In the 21st century, companies mercilessly drive technological trends out of the hands of consumers and back into their own. "Less is more" is a famous quote from minimalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This platitude is overused and abused whenever a company forces an "unpackaged product"— my term for a new tech product with the same or even less features than the previous generation— into the market.
When Apple, the notorious "missing tech" giant, decided to remove the USB-A port from their Macbook and pulled the plug on their headphone jack, there was some negative buzz but they got away with it. Apple doesn't even have to convince people to accept "less is more," because people have no choice but to accept it. The argument "people can just avoid buying the product" is fallacious: they may buy it because there may be no alternative that has the features they want, with the same accessibility, popularity and price. For this reason, the trends that the companies create "stick".
A primary force of this "stickiness" is mainstream acceptance of unpackaged products by news publications and media. An author at MacWorld, an media site on Apple products, wrote a headline that runs contrary to the buzz, which shows how constructive criticism of company actions gets derailed and ignored: "Apple’s ‘courage’ to remove the headphone jack has created a brave new world" (2). As we can see from this example: 1. companies sell products while creating trends on their own behalf, 2. people buy it because they lack options, 3. news publications and eventually the whole market follow these trends. There is no place for the opinions of the consumers to truly reach the companies. Only unreliable media, the forces of the biggest companies' products, and their fake trends run the market.
However a company justifies a forced trend, the real question will still remain unasked and unanswered: why should companies now have the unassailable power to override the basic features that consumers already expect? The feedback loop between companies and consumers seems to end at the intensive marketing campaign where they push their new product down our wallets while spouting out one to two "new" features. Then, they expect consumers to watch their favorite unreliable representatives on news or media sites, and pull out their credit card to go into debt over a lacking technology or software: an unpackaged product.
Do the expectations of these companies match reality? Actually, they do. Since the times where printed news monopolized entertainment, companies have found ways to completely subvert the rational expectations that an unaware targeted audience has. Unfortunately, this fact has only gotten worse in recent years; companies can abundantly expect a greater haul when changing trends for their own benefit. Nowadays, the modernized nuclear family produces many a easily-manipulated targeted audience.
Parents buying their children the newest tech, the young work-at-home professional buying tech for their home office space, or teenagers to young-adults buying the most popular tech at school. Tech trends matter more to them because high quality technology is so widespread and necessary nowadays. So much so that that simulated person, the "invisible person", whom the company creates, invades our daily lives and produces real consumers.
This article provides a very small sample of unpackaged products that many consumers reluctantly accept as the norm in their daily lives. The main focus of this "unpackaged" criticism is Samsung's decision to remove features from their smartphone, the S21. But first, there is another major pain that has to be pointed out: why are there so many streaming services nowadays? They are pricey, scattering one's wallet among the 4 streaming services that the average person subscribes to (if they did not care to pay for cable). They pollute the entertainment market with exclusives that put the consumer in a box for lack of choice, and they litter about shows that are just glorified low-budget movies. They even have the gall to put an additional premium on removing ads from their service, which makes them no different from cable. Here's a list of some of the streaming services that people use most frequently:
Credit to L.A. times for this list (L.A. Times)
Netflix basic: $8.99. Up to $15.99 for HD and multiple screens
Hulu (with ads): $5.99. $11.99 with no ads
Amazon Prime Video: $8.99. Or included with $119 annual Prime membership
Apple TV+: $4.99.
Disney+: $6.99. $5.83 with $69.99 annual fee
Quibi (with ads): $5. $8 with no ads; launches in April
CBS All Access: $5.99. $9.99 with no ads
Peacock (NBC Universal): $4.99 for premium WITH ads, $9.99 without.
HBO Max: $14.99.
Showtime: $10.99.
Starz: $8.99.
Cinemax: $9.99 As Hulu or Amazon Prime add-on.
Epix: $5.99.
ESPN+: $4.99.
WWE Network: $9.99.
DC Universe: $6.25 (based on $74.99 annual fee).
BET+: $9.99.
This is literally just a portion of the growing number of streaming services, and also doesn't even include the ones announced in the latter part of 2020. Each and every one of these services has different offerings that are exclusive to their own platform, and what does this mean for consumers? It means that for a consumer with various interests, the price of good entertainment needlessly goes up and up, according to the whims of each varied streaming company. One can still go to the movies, or to the store to buy Blu-Ray DVDs, however they cannot choose to watch shows they like, or rather, the shows that each streaming company has marked "exclusive" in order to avoid losing their market. Streaming services popped up during the period between around 2006 to 2008, according to Android Authority, but they really started to leech onto our market in the last decade: the 2010s.
The trend that these streaming companies introduced in this decade, the same trend people have been forced to accept, is "streaming companies will reduce the general population's access to the most popular and nuanced entertainment, in order to win over a specific portion of the 'streaming market'." Divide and conquer, so consumers will only have less and less options that don't cost an arm and a leg in our indefinite future, considering the lack of half-decent movies and cable TV shows. Welcome to your unwanted future, folks.
A more unnoticed yet equally injurious unpackaged product, or in the words of Taylor Swift, a "death by a thousand cuts", is Samsung's new phone, the S21. According to CNet, this came out of the mouth of Patrick Chomet, the current representative and head of customer experience at Samsung's mobile communications unit: "We believe that the gradual removal of charger plugs and earphones from our in-box device packaging can help address sustainable consumption issues and remove any pressure that consumers may feel towards continually receiving unnecessary charger accessories with new phones." (CNet) Additionally, he stated that Samsung has utilized the standardized USB-C type charging ports since 2017, so older chargers will still be compatible with the S21 phones. Lastly, Chomet declared that the company also removed support for microSD cards, because none of the new models will have the necessary slot.
There is so much wrong with Chomet's statement that it is astounding to me that this was an actual statement by Samsung. Everything that makes it wrong encompasses the fact that companies have power to make these "missing tech" decisions, and release these unpackaged products on consumers. Why do they choose to remove charger plugs and earphones in order to help with "sustainable consumption issues" ? Sounds like a company problem to me, not a feature problem. Samsung should not have the authority to make such a decision based on a bad faith argument such as "it's for the consumers who want to protect the environment." All of these cuts only harm the consumers, and the worst part of it all is Samsung's lackluster denial; its not even about whether or not consumption matter to consumers, but to a big-rump company like Samsung, they could hardly care less.
Again, a massive company greedily unpackages a product, and removes existing features that are already baked into the price without providing a suitable alternative to address a problem that they don't actually want to solve. Furthermore to their discredit, how does the company know that the consumer doesn't not have the USB-C type charging ports? For what reason does Samsung decide to remove microSD cards that one will use to physically safekeep and transfer their photos? Samsung is joining the "missing tech" giant Apple in forcing consumers to choose between their 128 GB or 250 GB options without keeping multiple SD cards. Samsung has picked the wrong track in a crossroads decision that will inevitably "stick" to the market and make it harder for anyone to keep more photos.
If Apple and Samsung, the leaders of the smartphone market, both erase the same features, it is clear to see where microSD cards and fully packaged phones will end up. Where are the consumers in this whole process? A generally unwritten yet painfully obvious rule has to be written whenever one sees the decline of one product by another, bringing a trend that "sticks" into the market and stagnates our future technological choices and progress: any changes that a company makes to their products, provided that technology is so abundantly integrated into our daily lives, should resonate with our voice as a consumer.
These examples of "unpackaged products" show the choices that are currently missing in our arsenal in this new decade. Life certainly is not a utopia by any means, with the polarity of jobs, opportunities and social relationships in our disparate bubbles of reality, but here's what is not going to make life easier: companies are degrading the product market, one "invisible person" by another, one unpackaged product by another, and one less option by another. Beware of the largest companies' blatant manipulation of our greatest asset in this world as consumers: free choice.
Citations: