A funny sort of progress
The Conversation's David Glance outlined a curious theory this week, suggesting that "part of Apple's success comes from giving us a sense of progress". Glance conjectures that providing workers with updated hardware and software every year might give them a sense of progress that contributes to job satisfaction, and suggests that companies might even consider paying their staff bonuses with which they can upgrade their own devices in bring-your-own-device schemes.
Glance doesn't address the question of whether or not upgrading devices makes any actual progress towards the goals of either a company or an individual worker. For Apple's purposes, it's enough to give a sense of progress if it keeps the customers coming back for more upgrades. As Erich Heinzle's comment points out, this strategy is generally known as planned obsolescence and it's an old strategy that serves car and computer manufacturers well but has some questionable benefits for the rest of us.
A student once told me that he'd grown tired of constantly updating his phone to the latest model, and had given up doing it. I told him, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that it was a sign of maturity. Where a child might grasp for the latest toy, an adult chooses the device that best meets his or her needs at a price that he or she is able to pay. (Indeed, he was studying a subject in which students are supposed to learn how to make informed judgements about what kind of computer equipment meets a set of needs.)
Matthew Tucker's comment alludes to what psychologists call an hedonic treadmill (though Tucker doesn't use the term), in which people chase goals and possessions in the expectation that achieving them will improve their lot, only to find that their happiness shortly returns to its usual level. My student recognised that he was on an hedonic treadmill, and got off it.
I can nonetheless see where Glance is coming from when he writes about the feeling of being left behind when one has to use old equipment while everyone else has, or is presumed to have, the latest model. And upgrading hardware and software can lead to progress if the new versions increase productivity, improve reliability and/or create new opportunities.
Still, serious companies and mature individuals probably want to exercise some caution in interpeting Glance's advice lest they end up on a corporate version of the hedonic treadmill. Glance's article is, after all, mostly about how Apple succeeds, not how its customers succeed. Suppose a company has some money to spend on bonuses. Would the company prefer its bonuses be spent by staff who rush out and buy the latest gadget, or by staff who carefully choose tools that improve the quality, breadth and ease of their work?
