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Is it your television?
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Technology We are just part-time owners of the gizmos we have. We buy them, tech-czars make them obsolete, then we buy the next big thing. Serish Nanisetti finds out
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Changing gizmos A Sony OLED television
Your old Weston/Uptron/Dyanora colour TVs worked for years, till the number of channels became more than what these manually-operated TV sets (for those who came in late, it is a knob that you turn like the gas-stove) could receive. Ten years back wh
en Nokia/Siemens/Ericcson cellphone bricks found their way into your palm, they stayed there for years. That Bajaj scooter, Yezdi, Rajdoot, Premier Padmini 118 NE, Maruti 800 almost became an extended identity of your family. Not any more. Everyday is a new identity. And it extends to almost everything that you have at home. Right from the exhaust fan being replaced by a chimney in the kitchen, to the tape deck being replaced by multi-CD changer, the VCP/VCR being replaced by DVD player, everything is getting outdated.
Now, there are suggestions that we should look at cellphones, TVs, cameras and other electronic gadgets as subscribers and not owners. Bizzare? Or How true!
“My first computer eight years back needed an external modem, then within a year, the modem became a chip and came inside the computer. Then I needed to buy an ADSL modem for a faster browsing experience now I have just bought a wireless router to access Internet wirelessly. The router doesn’t work with a dial-up modem. There you are. The breathlessly paced technology is making everything outdated,” says N. Naresh, an advocate.
Death of DVD
On Saturday, blogosphere and tech-wags started the buzz: Toshiba is calling it quits in the abrasive scrape over the hi-def format withdrawing its HD-DVD players. Left in the field would be Sony’s Blu-ray. So should you step forward and pick up a Blu-ray player as the winner is clear? We are not so sure. Not farther in the horizon is the holographic versatile disc that can hold up to 3.9 terabytes (850 times that of DVD) of information.
Apple’s Steve Jobs has a pulse on the future. He has just erased the optical drive from the Macbooks that the company sells. This, when you thought that the DVD writer on the computer is the ultimate thing to have. With that one erasure, Jobs has created a doubt about the optical drive business and confirmed the impermanence of technology.
Even the life of gizmos is getting shorter. OLED TV that is being touted as the next thing to have, better than the LCD and Plasma screens, has a life of only three years. After that, you throw it away. There was a time when big businessmen would change their fancy cars every year to benefit from depreciation clause in the IT Act. Now, it is Ramesh, Suresh and Manjula who are doing the same, not with their cars but with gizmos, for an altogether different reason: Fashion Obsolescence. And the year is a very long time, it is every quarter, that’s new turnover rate.
“I feel awkward whenever I receive a call and I fish out this black block,” says Krishna Mohan. “But I know the other side of the story and want to ask whoever has a fancy phone with bells and whistles ‘when was the last time you used the camera on the phone?’” he says.
“All this desiring, aspiring, buying and owning is unhappy business. Advertisers want you to feel inadequate so that you will buy even something that you don’t need,” says Stephanie Vermeulen’s, a South African EQ trainer warning about the urge to splurge.
So, are you the owner or subscriber?
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