Viscious white circle

Anyone who’s a die hard fan of Apple, stop reading now…

Gone? Ok.. here we go.

I walked into Matt’s office yesterday to be greeted by the giddy sound of “Oh hi, we’re following the Stevenote”. I tried not to roll my eyes but simply couldn’t help myself.

From 2001 – 2006 , if I only count the ipod, Apple has released some 17 different models of the damn thing. And this was still only to be able to listen to music alone, not counting the products of 2007 of which one of them will already be discontinued.

So I took some time to find out what they were doing about the environment. Most of it in reaction to the well advertised Greenpeace campaign obviously. Yes there’s something if you’re “lucky” enough to live in the US.

But that’s not the point now is it? How necessary is it to have such a high turnover of products that essentially bring the same value to the end user? At this point it’s not like Apple has to prove to people it’s a desirable company. Why can’t upgrades be available on the same product to transition from one set of functionality to the other? That would be clever product design. Is the amount of resources taken, energy spent, employees hired worth the production and environmental costs of sales of a product that will be discontinued 2 months after it’s been on the market?

In the mobile industry they call it feature-creep, i think Apple is now bringing this concept that to the next level: instead of providing all functionalities into one (such as the Jesus phone) it’s now creating a suite of products, each of which doesn’t quite offer all the functionalities of the other, thus inviting consumers to spend money on several of them.

I doubt that’s responsible product design and I will keep rolling my eyes.