Is Apple guilty of planned obsolescence? Yup. Also, let me tell you about my idiotic journey into a Technological Island of Stupidity

In the Ian McEwan book ‘Enduring Love’ (I have read books) there’s a wonderful, if somewhat mean-spirited, passage where the protagonist engages in a shady transaction with a couple of hippies. They’re both raging clichés, he with his invented statistics and almost Tourette-level use of the word “basically”, and she… well, here’s the part that stuck with me:

"Daisy was on her feet ladling out more porridge. She spoke in the quiet voice of one who knows the truth but can’t be fished to fight for it. ‘There’s an overriding planetary aspect with particular reference to earth signs and the tenth house.’"

I love that second sentence, perfectly encapsulating the resigned certainty of people who believe in bullshit. It’s with a similar tone that I hear people bemoan the evils committed by our capitalist overlords, one of which being planned obsolescence.

Talking of bullshit, I have an iPhone 4S. It’s a powerful machine, more powerful than the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov at chess, more powerful than the computer powering the Mars rover Curiosity, more powerful than my gaming PC back at university. Much too powerful for what I use it for, which is mostly listening to podcasts (obviously) and texting.

Left by the wayside...

But after the last Operating System update, my poor phone can’t handle the simplest tasks. If I listen to a podcast while searching the web at the same time, the phone stutters and groans under the pressure and starts to let off steam. If I pause a podcast, open whatsapp to send a message, then press play again, nothing happens. The task of sending that message was so gargantuan that the podcast player had to be ejected from RAM, and I need to open up the app again, press play, and wait up to 40 seconds for the bloody phone to get its shit together.

It’s just annoying because the same hardware was perfectly capable of performing these tasks earlier. Prior to the update, I could simply press play on the earphones and the podcast would start without having to unlock the phone. Now, shock horror, I have to pull the damned thing out of my pocket, unlock the screen, wait for the podcast app to grind into action, press play and then wait pointlessly, all while apple sends me subliminal messages that I should get a new phone.

I might have to join my tin-foil hat wearing idiot friends and accuse Apple of designed obsolescence. In fact, a class action lawsuit in Brazil claims the very same thing.

Damn you Apple.

Technology’s advance is tiring, and sometimes really, really annoying. Sometimes breaking with old technology is necessary. In Apple’s defence, I think they did the right thing when they abandoned their buggy OS9 and switched to a whole new operating system with OSX. Microsoft should have done away with Internet Explorer, the bane of web designers everywhere, long ago, but their admirable dedication to backwards compatibility and supporting old software has kept this bloated zombie going for much too long. Maybe they’ll be able to put an end to it with their new browser.

But not all such leaps into the future are desirable. We go through Islands of Stupidity. This is when a technology is abandoned before a valid replacement has been found.

Back when I was a child, if I wanted to transfer a document, it was easy as sticking a floppy disk into the drive.

But then we gave up on floppies. Apple was part of this move – the first iMac had no floppy drive. Damn you Apple. So a need was no longer being serviced. Transferring a simple word document became a nightmare. Some solutions never became mainstream (remember jazz drives?) and the mainstream ideas were stupid. Remember CDs?

Pretty, but oh so rubbish

I hope never to have to go through the agony of trying to burn a CD. They may be pretty, and have great capacity for their price, but what a horrible form of data storage. Thank God for USB sticks, and online disk space, which finally solved the problem.

I’m worried a new island of stupidity might by rising over the horizon.

When I play games on my console (aha! Of course games would make an appearance) I don’t like to use the TV sound, because I don’t want to bother the neighbours. I’m nice like that.

With my old TV, it was perfectly simple. I would just plug some headphones into my TV through it’s jack port.

My gamer face. One of my sexier looks

When I moved, I got a new TV. A beautiful big flat thing, and I couldn’t wait to start playing on it. I put my headphones on and looked for the sound-out port on the TV. Imagine my confusion when I couldn’t find it. I’ve made this image to depict that confusion.



It turned out this new TV didn’t have a simple jack port for sound-out. I looked for hours and hours, but the only sound-out option was a mysterious square thing with a little trapdoor. There was even a sticker warning me not to open the trapdoor and look inside or I would immediately go bald and my balls would fall off.

Baffled, I twiddled my headphone jack inside the square hole for a while in a manner reminiscent of some of the more awkward evenings in my life, and just as productive. After some pointless thrusts I decided I had to actually focus and figure out what the hell this was.

I learned (from the sticker) that this was an optical port. It's some sort of irritating laser-based system. Apparently it’s superior and supports surround sound and so on. Yeah, but does it support my headphones? This is when I embarked on one of my more ridiculous journeys into technological lunacy.

I figured there would be a simple conversion box I could use. Well, sort of. First of all, I needed a cable, called a TOS cable, which transports an optical signal. That was 10 € spent already.

Now the optical signal is digital, not analogue, and a jack expects an analogue signal. This was a real obstacle. To convert digital to analogue you need an audio converter. They’re not cheap! I found one for 40 €. At this point I should maybe have reconsidered my plan, and thought of the cable as simply a sunk cost, but I really wanted to play Call of Duty without annoying the neighbours, and lacked the intellectual capacity to consider other options (see below).

I bought the damn thing (of course since then I’ve found them for a quarter of the price), and it required power, so I had yet another plug in my sea of cables under the TV.

But the sound-out of the converter is not a jack port, but rather the standard red-white connectors known as RCA (yellow is for video). So I needed a cable that would have two male RCA connectors that link into a female jack port. After visiting way too many shops, I found one, for another 7 €.

Now I could plug in the headphones! But no. It was too quiet. And what’s worse, the stupid optical-out volume is not controlled by the TV. The remote did nothing. They expect it to be connected to an amplifier.

So I went ahead and found a small amplifier (normally intended for mobile use) for another 20 €, and I stuck that stupid thing between the converter and the headphones. If I wanted to change the volume I had to squat down to press buttons on the amplifier. Oh and the amplifier also needed a power plug.

The final solution was rubbish. Changing the volume was a pain, and if any connection along the daisy-chain of arseholery failed I had to check each connection. The TOS cable was particularly malicious on this front. Why couldn’t I just plug my headphones into a jack port on the TV? Optical sound feels a lot like CDs.

And in my pigheadedness, I hadn’t considered a much easier solution. Seeing as I only needed the headphones to play xBox, I could simply have bought headphones specifically for that console (which would also handle chat) at a considerably lower cost, which is ultimately what I did after putting up with this shit show just long enough to feel like I got something out of it (mostly misery).

Simple, universal, and on its way out?

And what’s worse, rumours abound that Apple plans to do away with the headphone jack on its next iPhone. Are we once again careening headlong into an Island of Stupidity, spearheaded by Apple?

Damn you Apple