My vote goes to Nintendo - I’ll let someone else nail Apple, since they’re the obvious answer, but I’m not a customer.
Nintendo always seems to have a new, superior product ready to roll out just as soon as a decent number of people buy their first one. I was an early adopter with their DS handheld system and they released the superior DS Lite 9 months later. There’s already rumors of a DVD-capable Wii with bigger internal memory on the way - just as soon as enough people buy the regular one.
Micro$oft.
I never install a new OS from the until at least the first Service Pack. (Which is usually a complete rebuild of the OS anyway).
That’s the great thing about being a poor techno-junkie! You don’t have enough money to buy the new hotness when it first comes out!*
*You can’t exactly buy the new hotness when the revamped 2.0 version comes out either, but at least you’re not pissed about buying the first release.
Does Microsoft count as “screwing over” early adopters in the same sense that TLDR describes Nintendo doing it?
If you buy a Microsoft OS when it first comes out, while you may need to get service packs and updates for a good while until it works the way you need it to work, it does not cost you anything to have the latest version of the software, until they release a new OS which doesn’t happen that often.
TLDR is saying that with companies that make hardware (Nintendo, Apple, etc) you have to buy a whole new physical system in order to get the “revised” edition of what was “the shit” just a few months earlier. Apple has done this with the iPod and the iPhone - not sure if they do it with their computers or not.
Just to be clear: you’re unhappy with businesses that continue to improve their products? Better that they just rest on their laurels and leave everyone with the same old hardware?
Geez, does Intel count? I can spend $1000+ on a top of the line processor and have something twice as good come out in 6 months.
Nintendo has always said a DVD-capable Wii was right around the corner. But with the ridiculous demand on the original Wii, I think “right around the corner” is at least a year, maybe two away.
And I like the original DS better, the Lite is too small for my hands.
No. The OP is unhappy with businesses that already have the “Lite” version ready to roll, but withhold the better version until all the early adopters have bought the “clunky” version.
How can you argue that Apple, for example, when dropping the price of the iPhone shortly after it was released, couldn’t have charged that price in the first place? Or that the “Lite” version of the Nintendo couldn’t have been produced at the same time as the “clunky” version? AFAICT, there was no major software upgrade, and could have been put out as the “improved” version right away.
Shimano tangentially fit the bill for this. For non-cyclists, shimano is the biggest manufacturer of bicycle components in the world. They don’t make bikes AFAIK, they make bike bits - stuff like brakes, hubs, cranks, chains, gears, shifters etc. They are also pretty good. In an industry that is very thin on genuine R and D, and very big on design and dancing bullshit, they’re one of the few outfits who could call themselves bicycle engineers with a straight face. They probably own more patents than the rest of the entire bicycle industry put together.
Bikes aren’t like consoles though - the design of the bicycle was pretty much ironed out in the Victorian era and has been tweaked in the intervening 120 years. So how do you make money off such a mature technology? Occasionally, you come up with something useful, like disk brakes, or suspension; oftentimes though you rip the customer off with useless ‘innovations’ that no one needs, but can be forced onto the market by the brute force of Shimano power.
Stuff like 7 speed, no 8 speed, no 9 speed gearing. Square taper cranksets worked great for 50 years, suddenly they’re obsolete and everyone needs an octalink. Hang on, octalink is shite, we need to go to outboard bearings. Tiny naval gazing products like ‘rapid-rise’ rear mechs that make no difference to your ride etc.
The discerning cyclist can ignore this bollocks, of course, but it’s an effort tracking down stuff that Shimano has sunset-ed. Possibly the most egregious shimano-isation of the bicycle is the idea that each and every component works best as part of an all Shimano-groupset. The hub / disk / cassette / chain / crankset / bottom bracket / gears / brakes are all part of the one machine, and can be hard to mix and match.
I’m still a fan of Shimano, because they’re good and don’t litter their mountain bike stuff with infantile iconography like skull and crossbones. They definitely get you by the short and curlies though.
So people are upset because, in the time between finishing version A and getting version A to market, a company is already trying to improve upon version A?
As for the Apple iPhone fiasco, the problem was that Jobs badly overestimated demand. You can bet his stake in Apple stock that Jobs wishes the iPhone price cut didn’t have to happen. Or are we now going to get upset because a company thinks it can profit on the items it sells. Profit = gouging customers? Are we advocating a central authority setting profit margins? Apple did not overcharge for the iPhone; early adopters grossly overpaid for the ‘privilege’ of being first.
There are companies out there who do some really scumbag things, but really folks. Every corporate decision is a scumbag decision? Every shortage is a conspiracy to increase demand? The fact that nVidia always has one to two upgrades in the pipeline, which results in you only getting bragging rights for 6 months at best, screws over its customers? The rants on many corporate decisions take the leap from dissatisfaction to complete lunacy.
Golf Club OEMs. TaylorMade in particular. New club cylcles down to like 6 months now.
EA Games. Ever since they bought out Maxis, they’ve delighted in thumbing their nose at early adopters of the sims games. If you buy the games when they first come out, you pay $50. Later on, once early adopters have made the game a success you can get a newer edition that includes that game plus a lot of new content for $40, or new combo packs of the expansions for a considerable discount over buying them seperately when they were first released. grrr.
Well, in my case, there’s an accepted “life cycle” of the product that the company is flying in the face of. It’s generally expected with a home video game console that once you buy the system, you can expect 5-7 years of life out of that system before the next thing comes out. Nintendo has increasingly moved to instead releasing multiple revisions of the system, often fixing major flaws or introducing major improvements, as quickly as a year after the initial release. This is considered bad form, especially by all of the people who bought the first version, because their purchase is made inferior or obsolete very shortly after they purchase it.
Yeah, I would have a higher threshold of ‘screwing over’ than having something newer and better released only a few months later, or having a few bugs in an initial release if they freely offer service packs and updates to correct them. (Bugs that DON’T get corrected so quickly, of course, are another issue.)
Now, if Nintendo offered clearly superior support and accessories to the DS Lite purchasers and neglected the original DS, you might have more of a case in my eyes. Caveat Emptor, buddy. (Which advice I admit I’ve ignored a few times.)
What are you talking about? The cycles of all consoles are getting shorter, but 5-7 years? Maybe that flew back in the NES days, but that’s kind of silly to expect now. You really want to play on a machine with 7 year old tech? And how many versions of Nintendo consoles are there? There’s a japanese and an american NES (plus the weird orphan top-load american nes), but those were all cosmetic diferences, anyhow. I can think of two SNES designs, but once again, they were just different cases. One N64, one 'Cube, and one Wii. They’re pretty darn steady in the console market. I think we’re on the 5th PS3 hardeware change, and there are 3 diferent 360s.
Yeah, what a bunch of jackasses.
I’ll nominate Sony.
Just how many “standards” did they try to introduce which have failed miserably?
Memory Stick
MO storage
AM Stereo
Beta
the root-kit debacle
BluRay was a risky thing. I think the only thing that made it succeed (since it appears to be the winner now) was the fact that Sony happens to owns a rather large movie company.
The DS Lite could not have been produced at the same time as the DS “Phat” for the same price. That’s why the Lite was able to come out when it did. Screen technology got slightly better and the chips that go inside the DS got smaller.
When the smaller components are hard to come by, you pay a premium, which is exactly what Nintendo did not want.
Sure, they could have released the Lite when they released the Phat, but would you have paid $200 for that system with that lineup of games then? No? Why not ask the PSP.
I don’t get it. If it was worth $600 to you yesterday, why isn’t it today? The object’s actual value to you is completely independent of what others choose to pay or what the manufacturer chooses to charge for the object tomorrow. How is anybody getting screwed?
I think planned obsolescence is just simply a cornerstone of capitalism, and that we’re only noticing because tech product cycles tend to be shorter.
But the bottom line is that we are a nation of complete dumbasses who simply must have the newest sparkly thing every 6 months, even though its going to be old news within the lifespan of a housefly.
There’s no good answer…