely grateful people you could help by volunteering your services. What if the computer breaks down, and mom and can't even afford to buy a used one? These are common problems with easy solutions.
Whirring noise and occasional malfunctioning. When the machine still worked, the hard drive might have been failing. A fan might have become clogged, and eventually seized. Many of us even like fixing these things (as long as we're not overwhelmed by relatives' requests). Of course, there's also teaching, installing OSS, donating hardware, and so on.
So, how to start? A few ideas:
I started thinking about this a year ago when I was in a charity shop in Los Angeles. A man was buying his grandson a used computer, and the boy was so excited. The grandfather didn't know anything about computers, and the boy was just beginning to learn. This shop has an employee just for the computer section, but that's rare. The grandfather asked the shop assistant lots of questions while the enthusiastic grandson tried the demo PCs. The assistant helped them to find something they could afford, although many of the displays for sale had major defects, and some of the PCs were unnecessarily noisy. I still wonder what kind of computing experience that boy and his family have now.
Perhaps this has more to do with people realizing tech companies are trying to suck every last dollar out of them now (especially with DRM schemes and products that expire and have to be renewed) matched with the plateau we reached in the gaming sector as far as what is required by computers to play them. Overall there isn't a lot of incentive TO upgrade and that incentive is usually matched with more obligations and things you have to pay for. It's becoming a chore not only to buy a computer that is more then likely lower quality then ones made in the past due to companies cutting corners and filling it with bloatware, but also everything associated with it.
I think the industry (software and not specifically hardware makers like Intel, but computer manufacturers) are slowly setting up their own noose to hang themselves with it and they don't even realize it is in part due to their greed to suck every last penny out of the market. People can blame the economy all they want, but this has been a ongoing trend that has far outlasted the current recession. A quick look at the gaming industry can tell you a lot about this.
Feelings can't always be rationalized with numbers, that's why metrics don't always work out.
Unless the stuff is made by HP the equipment barely makes it past the warranty period before it develops hardware failure. (I am one of the suckers complaining on that forum.) Every single piece of technology made by HP that I have ever owned has failed miserably within 2-3 years of use.
I have an HP laptop ca. 2007. It's perfectly capable of handling pretty much any task a home user would need, and it makes justifying the cost of a replacement much more difficult.
My father still uses my old IBM Thinkpad T22 (ca 2001). It's perfectly functional for his purposes, and even plays his favorite internet radio station while he does his Quickbooks 2008 tasks. Best of all, it has a 4:3 1400x1050 screen. Can you even buy a new laptop with a 4:3 screen?
The hard drive died a year ago. He thought about upgrading to a newer laptop. But I ended up just replacing the drive for $20 or $40, and installed a fresh copy of Win2k.
***
I accidentally dropped my own ca 2001 dell laptop an inch or so to the table a few months back. It never booted again. "crap". I took the hard drive out and put it into my sister-in-laws' 2005-or-so Dell Inspiron 8600 (they gave it to me for disposal after removing the hard drive - the XP install must've become corrupted, 'cause there's nothing wrong with it). Found a power adapter on teh craigslist. The Lubuntu install from the old dell booted without a complaint on the 'new' one too. It's a little pokey, what with 512MB memory, but that's about to be fixed.
I'm also about to buy a 20-year old aluminum sports car. Drove it the other day, and there's nothing better on the road today.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
> I have noticed this odd trend. More and more users
> (including companies) hold on to old computer
> hardware. The argument is that it is good enough.
> But when the same people install and run the latest
> software which require a more powerful computer
> they blame the software engineers. This happened
> with Vista and is a common complaint with Firefox.
Firefox suffers from the Microsoft disease. It seems whenever an extension is downloaded by a dozen users, the Mozilla people decide to include it in the base product, e.g. spell-checking. Then there was the "abortion bar" fiasco. And to support it, they had to build in an SQL database. Believe me, I didn't want or need "abortion bar" or spell-checking. I would've loved to have been able to stick with Firefox 2.x. Unfortunately, with exploits being discovered every so often, you can't safely run old versions. I recently switched to Opera out of sheer disgust. The thing that triggered it was an article in Slashdot about the "new and improved" Firefox 4 that is currently in beta.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I spent most of this weekend shopping. I had to buy a bike, train pass, clothes, ect. Frankly, I'd rather have done other things.
It's a pain in the ass to buy new things all the time. Sometimes I just want something to work. It's not about the money.
No, I will not work for your startup
Assuming that the cost of the handset was rolled into that one and not extra.
I have had two phones in the last 2 years, a HTC Dream and Motorola Milestone, both purchased outright for A$550 a piece, A$1100.
I'm on a A$30 month by month plan that includes 1 GB downloads (because everything is metered in Oz and the telco's cant tell you how to spend it). I've never gone over it. So in total I've spent A$1820, back when I first bought the Dream the AUD was about 0.95 USD and has dropped as low as 0.55. So for about the same cost as your Iphone, I've had two modern handsets.
I've just bought a new HTC Desire Z for another $550. I'm not locked into a contract for 24 months, If I lost my job tomorrow I could cancel the contract and go on pre-paid. "Free" phones are for suckers.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Note though that the Iphone (which doesn't have a user replaceable battery) is still selling well, so apparently the 'reuse' factor isn't a big thing when buying a mobile phone.
there is a very good book called "economics in one lesson" by Henry Hazlitt, written about 50 years ago but still easy to find in libraries and as pdf ebooks. you'd do well to read it, it's quite a good read. while I wouldn't agree with all his points it is pretty much the classic debunking of the broken window fallacy and is just as relevant now as it was then. the boloney politicians' & pundit arguments given as examples are right off today's news programs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Yes, I agree, and your example is something to think about.
Marshall Brain wrote some about this in "Manna", but ultimately people were more passive there, and there were also a lot of police robots to enforce "the law" related to mainstream economics:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
As I see it, the economy has always been a mix of four types (subsistence economy, gift economy, planned economy, and exchange economy). Even in the USA right now, we still have all four types (examples: Gardening, Debian, Roads, Walmart). But the balance can shift, and we can also put in place things like a basic income to intentionally shift the balance. Between what is spent on education and what is spent on social security, the USA already spends about US$800 per month per person on social programs. If that money just went directly to each person (or their parents for kids), then that would be a basic income at no increase in taxes (and likewise, universal health coverage would be possible based on just what is spent now by the US government for health care if done similar to other industrialized countries). Now, seniors who currently get more that US$800 per month would be worse off financially in that sense, however, they would be living in a world where their children and neighbors would suddenly have a lot more free time, which might be a very good thing for their health and happiness. Plus, to keep their benefits at current levels (an extra three hundred dollars a month or so?) would probably just require a relatively small change in taxes, probably not more that our current war spending.
However, even as $800 a month per person is just enough to live on in the USA (when coupled with medical coverage), I think it might make more sense to devote at least half the US GDP to a basic income (which leaves the level of the GDP from around 1997 to motivate people to work, and it was enough back then) and that level would be more like US$2000 per month.
But, as we get better 3D printers and they eventually can print solar cells and more 3D printers (as well as tools to recycle materials or collect them from nature), we will see a diminishing need for exchange for material things acquired by exchange, so a basic income would become less important except about control of land. Likewise, in countries that plan better, they could create an infrastructure of hostels or universities that people wanted to spend time around. And as the gift economy expands in the digital realm, there is less need to pay for digital files, and as abundance spreads, there are more people with extra things to give away (like old cell phones), again reducing the need to buy things.
So, there is a very complex dynamics going on that relates to production and consumption of stuff, but it is, for the most part, totally ignored by mainstream economists lost in the beauty of their elegantly beautiful but woefully incomplete and even sometimes deadly equations.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From an Amazon review of that book: "The one lesson is simply this: economic planning should take into account the effects of economic policies on all groups, not just some groups, and what those effects will be in the long run, not just the short run. That's it. That's the lesson. Fallacious economic policies almost invariably seek to benefit one group at the expense of all others, or to bring about short-term benefits at the expense of long-term benefits. With this as his thesis, Hazlitt examines the numerous manifestations of such fallacies in different situations."
That sounds sensible to me. I'd agree that a lot of problems in the USA are from the way powerful interests have used the government to get preferences in their direction (like the US meat, dairy, and grain industries, which is destroying US health, or like the US war industry, see "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedly Butler).
However, and not having read the book,does Hazlitt talk about how mainstream economist assume demand is infinite as a way to keep up with exponentially rising productivity and still keep most people employed in the mainstream system so they have purchasing power to buy the necessities of life? See also the essay "The Triple Revolution" from 1964 about a breaking "income-through-jobs" link even then, and the last thirty plus years of stagnant real wages in the USA has proved that out to some degree, and now we see declining real wages and those economic trends are really taking hold.
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
I feel demand for more physical stuff is not infinite among healthy humans (even given status competition) for at least four reasons. One is a spreading ethics like "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" that suggests "voluntary simplicity". A second is because of the idea of Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" which suggests that after basic material aspirations are fulfilled, humans tend to focus on higher, generally non-material, ones. A third reason is the simple accumulation of stuff in our environment, where it becomes easier to find what you need as someone else's discarded or underutilized infrastructure at little incremental cost (thus Freecycle and too-cheap-to-matter internet services). A fourth reason is that for more creative and intellectual tasks, it turns out, reward is not much of a motivator and may even reduce performance by interfering with intrinsic motivation:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
While the original article makes it seem like cell phones are not being replaced due to limited finances, could it be that we are also reaching some point of saturation in some area of basic communications technology?
While it is true, all things being equal, "more" in some sense might be nicer in some ways (like a faster cell phone or a prettier display), it is also true that the law of diminishing returns sets in at some point, where "more" starts to impose huge costs, including non-monetary ones like confusion and hassles and time costs of constant upgrades and learning new stuff. What would Hazlitt say are the implications of a law of diminishing returns for more goods and services across our entire society? That is not the kind of thing free market economists usually want to think about...
Then there is the fact that people without jobs due to rising productivity and limited demand would have no means to pay for more stuff, which then leads to another set of problems. Think about the implication of IBM's Watson winning at Jeopardy, or, for another case, this dexterous robot hand:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-han
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I still don't understand why you make the distinction between free and for-fee software.
Free software is distributed for a fee: see Ubuntu on CD. But someone who distributes software for a fee has skin in the game, so to speak, and the cost of poor quality could affect that someone's future sales.
One might be surprised at just how much difference it makes to remove the HDD from a 4 year old machine and replace it with a cheap SDD, eg. the Kingston SSDNow which (according the Anandtech) copes well with an OS that doesn't support TRIM (eg. WinXP)
When I did this to my wife's computer, she was shocked at how fast a program started after she launched it - she was used to starting programs like Firefox, Word and then switching her attention away while the program started up.
The SSD is qucker, quieter, less power hungry - worth paying for, but I see no point in replacing the whole computer.
The three Rs of environmentalism: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
I'm Canadian and was always taught that trips to the dump and "not letting anyone do anything for you you could do yourself" were parts of my family.
One time at my cottage I got these cross country skiis, 50 years old. But they were high end back then and damned if they weren't 100x better than my new skiis.
Computers in particular offer a lot of advantages to standing still. Open driver and codec support. Better hardware support. More developer time properly invested (rad apps!). Not paying a Microsoft tax. Customization that takes time to replicate. And from a paranoid perspective less security features (Intel Inside)(Egyptian phone and Internet systems). Software bloat. You get the idea.
I'm a bit pissed at how many people replaced Windows XP, Microsoft nailed us with DirectX 10/11 and with OpenGL closing it's doors they'll get us with Windows 8 too. Support for proprietary and closed systems. Which generate bugs/less features/more sales and "upgrades".
We need to break out of the walled garden and figure out why applications need gigs of memory, I bet a lot of those features don't have the user in mind.
I'll run with whichever terms you care to use - call the OS the janitor. What do we call the nifty new tricks? Add-ons? Plugins?
I like my tech exciting, because to me excitement is the emotional response to functionality. It's the realization "Now I, me, can do ___".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
to me excitement is the emotional response to functionality.
You are in the minority; otherwise the year of desktop Linux would be 2000, not 2020 :-) Most people don't need functionality, and because of that they buy into "smartphones" that are just the next revision of a calculator or of an electronic notebook. In fact, lack of functionality is one of the reasons why I stay away from smartphones - I don't need what they do, and they don't do what I need. However Apple proved that such a geeky approach does not matter, statistically - there is plenty of people who feel the need to update the world on the minute details of their breakfast.
There might be a split here between utility and functionality. Updating the world on _____ is the split. In Egypt it was enough to get the Internet nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, just like all good tech can be mashed up into a weapon, all good tech can also be dumbed down for a low common denominator desire. I'll suggest we take a page out of certain sports lore and Godel Encode menu items.
Activist 1: "Darwin's_Breakfast had Cheerios today."
Activist 2: "Ho Hum"
(Next Day)
Activist 1: "That's a new one. Darwin's_Breakfast had Cherry Yogourt this time for breakfast."
Activist 2: "Dammit!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine