I have often wondered what it must feel like to buy yourself an aircraft. Not a small propeller bird but something bigger, like a Gulfstream or a Boeing Business Jet. While thinking big, why not a 747? One of the attractive aspects of buying a big aircraft is the fact that they stay current for such a long time!
Buy a car and six months later its shape is an embarrassment. Buy the cutest cell phone and four weeks later your kids will laugh you out.
Our office in Brussels sees new technology pass through it like water in a stream. Some times a project needs new equipment, at others we see something that we are sure will be useful for something some time… More often than not these latter succumb to built in obsolescence and end up in our museum of must-have-gadgets.
Cell phones are no exception. 
Our director of multimedia operations consumes the damn things at an enormous rate and each time he buys a new one, he is able to come with bullet-proof arguments in support for the change.
I tended to take a more laid back attitude towards cell phones. Having been there at their birth, I went through the various phases of evolution, none of which really caught my fancy.
My first cell phone was a bulky Motorola which I used until it literally fell to pieces. The world around me in the meantime watched cell phones shrink to the point where magnifying glasses were needed to make a call and human evolution was being pushed in the direction of spider leg thin fingers to work the minuscule buttons.
Next came the race to load cell phones with all kinds of functions nobody really needed but they were soooo cool! Incidentally, they also grew in size as an unintended side effect. Some of those early loaded phones were so complicated that finding the way of making a phone call required one to study the manual at length and even then there were no guarantees. The owner of such a phone must have felt like the poor guy who one morning stopped me just outside Schiphol Plaza and asked with tears in his frightened eyes: Can you please tell me where the airport is here?
The race between manufacturers finally brought us the smart phone. Now these were more like it even if they all worked differently and making the transition from one to the other required superhuman effort. May be this was intentional, a way of ensuring customer brand loyalty.
My foray into the world of smart phones was ended brutally when the NOKIA PC suite that came with my spanking new smart phone from the same brand crashed my PC right on first installation and only a complete re-install of Windows could save the day. But not my smart phone which I sold next day…
The past year or so, I have been having a careful though fruitful relationship with a Samsung, the model which was advertised for a time as the thinnest on the market. And thin it is… some people think I am holding a cut-out from an advert when I pull it from my shirt pocket. It even has a camera which I regularly remember only after the moment for the shot-of-the century has passed.
Then the iPhone hit the streets. In its second generation now, it was a huge success and Apple’s competitors immediately misread the reasons. The cute touch-screen interface, the handy functions and the smooth response are the most visible aspects of the iPhone and are being copied by others. But the iPhone is a hit for a completely different reason.
Smart phones before the iPhone could browse the net, check email and do other nice things. But a completely user oriented information environment with its data cloud and open interface for developers to make use of has never been provided on such a high level of sophistication until the iPhone arrived.
It is this environment and the thousands of applications available for an incredible range of functions that are at the basis of the success of Apple’s latest baby. From tuning your guitar to navigating city streets, the iPhone does it all. Even making telephone calls is a piece of cake.
And now another killer app is coming to the iPhone. Garmin’s Pilot My-Cast sold under the Digital Cyclone brand should be available for the iPhone in the US by September this year.
Pilot My-Cast is a subscription based service that enables pilots to receive meteorological information as well as other types of aeronautical data, including NOTAMs. The app also allows pilots to create and file flight plans. The full content of AOPA’s Airport Directory is also included.
The iPhone is just one small step away from becoming an electronic flight bag of sorts.
The sleek hardware and the user application environment that is second to none is becoming a powerful combination that is not easy to resist… I think I know what my Christmas gift to myself will be.
Steve,
I agree the Iphone is the coolest thing out there, my son tells me so, so it must be true, and its apps are what turns it from good to great. But I am not clear why you want the capability to file flight plans for your Chrysler Voyager, or is there a new vehicle in the Steve universe I don’t know about?!
My experience of the Nokia PC Suite was ‘functionally’ identical, it never worked and Nokia never answered polite requests for an explanation. When I found the relevant user forum and found that apparently no one else could get it to work either. Never bought another Nokia product since.
Just a thought – and what if built-in obsolescence were just an element of marketing? It may of course not apply to planes, of ATC/ ATM for the matter of fact, but consider it like this: a great product, well-thought and ideally packagd, but not built to last, and which comprises the elements of its own obsolescence inherently “pre-sells” the next generation. In fact, the so-called next generation already exists, I am sure, when the built-in obsolete gizmo comes to the market, and so on. A commercial version of the perpetual movement, if you prefer.