Apple Accused Of Deliberately Slowing Older Products To Persuade People To Buy New iPhones

The title of this article immediately caught my eye….because my  dad recently gave me his iPad 2 which he had bought brand new in 2012. I remember it was extremely fast…and intuitive…he loved it. Only 5 years later we may as well throw it away because it’s so incredibly slow, it’s completely useless. It takes forever just to open an app…it’s constantly freezing and there’s no way for my son to even play games on it because of how much it lags. You cant even type a simple email on it unless you have two hours to waste. It shouldn’t be completely unusable only 5 years later. It was very expensive. We were perplexed over its ridiculous slowness…we tried looking up remedies. Nothing worked.

My dad of course shelled out around $900 for a brand new one because he needs one for work….how convenient for Apple. Now imagine millions of customers having to do this… $$$$$$$

Also…every Iphone or Ipad Ive ever owned cracks and or shatters when you drop it lightly…say like on the carpet…I finally gave up trying to fix my screen because it didnt take long before it had shattered or cracked again. I always kind of blamed myself for being too clumsy…until I got a Samsung Galaxy…and had it for YEARS without the screen so much a as cracking. I began to realize…Apple makes the glass on their products extremely delicate and breakable….Probably hoping you’ll just get a new one rather than spend $80 to fix it.

So anyways, this headline…about Apple deliberately making their old products slower caught my attention…because its the only thing that makes sense as to what happened to the very expensive iPad my dad bought just 5 years ago.

Here are some excepts from the articles I read about this:

 A new study is backing up long held suspicions that Apple, the Cupertino-based company is deliberately sabotaging its old products so people will buy their newer ones.

The U.S. study analysed worldwide internet keyword searches for the term ‘iPhone slow’ and found that the search term spiked significantly around the time of every new iPhone launch….without fail.

So the study discovered that online searches for the words “iPhone slow” increase dramatically when a new iPhone is being launched. While it might be tempting to think that this could be people looking for an excuse to get themselves a new phone, if that were true other brands would show the same peak when releasing their new devices. This is not the case, however. When searching for the term “Samsung Galaxy slow,” for example, the study could find no similar increase in searches.

Writing for the New York Times, Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard, described the results as ‘striking’.

‘Wouldn’t many business owners love to make their old product less useful whenever they released a newer one?’ Mr Mullainathan wrote.

‘When you sell the device and control the operating system, that’s an option’

In an informal inquiry, the Mail asked its readers whether they had experienced problems with their devices slowing down around the time of a new iPhone release. The responses were mixed, with many saying that they had experienced that problem, while others claimed they had not noticed any change.

“This is common knowledge,” wrote one reader. “If you want to keep your iPhone running at the same pace do not do the software upgrade that comes out within six months of a new iPhone release.”

 As Kalee Brown, writing for The Last American Vagabond, noted:

“To be honest, if Apple was doing this, it would be a pretty smart business move. They launch new products periodically, and all of them are really just slightly fancier versions of their older models. People don’t often need these products, they simply want them. They only become a “need” when their older models break or malfunction.”

Last year, Catherine Rampell, also writing in the New York Times, raised concerns that Apple could be engineering the new operating system so it only works properly with the newest version of the product.

She said her iPhone 4 became a lot slower when she downloaded iOS 7 – and that the only solution seemed to be to buy the iPhone 5.

Ms Rampell accused Apple of having run out of ideas so was trying to ‘brainwash’ its customers into buying the new iPhone 5S and 5C because they look nice.

Her claims fuelled conspiracy theorists who have long held that Apple engages in ‘planned obsolescence’, a term which has been around since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The theory states that manufacturers of everything from cars to microwaves build in a certain lifetime to a product and then it will simply stop working, forcing consumers to buy a new one.

And Apple has faced allegations that it is guilty of planned obsolescence before.

When it started using more tamper-resistant screws experts said it was to stop users getting into the phone and fixing it themselves if there was a problem.

Meanwhile, in 2012 Apple was sued in Brazil by the Brazilian Institute of Politics and Law Software over the launch of the iPad Air.

The organisation claimed that because it had the new retina screen it made the iPad 3 redundant and that Apple was changing its devices too quickly.

Ms Rampell said: ‘When major innovations remain out of reach, and degrading durability threatens to tick off loyal customers, companies like Apple can still take a cue from the fashion industry.

‘If you can brainwash consumers into developing new tastes that make the old stuff look uncool for aesthetic rather than functional reasons, you still have a shot at harvesting more sales from your existing customer base.

To close, “planned obsolescence” is very real, and in many cases, verified. And there is actually nothing legally wrong with sabotaging one’s own products in order to incentivize consumers to purchase new ones, yet this is next-level sinister in terms of good business practice. The important take away here is that your consumer power is a very important tool today that is given very little attention in terms of dictating the country’s direction, and for obvious reason. In fact, it is the only power left to the individual that actually garners a response from our leaders in their ivory towers, if not grudgingly and reluctantly, but a real-world response nonetheless. So as we enter into a time when such practices are becoming public knowledge, opt for a product or company that does not violate your privacy while simultaneously systematically weakening your now thousand dollar product, so as to be effectively downgraded and hindered just in time for their next product installment. Opt for a company that does not put the government’s needs and that of its shareholders, over the success of its very product, and those who mindlessly still choose to buy it.

Source: DailyMail.co.uk