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Xbox One X is the Perfect Representation of the Tech Industry's Existential Crisis (mashable.com)
A reader shares commentary on the newly launched Xbox One X gaming console: Fundamentally, Xbox One X is the same machine that Microsoft released in 2013. It plays the same games, runs the same apps, depends on the same operating system. You can still plug your cable box into it and watch OneGuide magically sync with your local TV listings. Most of the things you can do look a little better and run a little faster/more efficiently, sure. The actual casing is smaller than the previous iterations, too. It's a gorgeous $500 machine. That's why I keep eyeballing it. My brain screams, "Why do you exist?" The Xbox One X does not answer. This is a familiar problem in 2017. Look around at all the tech in your life and do a quick, informal poll: How many of those items become outdated every year or every few years when a newer, shinier version of the same thing comes along? I'm talking about your iPhone and iPad. Your Amazon Echo and Kindle. Your Pixel and Daydream VR headset. Your Apple Watch. Your Roku, your Apple TV, your Chromecast. Incremental upgrades that push features like 4K! HDR! Wireless charging! Slimmer design! No headphone jack! (Wait, no, that last one is awful.) Breathless bullet point after breathless bullet point. Some of these additions have genuine utility and add value to the product. Many don't, or depend on you also possessing some other piece of incrementally upgraded tech (like the kinds of fancy-shmancy TVs that play the nicest with Xbox One X).
Pretty sure people not buying stuff was the point of the article: if people aren't buying your stuff (because you don't offer anything compelling) you, as a business, will cease to exist. Hence, the "Tech Industry's Existential Crisis".
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
The author is just now noticing that the industrialized world has a problem with corporate exploitation of mass production for their own selfish benefit? It not only funnels undeserved profit into their pockets, it also costs society hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted productivity that should have been used for something constructive. We don't need our vehicles to be redesigned every year, yet they are. We don't need new varieties of underarm deodorant every six months, yet we have them. We don't need "new" but-no-better-than-last-year toothbrushes, yet indeed we still have them. Want to buy another of the same toothbrush that worked perfectly well? Sorry, buddy, we "retired" that one for a new design that cuts a few corners and gives us better profit margin. The list goes on, and permeates EVERY corner of our lives. What could have been accomplished for society if all that human effort had been focused on something truly beneficial for society? The promise of mass production was the ability to cheaply replicate items, but when those items are replaced so quickly with new ones the savings to society are lost, and worse yet the profits from this wasteful process keep flowing into the pockets of those abusing it.
This author saw one tree and failed to notice the forest. This problem is much MUCH more pervasive than he comprehends. The problem isn't just with abuse of technology: the problem is abuse of mass production of every sort.