Table of contents:
- 1. Renew or not the mobile, that's the question
- 2. Ballast the entire market?
- 3. Companies are there to make money
- 4. The placebo effect of memory
- 5. In the end, we are to blame
It is said that mobile phone manufacturers design their smartphones so that, after a certain time, the user has no choice but to renew their device. It is said that the components of today's mobile phones are programmed to reduce their performance once a certain number of cycles of use are exceeded. In short, we are talking about planned obsolescence, a concept that has been haunting mobile manufacturers for many years. But, today, is there programmed obsolescence in the smartphone market ? We believe not, and we have proposed to show it in this article.
But, to know the history of programmed obsolescence in modern mobiles, we have to go back no less than 2013. We are talking about the year in which the smartphone industry experiences its explosive expansion, a year in which mobile phones such as the iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One (M7) came onto the market. Precisely, it was in this year when the prestigious The New York Times published, in its paper version, an article headed " Dismantling the Apple trap ." The article ran like wildfire on the net and jumped all alarms. ¿ Was Apple, as well as the rest of the heavyweights of the smartphone sector, deceiving users through a “trap” ?
This article, published in the Sunday supplement, mentioned a personal experience in which, with the launch of the new
In any case, by then the damage was done. Even today, in the middle of 2015, large circulation media such as The Guardian continue to host - under their brand, although not under their signature - articles with headlines such as “we are the most affected in a gadget industry based on planned obsolescence ”. So, to open a free and documented debate on this, below we are going to list five reasons why we think that programmed obsolescence in mobile phones is a myth.
1. Renew or not the mobile, that's the question
The planned obsolescence starts from a base that, from our point of view, is completely wrong. Not all users renew their mobile only when their smartphone breaks down, nor do all those who buy a smartphone do so because their old mobile phone has broken. And even less is it the case that a user who has suffered a fault in a smartphone from a specific company decides to renew his mobile by buying a terminal from that same manufacturer. So who would benefit from this supposed planned obsolescence ?
Obviously nobody. If all companies manufactured their mobiles specifically with the idea that they would perform worse after two or three years - introducing components programmed to self-destruct -, it would be enough for a company to enter the sector that would manufacture mobiles without programmed obsolescence so that, little by little, users were switching to their mobiles as its reliability was demonstrated.
Conspiracy theories aside, mobile manufacturers know very well that their permanence in the market depends a lot on the reliability of their products. And this is achieved in two ways: offering mobile phones with quality components, and guaranteeing an after-sales service with a high level of satisfaction. Of course, throwing pre-programmed mobiles to crash is not a good idea to fulfill both points.
2. Ballast the entire market?
Another complaint of planned obsolescence on smartphones points directly to operating system updates. It is true that updates to operating systems (Android and iOS are the best examples) increasingly occupy more space in internal memory, and also seriously affect the performance of mobiles that were designed to work with previous versions. It is even the case that many mobile phones - after several years of their launch - are no longer suitable to receive more updates from the manufacturer, and are left to their own devices for the rest of their useful life.
But, is the solution then to weigh down the entire market, stopping the development of operating system updates only to allow users with four, five or six-year-old mobile phones to continue giving their terminals daily use? It is true that some manufacturers should review their update policy, but asking to slow down the rate of updates to the mobile operating system is only condemning ourselves to our devices having even less useful life.
And the best example is found in the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop update. If it were not for the interest of manufacturers to extend the useful life of their mobiles, smartphones such as -for example- the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 or the Samsung Galaxy S4 (both from 2013) would be completely outdated within the ecosystem of the operating system. Android. And be careful, because we can also say the same about Apple, which with its latest iOS 9 update continues to cover mobiles such as the iPhone 4S (a phone from 2011 !).
3. Companies are there to make money
It seems that sometimes we forget that the ultimate goal of a company that makes mobile phones is to make more money year after year. Therefore, it should not surprise us that every intelligent and more phones will not incorporate a removable battery (so we pass by the technical service if we replace it) or increasingly mobile come with a slot for external memory cards (plus to facilitate design, removing this feature also makes it easier for manufacturers to sell their cloud storage services, not to mention that it is also a good strategy for users to buy the versions with higher storage capacity of each mobile).
If users accept these changes, of course it will not be the manufacturers that take a step back when it comes to increasing their profits.
4. The placebo effect of memory
This point is irrefutable. It doesn't matter who we ask; everyone would agree that mobile " before " were better. They had a battery that lasted for whole days, they very rarely gave any problems and could spend years in the service of the user, taking hits and dips in the water of all kinds. And it is true, but… what functions did the mobiles of yesteryear offer? Calls, SMS messages, ringtones of trendy songs… did we miss something? It is impossible to compare a modern smartphone with -for example- a Nokia 1100. Nowadays we carry true laptops in the palm of our hand, and the number of components located inside the mobile is such that it is impossible for us to ask for the same reliability as in a phone with a black and white screen, a physical keyboard and a speaker.
Therefore, to say that smartphones today " last less " than the old mobile is a statement that ignores all the technological advances that have occurred in this sector over the last ten years. Let's not forget that, in 2005, there was still no Android operating system as we know it today.
5. In the end, we are to blame
In search of culprits, the real culprits that our smartphones become obsolete are the application developers. And, at the same time, so are we ourselves. We will all agree that we want applications to allow us to perform more and more tasks; It is no longer enough that WhatsApp allows us to send text messages at no extra cost, but we also want to make calls, send voice messages, hold conversations in groups in which dozens of people participate at the same time and, as requested, make video calls with several people at the same time. And do we really think that doing all of this fluently would be possible on an HTC Dream ?
Developers are delighted to add new features to their applications to solve everyday user problems, but this obviously comes at a cost. The updates of the applications are developed thinking, mainly, in the highest-end mobiles of each moment -as well as the most popular mobiles-, and it is inevitable that sooner or later they will end up not being compatible with the oldest mobiles. That, in a word, is development. Like it or not, it is the technological world in which we have had to live.
First image originally posted by pokercollectif, third image originally posted by lasindias, fifth image originally posted by lifehacer, sixth image originally posted by memebase.cheezburger, seventh image originally posted by mid-day .
