Quote from: Redaktion on September 17, 2019, 18:03:41
While the tech world clamours over the next innovation, is...one for which any asked?
On the broader point of technological innovation not following consumer demands, I think it's important to realise a couple of things:
- On a practical level, it's notoriously difficult to figure out exactly what consumers actually want, without significant expenditure - not just in the researching of this information, but the financial risk associated with the downstream costs of effecting the conclusions of such research, which have the potential to become losses if the analysis, or the conclusions drawn from them, end up being incorrect.
- Additionally - and this is probably the more important point - a lot of decisions in terms of technological innovation are subject to many other factors beside consumer demand, which are arguably much more important, such as the state of cutting edge scientific, engineering, manufacturing, financial and even legal considerations.
A good example of these two points is the decrying of smart phones having poor battery life, back in the late 2000's, and early 2010's.
Many people lamented the fact that newer phones weren't able to achieve the weeks long standby time of older ones and this was frequently cited as far and away the most pressing issue in terms of consumer choice, especially when it was considered to be due to the trend for increasingly thinner devices.
The difficulty with achieving this, however, is two-fold, namely that:
- Battery technology has hardly moved in decades, compared to other technologies, mostly as a result of most novel battery technologies having unrealistic manufacturing costs.
- It's far cheaper to invest in shrinking chips and thus power consumption, which has a mature and well understood manufacturing pipeline for future process shrinks, in addition to lowering the base mobile computing cost, which opens up the market to more consumers.
With the advent of fast charging, the majority of complaints about battery life have now mostly subsided and consumers, quite contrary to their earlier stated opinions, now tend to choose their respective devices on the basis of other things, such as high performance cameras (Pixel, iPhone), headphone jacks (Galaxy S, LG G series), UI/OS (iPhone/OnePlus), computing power (iPhone/Galaxy S/Galaxy Note) and, of course, price (OnePlus, Xiaomi).
The other thing to point out is also that thinner devices with higher screen:body ratios have resulted in many new notable technologies, such as underscreen fingerprint sensors and cameras and the focus on developing better display technology has led to increased pixel density and faster refresh rates.
Summing up, while I am all for consumer choice having a bigger impact on producer's decision making, innovative technology products will inevitably pose a challenge for that principle, as they are subject to many constraints and, by their very nature, are quite unpredictable in terms of their actual utilisation by consumers, especially when integrated with evolving platforms, such as Android/iOS.