I am well aware of the history of the term ‘640k is enough for everyone’, so hold your horses in your excitement to post it as a ‘gotcha’ response. I would like to lay out a case for a big slowdown in consumer spending, and put it to you, the reader, that although often we are wrong when we predict such things, this is not always the case. We have not all rushed out and bought 3D TVs, as predicted. We did not all buy VR headsets. I have still only seen a single folding phone in the wild…
I’m in the economically enviable position of having some spare cash which, in previous years I would probably have put towards buying some new thing that I coveted. Maybe a new TV, or phone, or gaming PC or laptop, or whatever. However, I am definitely noticing that this is slowing down, at least for me. Maybe this is an age thing? but maybe not…
I’ve had a bunch of mobile phones over the years, right back to the first actually practical ones, which were given to me at work when I was in IT. They were big, they were dumbphones (no apps or games or internet access), they were heavy, they sucked.
The first phone I had which was a smartphone was a revelation. Then, the next one was much thinner, much lighter, and much more powerful. The last one I bought was a samsung S8. Its amazing. It has bluetooth/wifi it has a fingerprint reader, it has GPS, it has a nice big screen that does face recognition, takes amazing pictures, and videos, can post-process them, and can play games. I use it to control my car, my drone, my lights, my TV, to talk to my solar panels and home battery, to surf the net, and to pay for everything. It charges wirelessly. I record my weight on it, and my steps. I take it everywhere.
I’ve had it years now, and there is basically no reason I can think of to get a new one. At least not yet. I’m not just ‘skipping a generation’, I think I’m at the end. It would be *nice* if the phone battery lasted longer, or if it was a bit thinner or lighter, but its not exactly a hardship now. It charges wirelessly in my car anyway, and its hardly heavy or bulky. It fits easily in a pocket, but its not too small to lose track of. Its thin, but not so thin I can break it.
To get me to buy a new phone, you need to REALLY go nuts on the few things that would improve it. Make the battery last 10x as long, and make it 1/5th the thickness (but same strength) and yeah…MAYBE I would pay the money to buy a brand new phone. I don’t anticipate this being possible in the next 5 years though.
My TV is a 43″ TV. I cant go bigger, because it fits in a small alcove. We sit far enough away from it that a 4K resolution would be pointless. The streaming apps *are* a tad slow on it, but can I really be bothered to set up a new TV, and recycle the old one, and tell alexa about the new one… just for a minor speedup in streaming UI? Not really. If a new TV was FREE, and had a slicker, faster UI, then *maybe* I’d bother. But my current TV does the job well enough.
Its not just these two things.
We bought a toaster years ago that seems indestructible and will probably last as long as me. My gaming PC has ridiculous power, and plays 60FPS Battlefield 2042 even on a 5120 res monitor. This laptop is fairly new, and amazing, and frankly…I am not sure if there is any improvement that is worth paying for. If you gave me a voucher for consumer electronics that I had to spend RIGHT NOW, I honestly struggle to think of anything I’d upgrade. Home theater system is fine and will last forever, alexa works fine…err…don’t bother with bluray player any more. No radios, everything is streamed. Nothing needs upgrading. Nothing.
Now obviously this is not the end of consumerism because a) I’m clearly well-off enough to have bought all this, and many people are not and b) I don’t know what crazy tech may come out soon, but I am definitely noticing a change…
chatgpt is amazing. midjourney is amazing, but these two amazing discoveries don’t require me to buy ANYTHING. The most exciting tech breakthroughs right now seem to be software, not hardware. When I see headlines about CES (Consumer electronics show), it just seems laughable. They are running out of ideas now. I really don’t need a phone that I can fold. I don’t need a 3D TV, I cant be bothered to wear a VR headset to be entertained.
The trouble is, our entire societal model of economics seems to be focused on selling new shiny gadgets to the wealthiest 25%. Thats how the system works. Bored wealthy people buy expensive cool cars which in 10 years time end up in the hands of ordinary people. The trouble is, we have run out of ways to get those wealthy people to trade in their current stuff. Its good enough. People now want ‘experiences’ not a slightly thinner, slightly faster phone.
And yet… there is a ton of work for society to do. So many people do not own a refrigerator, let alone a drone or a VR headset. We need to be addressing that huge swathe of people without the basics of western consumerist culture, not working harder and harder to make VR and the metaverse a thing. To be blunt: we need cheap fridges, not AR goggles.
In theory you can fix this with a lot of high taxes and high welfare, taxing those AR goggles like crazy to fund purchases of ‘my first fridge’. In practice, I think we do need to do that, but ALSO we need a shift in thinking in modern technology companies. For the last 30 years or more, it seems that the assumption in ‘tech’ is that the goal is always to produce some new, amazing cool thing that wows the CEO and impresses everyone in the boardroom. The problem is, everyone in the boardroom is rich.
The future may not be ‘look at these AR goggles, they are phenomenal’, but in fact be ‘look at this ordinary fridge. It was made for $30’. Thats what we NEED, but its not what we are getting. Companies are more excited about new features and functionality, but never about low cost. Tech companies want the specs on new tech to always be higher bigger, better. Hardly anybody talks about affordability, or how cheap something is to run.
I don’t know how the politics of the future will work out. We may end up with UBI and a crazy high tax rate on a super-wealthy 0.1% of the population. Who knows? What I do hope for is a future where technologists and industrialists care more about what the bottom 25% cannot yet afford, rather than what the top 0.1% might buy if you can make something 1% faster.
What about you? do you have a big long wishlist of stuff you wish you could afford on amazon? or are you quite happily reading this on a 3 year old phone or 4 year old laptop?