How to continue to increase profits after nobody cares about your
product
11/26/24 - 916 words
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------|WARN: ||This article was written by a socialist, and as such, is biased against ||capitalism, specifically in the late stage. |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About a year ago, my dad and I went shopping for a new TV, as our old one was
from 2007 and, while top-of-the-line for the time, was starting to show its age
(specifically in contrast). Something that struck me as odd is that, as we were
looking around Costco, I couldn't find a single TV that didn't have any "smart"
features. Now, on the surface, this would appear to be a good thing. After all,
who doesn't want to get a TV with everything you want built-in, rather than
buying something like a Roku box separately?
Well, the answer is: it's complicated.
On paper, it seems perfect; you spend less money, and you don't have to find a
place for a separate box or tolerate one of those horrid sticks. But in
reality, it's a tactic to wring more money out of you, even after your purchase.
You see, TV manufacturers are in a tricky situation. Everyone already has a TV.
Most people have somewhat good TVs. Of the people in those 2 groups, the only
reason to ever buy a new TV is if your old one stops working, which, in the age
of LCDs, takes quite a while to happen naturaly. You also don't have any
innovations that people care about; OLEDs only appeal to the enthusiasts,
which, while profitable, aren't nearly as profitable as the masses. So this
raises the question: how do you sell to a saturated market in which there is no
improvement? Simple: you make your products break faster. You lower production
costs while maintaining prices. Ok, now that's done, but the profits are now
plateauing instead of increasing, and the shareholders are unhappy. So you
start putting more tech in your products, not to improve them, but to make them
more profitable. With this new tech, you can now advertize as a "smart" TV and,
at the same time, spy on your users and sell that data to make more money. And
so the low and medium-end manufacturers begin spiralling to compete for the
shittiest product. And yet, still, the line must go up. Software updates ship
that slow down the TV and make it perform worse (aided by Google's infamously
terrible code[1]). Not enough? Why not remote brick it after the warrenty
expires. Take royalties on streaming service payments. Make YouTube have 3
minutes of unskippable ads for some reason, and yet this still isn't enough.
After all, the line must go up. And so the spiral intensifies until finally you
end at the perplexuing situation of the modern smartphone.
# Smartphones are...odd
Smartphones haven't gotten significantly better in the past 10 years (other
than Apple playing catch-up). It's just a fact. Sure, the processor speeds have
improved and the cameras have gotten better, but how much of that really
matters? I use a 2014 Galaxy S4 running Android 10 and it's perfectly
servicable. AMOLED screen, all-day battery, notification LED, hell even a
barometer. Takes good photos, runs fine, and generally just works (other than
American carriers being a pain and forcing Voice over LTE). And yet, people
still buy new phones, year after year. I think it has something to do with how
the smart phone came to be: at the start, there was very real reason to
upgrade. And then upgrade again. And then upgrade again. This happened for
about 5 years up until the iPhone 5S, at which point the point to upgrading was
generally just "larger screen and bigger battery." Yes, Apple introduced FaceID
in 2019, but that's more gimmick than improvement. But either way, it stands
that, during the dawn and early morning of the modern smartphone, there /was/
an actual reason to upgrade. But, as the soft tones of the morning gave way to
the harsh beams of midday, this mentality stuck around. After the iPhone 11,
Apple just stopped even trying. They made the exact same phone with better
cameras and a better processor year after year after year after year after year
after year. And people kept buying them. During this time, Apple (and other
manufacturers -- everyone was playing this game, not just Apple) started to
implement most of the tricks utilized by the TV vendors, but this time, they
had a seceret weapon: the battery. If they could reduce the lifespan of the
battery, they would essentially force people to buy new phones more often, as
most would rather trade-in their old phone[2] than get their current one fixed.
This is the real reason companies push wireless and fast charging so much: they
produce excess heat, which degrades the battery's lifespan, and leads to people
buying phones more often.
And so the line goes up.
It wastes so much time, money, effort, resources and causes so much waste, but
the system doesn't care. When an economic system is designed around the single
idea of growth at all costs, at some point, profits must outpace innovation.
Everything spirals down and down and down until the resounding thud of
the impact makes clear to all that it has failed.
[1] - ./google-sucks-at-security
[2] - Don't do trade-ins. They only exist to kill the used market, and almost
all of the phones recieved from trade-ins are recycled, rather than
repurposed
$ find -name author
ERROR 404: NULL NOT FOUND Programmer, hacker, BSD user, FOSS believer