‘It Never Gets Better’

Matt Buchanan, writing at Buzzfeed

You might buy a new phone that’s missing something, thinking, “It will get better.” No, it won’t. If I were to tell you one thing about buying technology, it is this: Buy something because you like what it is right now, not because you think it’s going to get better, or that one day it’ll be what you really wanted it to be. It’s kind of like marrying somebody and thinking you’ll change them and they’ll get better. They might. But they probably won’t. Over time, you’ll just hate them even more. And yourself, at least a little.

Great piece, but I think the headline throws it off. Sometimes products do get better — hugely better — thanks to a software update. Think about the original iPhone, which, when iOS 2 hit a year later, gained the ability to run third-party apps. Huge update. But the 1.0 iPhone was already an incredible product.

So I’d say it’s not that “it never gets better”, but rather that you should never buy something that isn’t already — right now, today — good enough.

Update: Good Marco Arment piece on this same topic from two years ago.

★ Monday, 9 July 2012