Radical Liberation

Worth What You Pay

Some goods are “commodities”, meaning you might as well get the cheapest you can get because the quality isn’t going to vary that much. But for some goods you really do get what you pay for. Here are some.

Mobile Phone

Until recently, mobile phones have seemed like a commodity because the cost of the phone has been built into the service contract and pretty much all mobile phones were so awful… Making people adapt to how they work rather than figuring out how to adapt to people. With Apple’s iPhone it is now clear that a mobile phone can be significantly better.

If all you do is make phone calls then the phone that comes “free” with your service contract is fine. But if you are so ambitious as to want to do something as simple as check your voice mail then the iPhone starts to have a noticeable advantage (I generally don’t leave voice mails on my wife’s mobile phone because I’m still not sure if she is comfortable checking messages on it).

If you’re interested in being able to do even more with your phone, like surf the web, then the iPhone quickly becomes worth the additional cost. Studies have already shown that even though other phones are capable of doing things like surfing the web it is only on the iPhone that people actually do such things regularly. That is no accident. If a user interface is so poor that people tend not to use a feature then, for all practical purposes, the feature might as well not be there in the first place.

Personal Computer

Similar to mobile phones, you can get computers for quite cheap that look good when you look at their list of features. But the important question is whether you’ll actually be able to use the features in practice. Again, Apple’s products stand out because they don’t just provide features, they do the hard work to make those features truly usable by non-geeks.

A perfect example of this is the new Time Machine feature in Leopard. This is essentially a backup program, definitely nothing new in the world of personal computers. Not only have backup programs been available for decades, but every computer expert has pleaded with users to backup their important data. The reality though, according to a study by Apple of its customers, is that 90% of people do not backup regularly. (Regular, automated backups is pretty much the only way to have the backup you need when disaster strikes).

Time Machine aims to make regular, automated backups much more common. Partially they do this with some visual user interface pizazz. But, perhaps more importantly, they make what has often been an arcane procedure (try figuring out Retrospect!) into something that is as simple as plugging in an external drive and saying “yes” when the Mac asks to use it for backups. (See James Duncan Davidson on Restoring from Time Machine).

There are many other goods where you get what you pay for: trash bags, dress shoes, and ice cream for starters. But I’ll leave those for a later installment.