I think that this comment on my furnace problems is worth elaborating on:

If you blow yourself up trying to save a few bucks by not hiring someone to do this for you, I don’t want to hear any complaints! Good luck.

It’s not (just) about “saving a few bucks.”

I come from a line of people on my mother’s side who would never think to call someone to fix something that had an obvious solution, and the tools/knowledge to do it. In fact, during the Depression, my grandfather was the guy who got called, doing auto repairs. But he also built his own cabin in northern Michigan on the Muskegon River, and built by hand inboard-motor boats to put in the river, by steaming and bending mahogany, and adapting Chrysler drive trains to put in them, including dashboard instruments. He built them in the basement in northern Flint, and knocked out the wall to get them out when they were complete and ready to be trailered Up North.

My uncle (his son) followed in his footsteps, except that he actually got a college degree (ME from Michigan), and he always (at least until late in life), though he was a well-paid engineering manager at AC Spark Plug, rebuilt his own car engines (back in the days when this had to be done every hundred-thousand miles or so), and his own plumbing and electrical work and drywall (at least after he retired).

My first car, at sixteen, was a used MGA. That summer, I tore it apart and put it back together, to improve the performance and end the blue smoke of the burning oil coming out of the tailpipe, and get smoother gear shifting with new synchros. Before I went to college, I was a professional VW mechanic. I’m just not by nature someone who likes to pay people (and in many cases, trust them) to do things that I think I can do better and cheaper myself. When I was in Florida in May, starting to prepare the house to sell, I got a quote of $500 to replace a leaking hose bib, which involved opening up a block wall, sweating in new copper pipe, then resealing and repainting it. I did the whole job in a couple hours after fifty bucks in tools and parts at Home Depot.

A few weeks ago we had a water leak in the main supply line coming into the house that had the meter swirling like a dervish. We did call a plumber, but a thousand dollars later, while they did a good job (I watched), I regretted not doing it myself. All it would have taken was renting a jack hammer to open up the sidewalk, digging some dirt, cutting out the bad pipe and replacing it, reburying, and replacing the pavement.

Anyway, I assumed that when a furnace failed suddenly, it was likely something simple. I read the service manual, tracked down the problem to an obviously failed igniter, and changed it myself. I have pride in my own ability, and a larger bank account.

…aren’t what they used to be:

For the first time in my life, I decided to sit out an upgrade cycle and buy the older model, now being sold at a discount like day-old bread.

I won’t say that the discount played no role in my decision. But in previous years, I’d have swallowed hard and handed over the money, because I am, in the laptop world, a hardcore power user. I game on my laptop. I frequently have a dozen or so applications open, two or three of which are browsers with many tabs open. Faster processors, more memory — these things are sufficiently valuable that I’m willing to pay for them, because they make me more productive.

The trouble is, the upgrade cycle is no longer delivering those things. The processors in the latest model were marginally faster than in the previous one, but you couldn’t add memory, which I needed more. Instead, Apple is focusing on things I care about a lot less, like making the laptop thin — even though that meant losing USB and SD card ports that I still use, and losing a lot of “play” from the keyboard. As a friend pointed out to me, Apple has become obsessed with thinness to the point of anorexia.

But my decision is not primarily evidence of Apple making poor design decisions. Instead, it’s a lesson in the limits of the form — and the way that’s affecting upgrade cycles, and very probably, Apple’s future revenue.

…My 4.5 years is actually on the low side for replacing a computer; the average now is nearly six years, which of course means that a substantial number of users are waiting longer than that. For replacing mobile devices, too, consumers are waiting longer, in part because phone companies are no longer subsidizing the phones to get you to invest in a contract, but also, I suspect, because devices are just not getting better as fast as they once were. We used to upgrade our phones every two years because the new operating systems ran on old phones as if they’d been given high doses of valium. Now we’ll wait until the batteries won’t hold a charge — and if it were possible to replace the batteries, we might wait even longer than that, because I’m not willing to pay hundreds of dollars to get a better camera while losing my headphone jack.

I replaced my slider Droid 2 Global a couple years ago, when it started to flake out, with a used Droid 4, because it was the newest phone in which I could still get a mechanical keyboard. The Droid 2 could do a battery swap in ten seconds; Motorola says not to replace the battery in the 4, but it was on its last legs when I bought it, and they could be purchased at Amazon, and didn’t really require any special tools other than a #5 Torx driver, so now the battery is fine. I don’t know when I’ll upgrade the phone, but then, I only use it when traveling, because I hate cell phones in general, and work at home with a land line, that they’ll take away from my cold dead fingers.

And I’ll stick to my desktop for now as well. I buy a cheap laptop for traveling, but to the degree I’m a power user, I prefer to have something easy/cheap to upgrade (I’ll probably double my RAM to 32G for Christmas). My next laptop, which may come soon, because mine is starting to have problems (occasional non-responsive keys, and lines in the display) will probably be a foldable two in one, that will be much easier to use on a plane.

As she says, it is a problem with marginal utility as we approach the end of Moore’s law, and the limits of the physical human interface.

But it’s not just that. I’ve never used Apple products, and things like this insane obsession with “thin” to the exclusion of all else is one of the reasons. My sense is that Apple’s response to consumer demand is similar to Twitter’s:

“Hey, we’re going to improve the product!”

“Great, want to know what we want?”

“Absolutely not.”