It Really is the Worst Time to Buy Anything ⭐

Everyone is familiar with the ongoing component crisis triggered by the AI gold rush and the stupidity of our government’s public policies. And everyone likely understands that prices for consumer electronics of all kinds, but most especially smartphones, tablets, PCs, and video game consoles, have gone up dramatically this year. And that these trends will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that knowing something and experiencing it are two different things. The most dramatic version of this is probably having a child, where you could read up on this topic for the entire 9 months leading up to the birth and it will in no way prepare you for what actually happens. The moment some doctor or nurse hands you this impossibly small and fragile living thing, wrapped in a tiny blanket and probably a tiny little cloth cap, and actually lets you walk out into the world with it unaided and unmonitored is potentially the scariest thing anyone will ever do. And yet many of us do or have done just that. And while life continues, it’s never the same.

But sticking to our little corner of the world, and lowering the stakes quite a bit, things are both familiar and terrible. That is, we’ve experienced what’s happening before to some degree, but we’ve also never really experienced this. There have been crashes--like the fabled video game downturn of 1983--recessions, pandemics, and bursting bubbles, the most recent major event perhaps being the Dot Com Bust of the early 2000s. There have been boom times intermixed with the low, of course, as we ride whatever waves in whatever eras, never quite knowing what to expect.

We’ve also seen how markets and products mature and change our habits. When the iPhone kicked off the modern smartphone era and Android responded as its perfect foil, we went through a period of several years in which it almost made sense to upgrade to a new phone every year because the advances were coming hot and heavy. That time frame slowed even for those who were most engaged in time, however, because the year-over-year advances slowed, as they must inevitably. You may recall the so-called “S years” that Apple instituted for the iPhone, a major/minor release cycle that mirrored the shifts of that time.

But then the time frames really stretched out. Two years became three and then four. Support time lines, vague at Apple and many Android vendors but more specific with Google, Samsung, and perhaps a few others, expanded to facilitate consumer expectations, helping us hold onto devices for longer. And then this component crisis landed and something interesting, a positive side-effect among all the terribleness, happened. Platform makers like Apple, Google, and Microsoft actually slowed down the introduction of big new features that many seemed to be railing against anyway, and worked to make the software running our devices work better. Our current devices.

In this new era, we can hold onto...