Technology is a Tool. We Need to Become More Aware of That When we Upgrade.
Recently, I saw this brilliant YouTube video by photographer Jamie Windsor. He talks about the newly released Sony A7 iii and the Canon EOS-R. Instead of comparing them to each other and telling his viewers which is the better option to upgrade to, he makes an interesting point on how irrelevant camera gear is to be a good photographer. It’s more important how you use the gear you have to improve your photography skill and how you can grow with the technology disposable to you. Only when you notice that your gear limits your progress, you should consider upgrading. Many famous photographers, like Stephen Shore, started their careers with much more limited technology than many a smartphone camera offer today.
This got me thinking. Isn’t that true for any piece of technology?
Consumers are always chasing the Next Big Thing, but when we pause and think about it — do we really need the latest iPhone? Sure, it may be slightly faster and may look slightly different than the phone you currently own. But does that mean your current phone is outdated and needs to be replaced? Your phone is still perfectly capable of the things it was capable of when you bought it. You are not really missing out on anything you had before.
Only through brilliant marketing and much hyped events Apple — and any other consumer oriented company for that matter — is capable of producing this “I want it and I need it” feeling in customers.* But, if you think about it, is this feeling really true? Were you unhappy with your current device before the grand release of the next device and its marketing campaign? I reckon the answer is no.
I don’t want to argue against technical advancement at all. It’s good and it’s necessary, otherwise we’d still live in the Stone Age. But lately, and especially with consumer facing mobile technology, much of the progress is just marketing a slightly better device as the biggest advancement in the whole history of mankind, while really it’s nothing but iterative progress.
Of course, the first iPhone pales in comparison to the iPhone XS. But over the last, say, three to four generations of iPhones, this progress has slowed down, because there is only so much space for technical advancement in a small handheld rectangle. I believe an iPhone 7 owner today isn’t much worse off than an iPhone X or XS owner from a strict utility point of view. The iPhone X is faster and has a new screen factor, but when we boil it down, it does the exact same things as its predecessors. It can be used for communication, entertainment and photo- and videography — sure enough, with some more processing power that makes it more future proof. The same is true for most recent Android phones. Even when they don’t get as many software updates as Apple devices, fundamentally they continue to function just fine (on the Android side, the lack of updates also means a security risk, but this is another discussion for another time).
Now, when we think about phones as tools or instruments (since the latter is a much more fitting analogy by courtesy of Dieter Bohn), we need to ask: When is the right moment to upgrade? When do we even really need to upgrade? And when is it just our eye catching something shiny that we don’t own yet?
The most obvious reason to upgrade is, naturally, a hardware defect in your current device, whether that’s because you dropped your phone and broke the screen, or because the battery is worn out and cannot hold a charge anymore. Another category is more demanding software. When you notice that your device’s hardware just isn’t up to speed anymore with the latest software, you know that it’s time to get an upgrade. But other than that, is there really a reason to upgrade?
Think about what you do with your phone. What are the tasks you use it for? Maybe you just need a phone for texting. Then your current phone might be good to go for a very long time. When you’re a more demanding customer who uses their phone for work, especially creative work like video- and photography, then maybe it’s really reasonable to your workflow to upgrade your phone on a yearly basis, since the camera is one point that can be much improved from generation to generation. Most people will fall into a middle category, where an semi-regular updates perfectly make sense.
This whole issue can be transferred to any consumer electronics. In fact, it can be transferred to almost any consumable, replaceable product. We live in a world where repairing a product is often not even considered an option anymore, since there a so many shiny new, supposedly better things to get. But when you think about it, how happy does a new piece of tech make you? Sure, the first few “honeymoon” weeks you will love it and play with it all the time, but in the end, it will be a regular part of your inventory and you don’t have second thoughts about it.
Instead, you will probably remember much better what happened in front of the camera when you took photos of your best vacation ever, the first steps of your child, or of a loved one before they deceased. Your tool, your instrument, will always be secondary to your experiences and your memories. Even when you consume content on your phone, it’s the content that’s memorable, not the phone.
This is something I have to internalize myself. I’m using a Google Nexus 6P right now, which, while it has some problems, is still perfectly suits my demands and there is actually no need to upgrade, even though the new Pixel 3, the Samsung Galaxy S9 and even the iPhone XS/XR are luring me. Of course, marketing works on me just like it works on anybody, even if they don’t want to admit it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so effective.
*I understand that another factor is social pressure. If your phone is much older than everyone else’s, you’re an expat in certain social settings like high school. This is a different topic that deserves its own article.
