Management Research – Article Analysis
Task:
- A Critical Analysis of the reading “Your new iPhone will soon be trash, and that’s the point” by Jonathan Sterne
In Jonathan Sterne’s (2016) article, “Your new iPhone will soon be trash, and that’s the point,” he describes the evolving nature and standard of products, the manner in which people continuously stop supporting old standards, in particular iPhone, a mobile product of Apple, one of the most innovative companies in the world. Sterne provides an example of how every few years, Apple updates its product line to look unique and different, and by extension, to make the previous product line look a little older. Sterne’s point is that the current iPhone would soon neither be unappealing nor unique, for new iPhone brands would have been invented.
As per Sterne, iPhone’s lifespan is three years. Sterne believes that to not only iPhone users but also Apple Inc. itself, the future of our new iPhone gadgets is trash (Sterne, 2016). The truth in this notion is undisputable. Apart from Apple, other mobile manufacturers, such as Samsung, continue to invent and design new gadgets each day. This can be termed as planned obsolescence, which is part of Apple’s business model (Sarhan, 2017). Besides what Sterne describes, this planned obsolescence has a far much reaching goal to make customers think that their iPhone is outdated. So, the way Sterne describes Apple’s business model accurately represents today’s market trend. In Apple’s context, they release a new iPhone each year and cease supporting the old iPhones because of the planned obsolescence in their business model.
Also, Sterne’s argument that there is a cost to our communication techs being subject to fashion is accurate. In Apple, for example, this concept works under the phrase, “just work” a longer than it does (Elmblad, 2020). In 2016, when this article was written, Apple’s products missed the headphone jack. So, the cost factor in iPhone’s fashion, as described by Sterne, is more than just a cost, but a planetary cost as well. Although the iPhone’s significance in communication and social networking cannot be undervalued, we must acknowledge that both the production and disposal of the iPhone are environmentally unfriendly and destructive….Continue Reading….