Topshopisation of Tech

I am sure people are bored of me eulogising about my Asus eee 901. Now I have a new Asus product to rave about: the Asus S101- the Macbook Air that you can actually afford. It retails at $699 for the 16GB Windows version or 30GB for the Linux version, that’s less than half the price of the “designer” product which it is imitating. This is great, for the same reason that Topshop is great.

Topshop is well known as the retailer that is famous for selling cheap clothes that look almost exactly designer styles. It’s uncanny how quickly they manage to replicate every season’s look. The reason that Topshop’s clothes are so cheap is that unlike original designer product, they are only intended to last for exactly one season. Is that a problem? It depends on whether you like old clothes.

In the past buying a laptop was like buying a very expensive designer dress; It cost so much you’d want to get a lot of wear out of it. You could buy a cheaper laptop but it would look unfashionable - not the sort of thing you’d want to take into the Executive Lounge. The new “netbooks” are different: They look great, they turn heads but they are still cheap.

When fashion becomes cheaper it changes the way we think about it. I used to carry my old Powerbook in a custom-made hand-decorated case. These days I carry my Asus in whatever I have with me. A handbag or an M&S carrier-bag. Anything will do. I haul it around like a piece of meat and I will discarded it when it’s no longer of any use. It will be ‘upgraded’ within a year and forgotten.

Rory Sutherland commented,

“The point is that it is cheap enough not to worry about all that much. As a result you discover that, never mind the weight and size, a £200 laptop is simply more portable than a £1,000 laptop. For instance you can carry it around in a carrier bag, not in a padded case.”

A government survey found that the majority of Britons believe that most products are not designed to last a lifetime. Sixty-five per cent feel that products do not last as long as they did 25 years ago, and that even larger items like washing machines will only last a few years before they must be replaced.

While others lament the passing of a ’slower’ society the unmistakable fact is that people are quite comfortable with planned obsolescence. Who amongst us has a phone older than two years? Even if you could make a phone last that long would you really want one that old? If you wouldn’t use a three year old phone, would you want a three year old laptop? When was the last time you wore three year old clothes?

A laptop is no longer for life, but could be just for Christmas.