Not Buying It
The quest for a latest-and-greatest-itis cure…
I buy way too many gadgets. That in and of itself may be a problem, but it’s compounded by the fact that once I have a new gadget in my life, I tend to always need that latest version of that gadget. And in an era of yearly iterations for gadgets, it makes for not only a very expensive habit, but a tiresome one as well. It feels like I’m always upgrading and updating some sort of device.
Maybe it’s a holdover from my days as a tech reporter, when I often got to try the latest and greatest gadgets for free — the downside being that the devices I actually owned always seemed dated as a result. Or maybe it’s even from my childhood when we would “only” get a new PC or TV once every several years. Now, when something new comes out, even just the latest version of something, I tend to buy it with very few questions asked.
Except recently I’ve noticed that desire slipping a bit. When Amazon announced the new Kindle last week, the Oasis, I opened the web page fully expecting to buy it and then something funny happened: I didn’t. After looking over the product page and reading a few of the early reviews, I decided that I didn’t need it.
Of course, “need” is a silly term here. I don’t really need any of this stuff — well, except the iPhone, I definitely need that — and certainly not the latest version of these things. But again, that never stopped me in the past. I love my Kindle Voyage, so of course I’ll “need” the Kindle Oasis too, right?
Maybe the Oasis is an outlier. After all, in some ways it seems worse than the Kindle Voyage. It’s not faster, doesn’t have a better screen, etc. It does have a better battery, but battery life has never been an issue with my Kindle. Plus, that better battery has a very real downside: that awful case.
So yeah, in my mind, there are plenty of reasons not to buy a Kindle Oasis. So like a normal person, I’m not going to, for once.
But then something even stranger happened just today. Apple released a new MacBook and I decided that it too wasn’t for me. Yes, it’s faster and comes with a better battery. And yes, it comes in “Rose Gold.” The weird thing here is twofold:
- This is an Apple product, and I always get the latest Apple products.
- I actually do feel the pain of my current MacBook being too slow and the battery being too low from time to time.
But the slight speed increase and the marginally better battery here don’t seem to be enough to warrant the upgrade just a year after I bought the model I’m currently typing on. As Dieter Bohn notes in his initial take:
“But benchmarks and just a couple minutes of use are one thing, while actual extended use is quite another. My hunch is that if you were worried that the last MacBook was too underpowered for you, the new MacBook will only assuage your concerns by, well, 25 percent or so.”
So unless the deeper reviews unearth something extraordinary that’s not apparent on the surface, I won’t be buying this either.
Now, I’m not foolish enough to think I’m cured of my mental ailment, latest-and-greatest-itis. And it’s worth noting that I still bought the new iPad Pro, even though I also had bought the last iPad Pro, and the last iPad Air, and the last iPad mini (to give you a sense of just how deep this rabbit hole goes…). But I sense progress in my psyche.
I mean, I didn’t even buy the newest, old-style iPhone. As ridiculous as it sounds (and I know how ridiculous it sounds), I normally would have…
I wonder if this is me coming to my senses or if this speaks to a broader trend of “good enough.” That is, technology, and many of our gadgets in particular, have improved to the point where most of them are now “good enough” on a daily basis, and upgrades are only needed every few years, as they age. Or what if we start to cling to our older technology trinkets as we might an old, worn notebook? Maybe we only upgrade when the gadgets are forcefully pried from our pockets by some software obsoletion?
It’s probably just me. At least until the new, new iPhone comes out.
