Tech columnists' best friend is technology that fails to succeed, but has it really gotten worse over the years?
In an attempt at calling for a revolution against the beta culture, Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz rants about the lack of perfect tech gadgets:
I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision.
To some extent we agree with Gizmodo's editorial, though we think the last few years have been about showing significant improvement as well as a new willingness of actually go ahead and release firmware upgrades and patches of significance. Furthermore, many of these firmware upgrades are now performed automatically over-the-air, often making it a matter of pushing a few buttons and you're done. That's the first real revolution.
And there's a second real revolution. The products we buy now cost far less than the products we bought only a couple of years ago. Whether it being televisions, phones or consumer electronics in general, these products are for the most part far better at just the fraction of the cost compared to what the generations before us had to put up with.
So we're not sure whether we need a revolution against the beta culture, as it seems to have led to some pretty good technology advancements through the years. It's just so easy to forget about them while we're all eagerly awaiting the next generation products that will be even better and cheaper.
If anything, there should be a revolution against only buying the cheapest technology, which geographically only pushes the development teams farther and farther away from the intended home market. That might not necessarily be a good thing in the long run, which our extensive testing of products have already proved more and more often in the recent years.
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