Dear Reader,

It’s finally here.  We have waited since, literally, forever;  there has never been one before.  We have lived so long without one that some of us may have even made the mistake of not being aware that we needed one.  No longer.  The wait is over.  The iPhone now comes in purple.

The marketing folks at Apple rightly call the new color “stunning.”   I am stunned.  They announced it at a huge event this Tuesday.  It was viewed all over the world, as such events always are.  Great anticipation preceded the event.  Rumors swirled.  Prognosticators prognosticated.  Stocks flew up and down.   But no one could have predicted this.  Purple!  Stunning.

When I was in high school, I discovered a purple, electric guitar at our neighborhood music store.  It was the uncontested coolest thing in the world (or at least in our neighborhood music store).   Its over-the-top hues promised to wash out any melodic shortcomings that might otherwise be noticed in an adolescent guitarist of questionable musical talent.  And it was quietly mentioned to me, man to man,  by the salesperson that — like the plumage of some male tropical bird, I suppose — it would undoubtedly attract the attention of adolescent females (of questionable musical taste).  

I saved up money mowing lawns and suchlike, but I was still a few dollars short of the several hundred required to make it mine.  Undaunted, I went into the store and tried my teenaged hand at negotiation.  The managers made a great show of pretending to punch numbers into a calculator.  They tried to see what they “could do.”  They sincerely wanted to help, if there were any possible way.  Eventually, they begrudgingly came to terms with me, probably at the expense of starving their children.  I suppose I did not realize at the time that guitars in music stores always transact well below their intentionally overstated sticker price (and likely well below my offer).

I still have the purple guitar.  I think.  Somewhere in the basement?  I don’t play it much.  It is not an extremely good guitar; it is not the best-made guitar; its main advantages are (were) that it is shaped to fit the style of a particular (past) decade and that it is (stunningly) purple. If I ever find it I suppose I could try to sell it, but I suspect it might only fetch twenty dollars nowadays.   I’d surely do better taking up lawn mowing again.  Purple guitars, it seems, are victims of planned obsolescence.  

The concept of planned obsolescence, basically, is that manufacturers consciously intend for items made and sold today to become undesirable in the relatively near future.  The term  itself was coined nearly a hundred years ago.  Automobile manufacturers at the time were reaching a point of saturation and stagnation in sales.  General Motors, therefore, decided to start introducing a new model each year, with minor, somewhat arbitrary, aesthetic differences from the prior year. They created a new internal department called the Art and Color Section, which headed up such things.  The change in production processes was not entirely easy to pull off, but the company was gambling on the curious idea that it might be able to alter the buying habits of car-owning Americans by retraining their psychology to perceive novelty as a primary source of value, instead of just quality, beauty, and usefulness.   Ford, at first, did not take such an approach.  It seemed ridiculous, I suppose.  But GM’s bet paid off.  By 1931 it surpassed Ford’s sales and became the preeminent car company in the United States.  On the heels of this grand success, the term and the concept of planned obsolescence rose in prominence within business strategy and industrial design over the course of the ensuing century.  It really gained velocity in the 1950s and became a key engine of our modern economy, albeit not one that businesses riding it wish for their customers to think much about.

Nowhere is this reality more obvious than in the gushing river of gadgets that now floods its banks almost  continuously.  Its source, of course, is the benevolent wellspring of Big Tech.   On Monday, the device you held in your hand was a modern-day miracle, the pinnacle of human achievement in communication, computation, and design — indeed the technological apex of all past millennia.  On Tuesday it was obsolete. A relic. An object meriting the stifled laughter of teenagers and the condescension of all progressive peoples.  As of Tuesday there’s now one with a different chip. Or an extra megapixel. Or a new way to swipe.  Maybe there’s a thinner design, mocking your archaic paperweight.  Most importantly, it now comes in purple.  Stunning.

Sincerely,