Full episode transcript below
Geoff and Guy team up together again to verbally trade barbs and laugh way too much whilst discussing the act and factors behind upgrading our physical and digital products. They just don't make 'em like they used to anymore.
Highlights include:
💡 How do "anticipointments" shape our future expectations?
💡 What is "planned obsolescence"?
💡 When and why should we upgrade our products or services?
💡 How do non-digital products like appliances compare to new digital releases?
💡 How can we start improving our liveable environment in this throw-away consumer culture?
Originally recorded on 18 January 2021.
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Episode Transcript
Geoff Wilson [00:00:04] Welcome to another episode of the Everyday Experiences Podcast, where we uncover potential design improvements in the world around us by exploring one frustrating experience at a time. I'm your host and Chief Observer, Geoff Wilson, based out of Auckland. And joining me once again today is Guy Thompson, a Kiwi based in Melbourne.
Guy Thompson [00:00:21] Hi, Geoff. Nice to join you again.
Geoff Wilson [00:00:23] I was wondering, like, would we say the same things? Because if I just leave a pau se there and don't say it, like don't prompt you with anything, like, "How are you doing?" I'm like, nine times out of ten will Guy say the exact same thing or not? So good job, so far you're not!
Guy Thompson [00:00:34] Probably, yes. I'm attempting to make a difference so even I can tell that I'm in a different episode haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:00:41] Hahaha so anyway, so on today's episode, we started thinking about upgrades. We'll just say it as straightforward as that, we're looking at the apps we have, the phones we have, the game consoles, laptops, but then also physical things, our cars, our houses, our furniture, all of this. And we started wondering, what is it that that keeps us from upgrading stuff? Is there a theme between digital and physical that match themselves? Like, is there a common trait that we can identify in ourselves and how we shop and what we consider? Or, is there something totally new that maybe we'llfind us through this conversation?
Guy Thompson [00:01:17] It's a really good thing to explore because upgrades I feel like are something that happens in a far more frenetic and regular pace now than it did a long time ago. Right. We've got all these different platforms from your mobile phone to your tablet to your laptop, to your work computer, to all the digital devices and you and your home, your smart TV, all of these different devices may go through some kind of digital upgrade that might simply be for security as well as new features as well. And some of these are forced upon you because the system has to do an update before to work. So I think it's a good thing to get into and discuss and see, you know, where are some of those objections, where's some of that friction coming from and what other users like us face when they're actually coming to grips with an upgrade in the real world and in the digital world.
Geoff Wilson [00:02:01] So where do you want to start with today?
Guy Thompson [00:02:03] Let's start with the phone, because this is the thing that you're now using, like every single day. And I was looking at my phone yesterday and realizing that it's, like, I tend to upgrade quite slowly on iOS, even though I've got like a MacBook Pro and I've been an Apple user for a long time. I'm still using an iPhone 7 from like four years ago.
Geoff Wilson [00:02:21] And why are you using it from four years? Like what's...
Guy Thompson [00:02:23] Because I like it because it's got a home button haha. I think the interaction with the home button was really good, their thumb ID was really clever, and I felt that there was a couple more years of people interacting with it that it could have used. I know that they moved away from it so they could increase the screen size, the screen real estate. That was I guess a smart decision if that's what users were looking for. But I still like that tactile element of the thumb ID. And of course, the new iPhone SE also still has that thumb ID from the iPhone 8 model. So you can still actually buy that.
Geoff Wilson [00:02:56] And is it still on a button?
Guy Thompson [00:02:58] Yeah. So you can still actually buy that form factor for those people who want that smaller phone that still has a thumb ID.
Geoff Wilson [00:03:03] So, I was really worried about this myself because I had Google phones for at least two or three generations. And now the first time I've got a Samsung one that I was worried about, the same thing. There's no more thumbprint. But this one, they've actually got a thumbprint reader right in the middle of the screen. So you still get the benefit of a large screen real estate, but it's actually got a thumb sensor that has no physical button anymore, and it's actually worked pleasantly well. So my main concerns with that are actually totally fine.
Guy Thompson [00:03:26] I'm not entirely convinced and I haven't been for a long time that each of the features that are added to a phone each year are necessarily that groundbreaking or that impressive. Now, for me, as I still do photography for fun, I'll still have other kinds of cameras that I might take with me if I plan to take photos. If someone's not interested in taking a camera with them and their phone is always going to be the camera, those phone, the camera upgrades each year are probably actually going to be a significant change. Whereas for me, the fact that it could record 4K video four years ago, that was pretty much all I needed in a phone with a little sort of video pieces. And then everything else that I wanted that needed to be high resolution was on a digital SLR or digital camera, which no one else wants to take with them now because it's just inconvenient haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:04:09] Yeah, it's been a long time since I've had a digital camera. But still I wanted just to take pictures of life and things happening. So in this case, when I was looking at the phones, it was a model decision between camera types. So for me it was like, oh, well the Samsung, this one has a wide angle lens. The current Google one doesn't. So, yeah, I'm going to go with this wide angle lens one, it looks like it's got some really cool cameras. And that was literally the decision factor for me, for the entire thing, because I guess for me price is a thing. So, you know, phones are one of the big things a lot of people buy them again _every_ year religiously. I don't have that kind of money, nor do I... nor do I need that? That's just so much wasted materials by not doing this thing, by not switching every single year if I were to buy a new one every time.
Guy Thompson [00:04:50] I love how you describe yourself as like, you know, "I don't have the money to do it." No one has the money to buy a thousand dollar cell phone every year! hahaha
Geoff Wilson [00:04:57] Well, they're doing it somehow! I don't know how the hell they're doing it, but they're doing it!
Guy Thompson [00:04:59] It's when people are going onto the plan, right? Like when the cost of that phone is hidden inside that one hundred dollar fee every month or whatever for you or for your phone plan. That's where people don't realize they're signing up to like a twenty four or thirty six month plan and they're really paying for that fifteen hundred or two thousand dollar phone over three years. That's without getting locked into it.
Geoff Wilson [00:05:21] So I think this is where we can start doing the good comparisons between and going back and forth between digital and physical, because that makes me think of leasing cars, because I've still I've still personally never understood why. Like, I've always, I was raised in the mindset of: you get a car, you work to pay it off, and once you pay it off, it's yours. Keep it for as long as you can and then upgrade to another one. And so for me, I've never understood leasing cars in the sense of: you buy it one year and then you're just paying somebody else and, you don't... I guess you don't own it yourself? But then you can trade it in every few years and keep getting the new one with the new, you know, options and accessories and all that kind of stuff. I guess, is there any difference in that parallel right there between phone model upgrades every year and that?
Guy Thompson [00:05:58] Yeah, there is. I think the element that's there is around this newness factor. A lot of people want that status of having the newest and latest thing and they're prepared to pay a monthly fee for that rather than the outright cash. So the same principle of you paying full rate for a vehicle and driving it off the lot, you're going to be losing, what, 25 to 30 percent immediately? The same is probably true for a phone model. You're probably going to be losing at least 15 to 20 percent as soon as you buy that new phone and then you potentially sell it on eBay or something. It's going to go down. But in terms of the comparison to the vehicle, there are certain advantages for having a lease car in that the servicing can be included, umm you know, any of the other maintenance requirements for it. They might have attractive insurance package.
Geoff Wilson [00:06:43] Yeah, warranties, maitenance, yeah those things,
Guy Thompson [00:06:45] Tires, etc. So the only thing you have to do for, say, three years is literally just put petrol in it. For some people, that's really attractive. They can leverage that for tax purposes or they can, um, they may have a business that they lease it through. There's a bunch of different reasons they may decide to do that. But for most people it seems like an awful lot of money to be spending when generally you just buy a car yourself and then you kind of pay all of those costs, repairs and petrol and tires and all this other stuff. Like it's a lot of money and you include that depreciation. The money just vaporizes.
Geoff Wilson [00:07:17] But I've been very happy for three years living here in Auckland. I've used public transport and I always was comparing the price of that versus the price of petrol. Going, "Oh, well, it's about equal to six bucks a day return. It's about the same for what I'm using in petrol to get to work." But actually, like you say, it's not; there's all of these other hidden costs. So things to consider and how you shop for those things and whether or not you you do get a new one, do you keep it...
Guy Thompson [00:07:41] The key angle that I would say there, because I'm a bit of a fan of this kind of used technology thing... And in fact, actually the iPhone 7 that I have, I also bought second hand four years ago. So I very rarely buy a brand new phone. In fact, I can't remember the time ... actually, no, I did recently, I did buy a 10 which I haven't opened yet because I don't think I want to upgrade hahaha.
Geoff Wilson [00:08:00] It's in a box, so for everybody who can't see it: it's nice in plastic wrap, white boxy, he hasn't gone through the Apple unboxing experience yet!
Guy Thompson [00:08:10] I do have an XS, Yeah. So a 10S 256gb.
Geoff Wilson [00:08:12] I like how you have to read it to figure out what in the world you bought because you don't remember what it was anymore haha.
Guy Thompson [00:08:16] Coming back to the car comparison. The way that I approach this is I don't like the smoke and mirrors that's happens from sales people trying to kind of push a vehicle or a phone model or anything else on you. I prefer to look at the data from a few years later as to what's the best and most reliable used model to actually be using. There's not enough data when that new model comes out, right. If I buy that used model that, say, five years old, it's still almost going to be within its warranty period of when it was sold as a vehicle and I'll be able to know are the any issues with that engine? Are there any other issues with the vehicle, the electronics or the servicing or all of the things that all gets filtered out by users in the marketplace? And then you get that data online on various different websites if you can find out what the best examples are. And usually they are actually the vehicle fleet that rental car agencies have. So you can very quickly find out if they're using them and they have them on their fleet, they're probably reliable and they use that data to buy them in the first place.
Geoff Wilson [00:09:15] I wish I could remember the guy's name, but in reading Scott Berkun's "How Design Makes The World" book recently, he actually has at least part of a chapter talking about how this upgrade culture came to be. And it was all the old Cadillac, I guess it was CEO or president. And he was the one who basically invented the idea of having wasteful models every year, just throwing a new year on it. You can barely tweak the way the dashboard is shaped or the way the, you know, little esthetic changes you can add on there, like, oh, we're going to put a pin stripe on the side and therefore we can say this is the new upgrade of the model. You know, you don't have to actually do much for cars to incentivize people to get it. But that's just like you were saying with phones. It's like maybe cameras have maybe a tiny little leap and things you'll never notice processing and things that I as an everyday user, I've never seen the processing power. My video is loading 0.0001 percent faster than it used to be.
Guy Thompson [00:10:05] Hahaha exactly; it's hard to get those significant performance upgrades on a yearly basis, but I am going to challenge you on that point around, you know, the idea of a wasteful model. I'm pretty sure the shareholders of a company that expects a return every single year is pretty much in love with the fact that there are new models coming out every year, right? Yeah. Otherwise you've got nothing to sell. What are you going to sell, last year's model? Like, no, you've got to have new for 2021, what's the hot new thing, and it's this, it's last year's car with a different paint job.
Geoff Wilson [00:10:32] So maybe as human-centred designers, whoever of those of you who are like me in that sense, maybe that's actually a thing to consider, is that do you want to run a company where people are just actively pushing products out versus things that are actually good for us? Because that's a lot of that's a lot of materials, right? That's a lot of materials that are eventually going to be thrown away. I could go heavy to the environmental side, but I won't.
Guy Thompson [00:10:53] Haha yeah, we can we can definitely push that sustainability environmental side. But are you also saying that novelty is not a human-centred factor?
Geoff Wilson [00:11:02] I'm saying it now, no, I know it's a factor - there's an addiction to it. There's a lot of things that will get people buying it. There's a lot of marketing in that for sure.
Guy Thompson [00:11:09] But is there any value from a user point of view? Is there a satisfaction and a motivation element from a consumer saying, I want to buy something new this year? This is the new model, I'm really satisfied by with my purchase? Is that a motivating factor?
Geoff Wilson [00:11:24] I'll take it back a step because my excitement got the best of me. Because you know what? The one thing that I always fail to consider in this sense, right... the stagger timeline, if you will. So you and I, we're not, you know, we're talking about us buying things once a year and we don't have the money. Why would we do that? I'm thinking it's wasteful, but I guess there is that aspect that, let's say something only came out every three years. Well, somebody who bought the last one nine years ago, they might not want the one that's already two years old by the time that they are ready to upgrade. So maybe they do want that newer thing. So I guess there is some validity in that, in that there's always a new model for somebody who might not have had one for quite a long time. There's always this new thing with new upgrades and things that have come out. But then again, I'll even counter myself, because just because one company hasn't put a new one out in a few years potentially, but another one has, you do have choice. We're still riddled with choices all over. So maybe it's not the Samsung, maybe it's the Huawei. Maybe it's the One phone or the Google phones, whatever they are, or I guess Apple is just Apple haha.
Guy Thompson [00:12:21] I think that the interesting thing about that idea is regarding like how and every statistic for different phone companies and different car companies is going to be different, right, around how many users are coming to this for the first time and how many users are upgrading their existing phone. So there might be like twenty percent of iPhone purchases are someone who's going from a really old Android phone and they're changing over. And then another 20 percent might be an upgrade from the previous version. Another 20 per cent might be upgrade from three years ago. Another 20 percent might be an upgrade where someone actually wants to trade the phone in; they're actually trading in like a one or two year old phone. And another 20 percent might be someone who's currently on a phone contract, and their contract allows them to upgrade the phone inside the cycle. I've seen that a while ago where for probably quite a lot of money per month for three years, you actually would get the new phone every single year. So when you see a lot of young people walking around with a stupidly new two thousand dollar phone, it may be what they're actually doing, they're paying for the most ridiculous plan they can because they don't care about how much money they're spending haha because they get the new phone as soon as it comes out. And that's what they want. And they'll send their own phone back if they haven't already smashed it by then haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:13:30] And I'll get off my high horse about responsible purchasing, too.
Guy Thompson [00:13:34] And that's right. If your horse isn't that tall so it's fine hahaha.
Geoff Wilson [00:13:36] Yeah, it's a little Shetland pony. Yeah haha. Let's see, let's move our phones. We've got phones. We've gotten cars. In one of those, I started thinking, well, what other devices have I had trouble with in the first upgrade, right? So not necessarily of features missing, but things that just haven't gone well. And I've got two to come to mind. Maybe I'll start with game consoles, because for me this year, the Xbox Series X, I think it's what it's called, who knows right? They're all over the place. But either way, right. So I haven't got the new one yet, and part of the reason was, well, one, I have a decent Xbox One X now, and that's like, well, I don't see a reason to get minimal gains and so why am I going to buy the hype, there's not anything out for it yet. Now, with game consoles, eventually game developers and stuff might start putting out games that run better on those new platforms. There's some games that if I really wanted, I might upgrade for that one game. That might be the big turning point. But I'm also still harbouring this resentment from what's got to be about seven or eight years ago now of, for the first time when the Xbox One came out. So I had a 360 for a long time and I was like, hey, they're doing a Day One release, and I want to, for the first time in my life, be the first person to jump on - the first group of users buys that new thing. I've never done that with phones, laptops, cars, nothing. I want to be the first one.
Guy Thompson [00:14:50] And how much was that Day One download?
Geoff Wilson [00:14:51] The download wasn't even my issue. It's the disk drive failed within like three days!
Guy Thompson [00:14:56] Ohhh no!
Geoff Wilson [00:14:56] And so it's like I got this brand new thing, it says Day One on it. If I had just waited and let the bugs iron themselves out, let their manufacturing make tweaks to it, send out the new models in half a year or whatever, I would have avoided that. But now I've got this story that's going to stick with me forever; it's like a warning sign for why I shouldn't buy the brand new thing anymore .
Guy Thompson [00:15:14] And I'm just getting burned on that. Like, I absolutely agree, and I think one of the issues that I have around game consoles with that is that I don't have a huge amount of time to dedicate to playing games anyway. So I want it to be a really efficient process. I'm not going to play something really in depth, like a role playing game. I just want really easy arcade games. So if I want to jump onto a PlayStation or an Xbox, I don't want to have to download 36 gigabytes of updates before I start playing a game. So gaming consoles are obviously a really fun thing to be able to buy and upgrade. And I think one of the things that plays against me in terms of that upgrade cycle is I don't have a lot of time to spend on it. So I'm going to tend to wait until that console has been out for a while. Maybe it's gone down in price. Maybe those flagship games that I want to play have got all of the upgrades for them and they're really stable so that I know if I buy it, my user experience of playing that game is going to be really smooth and really stable - I'm not going to have those initial release issues that you have if you rush in as a really early adopter. So I want to make sure that my time is really efficiently spent on that kind of, you know, entertainment. And I'm not going to sit there for three hours waiting for download.
Geoff Wilson [00:16:16] You know, actually, you said the world "early adopter" for the first time this episode, which I'm surprised it took us this long to get into that.
Guy Thompson [00:16:21] haha well I'm not really an early adopter, Geoff, so I don't usually use that term.
Geoff Wilson [00:16:25] Maybe that's why, yeah, maybe that's why neither of us are haha. I feel like early adopter might be a business metric that people lean on sometimes. So, at least I know, when I thought about the Lean Canvases, Lean UX Canvases, that is typically one of the fields we try to fill out when we're doing those kind of frameworks. It's, OK, you've got this new product idea. You know, what is the problem you're trying to solve? What's it going to do? How much is it going to cost? Where are the revenue streams? But also, who are your early adopters going to be? And so in the sense, we've already covered that at least a little bit. I'm kind of doing mental checkboxes, if you will, of like, you know, have we thought about early adopters? Well we have; we talked about people who might want that novelty upgrade. So novelty might be a reason. It might be just a status, as you already mentioned. Is there any other thing so far of reasons people might want to be upgrading as an early adopter?
Guy Thompson [00:17:11] I think it's just really performance. It's really about like what features and benefits does that particular model give you over anything else? And the only thing I would add into that around the comparison to vehicles is that, and also phones as well, is that for people who lease them, or at least they're paying for the value of that thing over time, that's where the idea of, say, a five year lease on a vehicle or essentially a three year lease on a phone starts to become really relevant is because those early adopters know that paying almost like a tax that that 20, 25 or 30 per cent value they lose immediately if they buy that thing outright. They're buying that 100,000 dollar car and it's worth 70 grand on day two, same with the phone. So if they decide if they want the newness, they want to be first. They want to have the new model and the leasing that thing for five years and spreading that cost over time. It's less of an upfront sort of chunk of change to spend. Likewise with the phone, you'll see people walking around with the two thousand dollar phone. I don't know if that many people are going to put out two grand outright for the phone or if that's going to be more likely to be embedded into the very high cost plan. And they've been spending, you know, maybe a hundred and fifty two hundred bucks a month on the plan for a long time. And that's just normal for them now. And so they just always have a new phone with them because it's just that's how much they're paying per month now.
Geoff Wilson [00:18:28] I guess things that maybe you can't pay for on a plan, as far as I know... now, already, I'm going to stop myself there because I know there are like layaway... layaway is a term that personally I don't fully understand myself.
Guy Thompson [00:18:39] So layby is that process where you pay before you get the thing. So you go in next month and you just give them ten or hundred dollars before you buy the thing, which is this really old world thing of discipline where you just would regularly go on and put a hundred dollars down and then finally you'd go pick the thing up before you had it. So I guess that was maybe how it became ingrained as this habitual thing that, like our sort of parents generation tended to do? That they'd put something on layby or layaway. But for now, we're just like, "I don't even have the thing, why do I stop paying for it before I've got it? I want to pay for it after I get it."
Geoff Wilson [00:19:13] Which I think is really interesting, and I do want to stay on that for a second, because it is about upgrading. You're buying something new to replace something else. To solve a problem, you're buying something. And so this idea of a business offering the ability for you to pay for something before you've actually gotten it and incremental. Because I was thinking, well, there's preorders today, those are really relevant. Everybody's pre-ordering the new headphones, the new laptops, the new phones...
Guy Thompson [00:19:33] Yeah, you're putting that 25 percent down or whatever. Yeah.
Geoff Wilson [00:19:35] Yeah. So in a way that is kind of like that; that you've paid for it and you're waiting to get it, so that's there.
Guy Thompson [00:19:41] That pushing this marketing angle for this new thing that's coming out. You definitely want it. So make sure you get in quick because there's only a thousand. So you need to preorder now and get your dollars in there for the Tesla that will take five years to come.
Geoff Wilson [00:19:53] And then as a business you get at least an early view of what people are buying and what people are liking about. So actually from a business point, that's actually some pretty good testing there.
Guy Thompson [00:20:02] Exactly, but that revenue is really important because I think, you know, there'll be some games that would have come out and I know Cyberpunk was one of those that they had, I think, eight million preorders and that paid for pretty much all of this staff for the whole year and probably a few years before that for the actual production of the game. So getting that revenue in in the same year that you need to deliver something is absolutely essential. And unfortunately, sometimes those things get released when they're a little bit too buggy. But, you know, we can leave that there haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:20:29] Haha yeah we'll just leave that little hint there. Yeah, because I was thinking, so what other things do you normally just straight-up pay for while there might be preorders? And so I started thinking of other things that irritate me and it's often headphones. Right now, my earbuds, if you will, the biggest problem I have is I can't consistently charge them. In fact, I would hesitate to say I can charge them at all because every time I put them in the case, if the contacts aren't touching them just ever so precisely, I'll find out the next morning opening up that it wasn't charged at all. And so now I'm like, they're still perfectly functional, they're not damaged, they play well enough. The controls on the earbuds are decent enough. But one thing which should be minor about charging, that's going to cause me to upgrade. I'm seriously considering going to the store almost any day now just to go. I can't stand this anymore. Arrghh!
Guy Thompson [00:21:18] I like how you saying like it's all because of manufacturing, and I'm like, no, no, it's all because you didn't spend enough money in the beginning because you didn't want to spend the two hundred and fifty dollars for like the Apple ones or the Sennheiser or whatever...
Geoff Wilson [00:21:29] Ohh, well, you know what! I'm name-dropping them then: these are the Google Pixel Buds. I'll actually throw the product out there; it's a Google product. This is not one of those cheap things because I actually, yeah, if it was one I bought on TradeMe or, you know, Ali Express... again, sorry if you guys work there! Hey just saying haha, I haven't gotten the most consistently quality products from those places. So this was a name brand product. Now, I do know that the Google Pixel Buds in this case, they have gotten some bad reviews from those first gen. And I got the first gen because I wanted the translation feature, which I actually never used haha. It just didn't work like I thought it would. But I didn't know it wouldn't work like that till I got them. So now I'm like, the main thing I bought them for is old and I can't consistently charge it at all. Like, I am literally cursing at it every day, trying to get it to charge.
Guy Thompson [00:22:14] Yeah, no, this, this actually brings up a really...
Geoff Wilson [00:22:16] So there's a fourth reason! It's not a performance issue! Just plain old usability. Can I use the product? Can I charge the friggin' thing?! Arggh! OK, go on before I start breaking things.
Guy Thompson [00:22:25] Now this actually brings up a really interesting point, right, around the idea of warranties. Now for most appliances and things that we buy, we generally would get under the consumer protection laws in the country live in. Most of the time you have at least a one year warranty guaranteed by law. But for most things, you will actually have a period of time where that device, that thing has a usable lifespan and therefore the item should work for that period of time. Now, I would have to double check exactly what this is, but I believe for whitewear, so like washing machines, fridges, ovens, those sorts of things, it's about seven years. So if you buy something and it literally stops working, that if it's put together in such a terrible way in the factory that it won't work for seven years, then it's technically not built for purpose. So if you're buying headphones that do not work within six months, have you been sold something that's fit for purpose? If that thing has a one year factory warranty supplied by Google, fine. But if they've stopped working after 18 months, are they... is that a purchase that's for you? Now because you're coming at this from a Western first world country where we can afford to spend a couple of hundred dollars on headphones. But if you bought those exact same headphones and Madagascar or Ecuador or Yemen, that's a lot of money to be spending in that particular market. And I would expect those headphones have to last for ten years. So haha, how long are you expecting that digital device to work for?
Geoff Wilson [00:23:54] So what else we know about, I know, is planned obsolescence. We hear about in the news all the time. It's like the ultimate rumor mill, right? So you've got this consumers act like we're talking about where things are supposed to work. And obviously we can only speculate there, but that's even a question for that. So these other countries, like you just said, if they're expecting something to last, well do their phones last as long as they think they will? Because is planned obsolescence a thing? Actually, Guy, you know what? For anybody listening who doesn't know, can you explain it? Because I'm sure you can do it better than I can.
Guy Thompson [00:24:21] OK, I'll try and put this in a nutshell. I have two views...
Geoff Wilson [00:24:25] I just pass the ball to you so I don't get in trouble for being wrong hahaha.
Guy Thompson [00:24:27] Exactly. I have two two views on this; I'll try and put it in a nutshell. So for any consumer electronics company, the intention is to be able to sell your products as regularly as possible so you can come back every year and keep buying and keep consuming. Therefore, there is no incentive for that company to make products that last for ten years because you wouldn't come back again. Right? And so the same can be true for vehicles or microwave ovens or television sets. If you sell something to someone that will last them for twenty years, then you don't have a revenue stream anymore now.
Geoff Wilson [00:24:59] So I'll interrupt real quick. So, as an example, my parents have I think in might be a GE dryer, they've had it for literally longer than I've been alive! It's still running, it's made out of steel, it weighs a freaking ton!
Guy Thompson [00:25:12] "They don't make things like they used to...," right?
Geoff Wilson [00:25:12] But that's why people say that it's because literally that was the case. We've got that sitting next to a washer that at this point they've replaced like three or four times. And because it's now plastic frames, things crack, things just stop working, buttons pop off. That old steel dryer... man, that thing still goes! It still heats the exact same it's always done. As long as you clean the lint out, it's great!
Guy Thompson [00:25:31] It's fine, right? Yeah. And so your parents which I'm sure through their superannuation, will be shareholders of GE haha, which now makes probably more money from finance than it does from selling dryers. But that's what a company has to go through that transition to other products and services because you don't buy the thing they used to sell. So let's take the case of Apple, for example. I don't know the exact number, but I think it's around about 20 per cent of Apple's revenue comes from computers and the rest comes from mobile devices and services and apps. Whereas, of course, Apple started out selling computers, but not enough people were buying those, so they had to expand into the consumer electronics. So they had billions of customers, not just a few million worldwide power users doing design and animation and video; that addressable market was too small, so they had to expand to consumer electronics and sell people everything and upgrade them every single year. Whereas when I was doing video and animation design, you'd buy a Power Mac tower or a Mac Pro desktop and you would have it for a couple of years because you didn't want to have to upgrade all the peripherals, all the hard drives or the extended pieces of equipment. You had the monitors. Everything you set up just worked and you wanted to use that for two or three years and get revenue from that, charging clients to do work. You didn't want to have to keep upgrading it every year because it's already working. It's doing this thing that you bought it for. So regarding planned obsolescence, it's an interesting concept because I think part of it is intentional and part of it is accidental as well, because a consumer electronics company wants to be able to sell products every year to the same kind of consumers, because if you make a product that lasts five or 10 years, it's difficult to be able to keep selling to those same consumers. You want to add new features and have an upgrade journey where people are upgrading, say, every 18 months to two years. So they might skip next year's model, but then they'll definitely go on to the the year after that. And if we rewind a few years when the first iPhones were coming out, the differences and the features that were available were quite significant in the first few years because this process of miniaturization was going on, that all these new features and a better camera and a larger, hard drive was starting to come onto the iPhone of those initial years. And then as we've gone past that, the amount of features that you have every year in a new iPhone is less. So the difference is now that you see between all modes or different models, the phone is not that significant as it was between 2007, 8, 9, 10. You really had a significant difference and a justification for that extra couple of hundred dollars, or if this year's phone's the exact same price as last year's phone, but it had all of these cool new features, it would be a significant upgrade. But now I see people waiting two or three or four years before they decide to upgrade again, because I'm like, my phone works fine. It does everything I want it to. I don't have to work out how to use a new phone and I'm not going to spend that money on it. So they kind of wait. So that pressure is back on Apple and all these other companies to add these, you know, really significant upgrade, amazing features, but they just really don't materialize each year.
Geoff Wilson [00:28:37] I do the same thing, as I said, with the car. I like to pay it off as soon as possible. Then it's mine so I don't have to worry about keeping paying or anything else. So in that sense, once I bought the phone, I have no pressure to change it. Like I'm not paying a single dime for this anymore other than my mobile plan. That's it. So you have to do something eventually that actually entices me enough or the whole planned obsolescence thing. Things have to break enough for me to stop using it. Like my old one when the standby button stops working and the only way to access the phone is by tapping on the screen a few times to get it to work, that will be enough of a burden after time that I'll go, you know what I'll deal with it or I'll do something about it now.
Guy Thompson [00:29:16] OK, so here's a suggestion for you. What if it was different and every phone upgrade you did was a rental and you sent it back and they recycled at the end of the term? So you were buying, you received a new phone every year and the monthly fee was always the same, and one year later it goes back and gets recycled and you receive the new model and all your data is on it.
Geoff Wilson [00:29:34] Again, I hate waste. And so, if I knew it went to somebody else that's actually going to use it, that'd be great. Now, the interesting or hypocrisy for myself is that: do I like getting refurbished devices? Like, you know, if you have a problem, like my old Xbox I talked about or even phones I've sent in before now, and they're like, "Oh, well, we'll send you a like-for-like model; it's refurbished one." I can't help but think, oh God, I don't know what the previous person has done to it. I don't know what they used it like. Maybe the company that fixed it didn't fix every thing, and so I get really nervous about getting anything refurbished. So, it's like, I've got the... I do have the hypocrisy; I don't want waste, but at the same point, I want things that I've controlled from the beginning that I know I've only owned.
Guy Thompson [00:30:13] It's interesting, though, because I don't trust that new devices are going to perform that well. Maybe I've just seen enough of them released and the problems that people have and the upgrade issues and the operating system updates, and I never trusted a new purchase is going to be streamlined. And so I just I have just as much trust that a refurbished device that we know that particular model performed well, there wasn't a recall, like you've got just as much chance of that reconditioned refurbished model performing just as well as a new one. And I think I've probably owned probably three refurbished phones, iPhones, and every single one of them has been completely fine. So I actually haven't had a negative refurbished iPhone experience at all. So I'm completely happy to be that customer that gets the refurbished phone that's come back onto the secondary market, because I don't, I feel absolutely no need to to pay for the absolutely new. And of course, that example I used before of the 10S that is still in the box, that's still like a two year old phone. Right? Or maybe three. I don't even know now haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:31:11] And by the time this comes out and you're listening to it, who knows how old this is yet?
Guy Thompson [00:31:14] Yeah, does anyone want to buy my unboxed phone? Oh, actually, that's a really good point! I was going to mention the unboxing thing. Right? So I feel like there's a really interesting, vicarious curious thing that happens now where the ability for you to do research and due diligence and get the experience of the brand new device and the brand new thing is satisfied by a lot of content online. And so you can kind of go through that process and that emotional feeling in 4K on your TV in the lounge of what that box looks like, all the new bits and pieces inside it. And then you can kind of sit back and go, do I really need to do that myself now? And the question is, maybe it might actually solve it - that little need fifty percent of the time.
Geoff Wilson [00:31:56] I'm torn there. So a few stories real quick and I'll try to make them short. One, you know, reading the old Steve Jobs biography, it is through that that I realized that idea of unboxing being an experience. Like I never understood why people were doing unboxing videos until I read and listened to that biography. And I was like, oh yeah, that's it. There's this tactile experience and it's not just using the phone itself. In that case, this Apple iPhone. It was just the feeling of unboxing and seeing it in pristine white and everything else that it has. It's this whole feeling to it. Transpose this to, I once got a phone shipped to me from my parents that they basically took it out of the box and put it in nothing because there's Duty costs and all this other stuff. Ahh, hopefully New Zealand Customs doesn't fine me for saying this years after the fact haha, but I got a phone sent to me from the U.S. It was one of the Google phones because I just couldn't buy it here in New Zealand. Yeah. And so they shipped it to me out of the box, but it was still new, but they turned it on already and everything. So I lost all of that part of the experience. And so because you're told that it's a special experience, you kind of feel like you're robbed of it. But it's just a manufactured idea in a way. It's not like... did I really miss anything?
Guy Thompson [00:33:03] It's interesting because I'm going to challenge you on that one, because I, I think the unboxing experience is something that is actually really unique. And I hadn't even really thought about this much until recently that the engineering and technology and development and research that goes into manufacturing and consumer electronic device is actually extremely significant. And I feel like often the packaging that you receive doesn't really give it the respect that it actually deserves. You're using a completely futuristic science fiction device, a little piece of glass and plastic and metal that's less than a centimeter thick that can literally do anything that you want and supply you with any information that you can find in the world. Right. Compared to, you know, our experience of sort of growing up in the 80s and 90s and using technology then to what we're experiencing now, and you just get it in like a cardboard box? Apple was really the first company that sort of said we've nailed this thing out of a solid block of aluminum and put a whole bunch of chipsets and batteries and things you don't even know how to build. You don't even know the computer science that even remotely goes into this. But we're going to give it to you in a way that actually gives you this impression. You're really using a futuristic device. The future's now when you open that box. And I think when they started doing that, people were like, wow, this is actually a really amazing piece of technology. And then everyone else sort of started getting that idea that it's not just in a beige box. You know, the Dell kind of you know, you just see them all over the office, the standard HP, Compaq, Dell packaging. And Apple was like, no, no, this has to be a really premium experience because you're actually getting really premium device.
Geoff Wilson [00:34:43] Which is interesting. Yeah, because when I do think about it, it makes me want to save the box. Like, I almost don't want to throw it away because I'm like I mean, I'd have no use for it now. I'm never going to put it back in there ever now unless I sell it, which we talked about selling other things. But I'm not doing that as much with phones anymore. So, like, you know what if I'm going to sell it now, I probably didn't keep the box, but I want to. And it is making me focus on that more. So, yeah, with every new device I get, I am looking at that going, "I'm going to take my time to soak this in," but I'm also kind of a designer. So in a way, I might not be the average person in that sense; that I'm actively overthinking the fact that I know it's like a placebo effect. I know it's an unboxing. So my brain's telling me I need to care about it more than I probably would if I didn't know it. Quite curious. Oh, but when you said unboxing, I did think of one going back to the real world or the physical world... ummm... that doesn't make sense. Hold on. Because the boxes are physical, phones are physical. I don't know what Matrix world I'm living in haha.
Guy Thompson [00:35:35] Haha are you imagining that box?
Geoff Wilson [00:35:38] Yes. Well, technically as we talk, yes, I am. I am imagining the box. Okay, good, you saved me from that one. But _household_ items, if you will. Yes. And you know, like the foam mattresses. Now that's an unboxing experience! Right? Like I was so happy when we finally got one. It wasn't a Casper mattress. It was some New Zealand brand version of it. And it was that is, I mean, I've got pictures of it. That was an event for that night that after we moved into our house, like, we got to fill this bedroom, let's get one of those new foam mattresses we always hear about in podcast ads.
Guy Thompson [00:36:08] Yeah that can explode out of the package.
Geoff Wilson [00:36:10] Yeah, we open up... but then I was very eeeeeeeehhhh.... yeah, it was then disappointing because... If you can listen back to the past 30 seconds to the tone of my voice, if you manufacture those things, you could tell I was very excited just now. I'm recalling this memory of being such a happy consumer because I was told how great this experience would be. But now after I've talked about it for 30 seconds, I've realised, wait a minute, it wasn't anything like that! It was quite disappointing. We cut it open, and stood back thinking it was going to explode! But then... ppssssshhhh... just this slow, slow crawl of a thing like this is so anticlimactic! Haha yeah. So I... wow, I went from really elated thinking this is was a great story to now being like saddened by like, this actually wasn't what I thought it was goin to be.
Guy Thompson [00:36:55] Yeah, that's one of my favorite terms: "anticipointment" where
Geoff Wilson [00:37:01] Oooo I like it, I like it.
Guy Thompson [00:37:02] Haha and it's so common now because you think, you know, we drink the marketing Kool-Aid, we se this incredible products, you know, shown. And there'll be a tiny little disclaimer down the bottom that says, you know, "mattress inflation shown in timelapse" or something. And you're like, oh, it's actually going to take twenty minutes, you know, it's not going to be that instant thing. So I think it is a really great marketing gimmick for a lot of these mattress companies to sort of be wrapping up this tiny thing that one person could pretty much receive at their apartment or house and kind of get it in the lounge or in the bedroom and sort of cut it open. It would sort of explode and pop out and suddenly they'd be just on the floor and ready to go. Right? Because manoeuvering a mattress is usually like a two person job. So the fact that one person could get it and it would pop open looked really exciting, but it seems like...
Geoff Wilson [00:37:47] So they don't get smothered underneath it like, "Oh God!, I wish somebody else was here helping me on boxes so I don't die under this rapidly inflating mattress! Ahhh!"
Guy Thompson [00:37:54] The trapped under thing, right? But the reality is that you can't have something that's going to exert that much force and that much velocity because it's unsafe for consumer. Right? That's why we have regulators to make sure that you can't buy a mattress that's going to exert, you know, 50 kg of force when you open it because you could. Like you think of the way that industrial springs and stuff are packaged up before they're installed in something. You can't have that with a mattress that you buy at home.
Geoff Wilson [00:38:20] So I want to put like an industrial spring now in a headphone case that way, like, it really, it just onto blasts on your head, like, "POW! You got headphones!" hahaha
Guy Thompson [00:38:27] Exactly. You can't have the jack in the box thing, right haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:38:31] All right. OK, so we've we've done that part of at least the unboxing aspect. Now, one thing has always bothered me in a weird way, it's like I almost have a vendetta against matrress and rug stores? Haha that I see a speciality... haha it sounds so weird; I'm sorry for the mattress and rug store owners. But when I see them in a small town, I just... it's more so I want to go to them and hold them by the collar and go, "How do you exist?!" Because in a small town where like, you know, you don't really feel like people move, right? At least the people, you know, like, "Oh, well, I've lived here for X many years. These other people have lived here. None of us are moving. None of us are upgrading." And maybe this is a logic fallacy where you think because you don't see it, it's not happening. Yeah. So I think at least, you know, well, hey, nobody's moving or buying mattresses or buying new rugs. So how in the world are these stores existing?
Guy Thompson [00:39:19] Interesting. I've I've got a theory about this, and it's something I've noticed from living in Melbourne for the last few years. I think there is always per 1000 households - there's actually quite a high number of people that are moving in and out all the time. And they're getting a new lease that, you know, they've had kids, they're expanding, and they're arriving to do work. This was happening a lot more when borders were open and people were moving around and doing work internationally. Not so much now. So part of it is the natural churn, right. Of people moving in and out of places. That's enough that you can kind of keep stores running. You might not have three rug stores in a row, but it's enough that you can keep the one local rug store going.
Geoff Wilson [00:39:56] One of those is a front. If there's three rug stores next to a liquor store, and that's just... chances are one of those is doing illegitimate business hahaha.
Guy Thompson [00:40:03] Haha so you're literally telling me they're storing money underneath the mattress and people are selling? This is great for storing money underneath? haha. Umm but the other factor that I thought was really interesting is that there is a segment of the population and I don't know how big this is, that for multiple reasons either don't want to move the mattress because it's too heavy or that just may be a hygiene thing, they just literally want a new mattress every time they move somewhere. So they take the TV under one arm in the back of the car and some luggage and they move to a new place. And the only thing they're not going to move is the mattress that's too big and the person who moves in doesn't want it because it was someone else's mattress and it just goes out on the road. So there's actually like, there's a lot of churn in mattresses because they just get discarded on the side of the road.
Geoff Wilson [00:40:49] So you know what then? If they can have mattress stores that can exist in small towns because there's enough churn, then surely there's like a mattress recycler who can somehow exist and their whole business model is sitting right next to the mattress place. So they pick up your old one, somebody else drops off your new one. There you go. It's the circle of life haha.
Guy Thompson [00:41:08] I would be fascinated to know if someone they can tell us where the recycled metal from bedsprings inside mattresses goes? And actually what happens? So when that mattress disappears off the side of the road and gets recycled, I certainly hope that not going into landfills like a full size mattress that goes into landfill? Which does worry me because I feel that New Zealand and Australia are still making really good gains on recycling and spreading stuff out. But I'm sure that too much stuff still gets just buried straight in the ground. And of course, when we're talking about consumer electronics and stuff that we're buying and acquiring and being part of the design and marketing of these things, we've got to be conscious about that entire loop is as are things actually getting thrown out that are still useful? That do have more usable life in them? Or are things actually ending up in the ground just because we're caught up in this adoption, early adopter, you've got to have the brand new thing and then just goes in the ground. Because we never se those things. We put the rubbish out on the side of the road. We never go actively to a waste management facility and have a look around. It's all taken care of from our council, right. So that we don't see that impact we're really having on the environment. It's out of sight, out of mind. And we just looking for the brand new fancy thing to get out of the box.
Geoff Wilson [00:42:16] And that's that idea of human centered design. It's not just the UIs. It's not just these things you see and touch and smell and everything else. It's what happens to those things after the fact. Exactly as you're saying, those things will affect our lives. So being a humans-centred designer, remember that; think of that full lifecycle of that product. In that sense, what are you making? What waste is it going to generate? How might that waste come back to bite you and bite all of us then from environmental? Just anything, whether it's air or ground pollution, water pollution, all of this other what we do all has consequences. And so be smart about what you're upgrading. Be smart about what you're building for the sake of building. Consider all that. And I think that's a good message to end on today. We'll leave on a very high note, if you will.
Guy Thompson [00:43:00] Very good hahaha. Sorry, I thought that was my cue to stop talking haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:43:05] Oh no, I was going to, but then I was like, "Should I get a reaction out of you?" I don't know.
Guy Thompson [00:43:10] That is a high note to end on. I think that's a really, really good consideration, because I feel this is a really interesting point there, right? That we that we probably didn't flag early on. It was that the cost of getting this brand new thing, how long you had to save up to get it, and the experience you went through when you actually first received it, I think affects how long you're going to hang onto it for and how willing you are to discard it. And I worry that some of these gimmicky things, like the the mattress that you that got delivered and it pops out, is that more discardable than the mattress that turns up with two dudes in a delivery van and they kind of pop it in your living room for you or your lounge or your bedroom? Is that experience of getting that that brand new thing significant? And I rewind all the way back to that dryer that you parents have got, did two dudes turn up and plug it in and show your mum how to use it and say, Hey, here it is, it's amazing." And that experience of acquiring that device was so powerful that you're like, "I'm not getting rid of that, it's amazing!" Whereas, you know, that experience that we have so often for cheap, basic consumer electronics is so throw away that, you know, we've all got spare headphones that we don't need, which are all complicated. I don't know how to manufacture a microphone or a speaker and these miniaturized things, but, you know, and I'll be like, "Oh, I like this one more than that one and I'll throw that one away or give that away." So, yeah, we are definitely living in a an environment where we're consuming products a lot faster than we were. And also services. We're upgrading software and using different tools in a much faster way than we were before. And I worry that it's going to get even even quicker.
Geoff Wilson [00:44:48] And that's why at Christmas time and birthdays and stuff, I don't necessarily like to receive or give gifts because I hate getting stuff that you just throw away. I'm kind of like Scrooge in that sense; it's like the little novelty Secret Santa gifts that are 20 bucks or Christmas crackers that you have these little useless plastic things that you're not going to use at all. It's just waste. Anyways! Anyways. Well, with that, folks, thank you for listening to this episode. And I hope that makes you think of a few new things. If you'd like to continue this conversation and hear us laugh endlessly or yell at us for the things we've said, you can find us, find us and follow us on social media @EverydayExpPod or myself @GeoffWilsonHCD. Please consider subscribing on your favorite podcasting app and leaving us a rating so we can keep this going. And just remember, you don't have to have a fancy job title to start noticing and improving the everyday experiences wherever you work. Thanks. And we'll be on the air again soon.
POST-CREDITS
Guy Thompson [00:46:10] That's awesome, Geoff. Next time can you not turn into Scrooge McDuck and then sign off this thing? Hahaha you can't be like the Christmas Grinch and just sign off the podcast. You've got to have a positive spin at the end. But, you know, "Thinking about design and human-centred design, we can influence the world and impact recycling and make the world a better place." Like, "Just don't get me anything for Christmas" was the message that people got at the end hahahaha.
