So, what is the trend I am all set to set according to My Lucky Birthday Book? Being not first in line, but last, when it comes to buying technological products and services.
Take the iPhone 15. Experts expect a jump in sales for the latest line this year from last year’s iPhone 14 range, especially with models now being assembled/made (choose your verb depending on whether you’re a Raghuram Rajaane jaan or not) in India. Meanwhile, I am yet to possess an iPhone. I don’t mean an iPhone 15, but any iPhone since the iPhone Touch was released on June 29, 2007.
Smart smartphonewalas – non-Parsis among you as well – you may well ask: So, how are you a trendsetter, bruv?
Which makes me come to the follow-up point regarding the latest iPhone. Some buyers of the ₹79,900-plus device – especially the top-end Pro and Pro Max models – have been complaining about overheating. According to master Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo – he’s South Korean-American, not Chinese, just saying – the problem could stem from corners cut in the device’s ‘thermal system design to make it lightweight’. Others have the ‘problem’ down to too-early-feedback of too-early-use when the phones tend to heat up before ‘cooling down’. No one, not even the Nazi dentist played by Laurence Olivier, in Marathon Man likes ₹80k teething problems.
Whatever the reason for consumer concern, by not lining up at Apple Saket as if the iPhone 15 is the new Harry Potter, I avoid any tension of buying a faulty, very expensive device. Instead, I let the iPhone-buying populace be my personal feedback-cum-test drive team. The rich not only subsidise future technology by paying good money to make these products cheaper at a later date, but their ‘Keep Up With the Joneses’ enthusiasm also helps clean up glitches. If there weren’t enough rich folks who flew those early commercial flights, I would have been still tonking along up and down in a Rajdhani, instead of aisle seat, cattle class, phone set on ‘aeroplane mode’. Like the phone – I bought my first mobile phone, the Nokia 3310, in 2003, under much duress – I believe that superwealthy individuals lining up to follow the likes of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to go to space will make my ultimate puja space vacation affordable and safe. Of course, there are always duds on the way. The Concorde started and ended supersonic commercial flight because people who could afford travelling in it, found it too loud and uncomfortable despite the delightful in-flight meals, before those planes could be made suitable for posh passenger comfort. (There’s a reason why old photos of commercial travel look so ‘aristocratic’ compared to the baby-Kumbhs of democratic today.) And remember Blu-ray? That got railroaded by streaming technology even before it could get cheaper.
As it happens, this Friday marked the last batch of DVDs sent out to customers by the company that started off as a DVD mailing service in 2007: Netflix. So, if I wait too long for that ‘perfect’ technological and price point, either the device or service itself may die out, or I will.
But with the right wait-and-watch approach, I do believe that I may be on to establishing a new trend: of using rich, enthusiastic purchasers of the latest cutting-edge upgrades and innovations – including age-reversal and death-postponing products and services – as guinea pigs. Once these products-services reach a dependable, cheap critical mass, I may pick and choose a few of them.
