Sunday, 4 August 2024

The enshitification of hardware in the real world.

Ok. This post is going to be a bit of a rant. 

Read the link below. I'll wait.
 
https://www.theverge.com/24206847/logitech-ceo-hanneke-faber-mouse-keyboard-gaming-decoder-podcast-interview

So if you read the entire thing there's a mention in the interview of a "Forever Mouse", a mouse that you would never have to purchase again, but that would carry with it a ongoing subscription that you would have to continue to pay for software updates.

I mean we are talking about a god dammed mouse. 

These stupid things should just work. They shouldn't be something that requires an ongoing subscription for them to keep working. It's something that I pay once for, use until it breaks, and provided that it lasts long enough I would go and pick up a new one once the old one dies. 

I can't see any point where I'd be willing to have a subscription that I'm paying for a mouse, even if it was going to cover all warranty issues or other problems that came up. I mean how long can you pay for the subscription before you have spent more than the replacement cost of the mouse in the first place?

There are places where subscriptions make sense, but in my mind most hardware should be a one-time purchase. To be completely honest we have seen this happening with printers over the years. 

I've been working with computers for a very long time at this point, and printers have been something that I've had to be fighting with for my entire time working with computers - both personally and professionally. Back in the day printers were generally well built and there were models that you would pick up and run for potentially a decade or more unless there was some compelling reason to upgrade. 

I ran a HP Deskjet 830c for way longer than I can remember. At some point the thing threw a belt or something and stopped working. At the time I wasn't really printing any more and it wound up getting sent out for recycling and I was without a printer for several years. When I needed one again I ran down to the local retailer and picked up one for cheap and the thing lasted about a year before it started jamming up. This repeated for a couple of years, and eventually being a bit sick of it I picked up a laser printer that stuck around until the drum died, and it was then replaced with another HP printer that I absolutely hated.

Right now there's a Lexmark unit sitting at my house that works well that I picked up on clearance. 

The thing that I noticed each time that I was picking up a new printer was that the quality of the devices was continually decreasing each time that I had to get a new device, and the price of the toner or ink was going up, and up, and up every time that I looked at a new device. If you think about it this does make sense from the stance of the company making the printer - it's not about the printer, it's about selling you the ink for the printer. 

HP now offers a Instant Ink program where you are basically paying a monthly cost for ink based on how much you are printing. This type of thing has been around for large companies for a long time - especially when dealing with higher volumes of printing but it's starting to push down to the consumer level, and the quality of the printers has basically fallen off the face of a cliff in response since the printer only has to last long enough to sell ink and then be disposed of. 

And now it's spreading to mice. 

Sure they are talking about doing this with a "really nice" mouse right now, but you can't tell me that they won't eventually build the things to basically be disposable enough that you can't get away from having a subscription because the device is a piece of crap. 

Frankly, if Logitech does this it's probably going to be the trigger to keep me from ever using another one of their products in the future. 





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