Apple Consumerism Essay

The Apple Macintosh and its Signifigance with American Consumerism

There have been many inventions throughout time that have changed the course of consumerism. The printing press allowed us to consume newspapers and information at a significantly higher pace than ever before. The industrial revolution changed the way we consume energy. But the single invention that might have changed consumerism the most is the computer. Ever since the modern computer was invented in the 1970’s, consumerism has gone digital. It started with everyone needing a family desktop in their home, and it has turned into everyone needing the latest tech gadget. At the forefront of this overhyped technological consumerism is a company called Apple. In this paper, I

Up to this time, computers were used mostly for large corporations and scientific use. Their vision was to create a ready-to-use computer for personal use. Only about 200 Apple I’s were sold, but when the follow on Apple II came along in the year 1977, consumers latched on and the product sold in the millions. With the Apple II, Jobs and Wozniak changed the way humans view computers. They were the first to show the world that computers could be a consumer item, and with this, the rise in digital consumption really started to take off. In 1984, Apple introduced the first Macintosh – the first mouse driven computer with a graphic interface. Not only was the Macintosh a technological advancement, but at 2500 dollars, it was the cheapest consumer option by far. This shows that at the beginning years of Apple, they were not a company that pushed for overhyped consumption of their products. Their purpose was to supply the average consumer with a groundbreaking product at a price they could afford. Furthermore, in the 1980’s, America had just begun an era of mass consumption. Ronald Reagan was inducted into office, and he immediately made tax cuts to help spurn economic development. People began to consume things like mad. Everything from cars to tv to houses, greed was good in the 1980’s and people would buy things to show status more than ever before. However, the typical computer

According to Catherine Rampell of NY Times magazine, planned obsolescence is the act of “deliberately limiting the useful life of a product so that consumers will be forced to replace it”. For example, notice how each year, Apple introduces an iPhone that is only marginally better than the last. This is because they want to make the previous iPhones irrelevant, but they also don’t want to upgrade it too much so that they can’t significantly upgrade the iPhone in the future. If Apple were to roll out its best technology on an iPhone today, they would have nothing to upgrade it with in the future. But if they displace these upgrades over different generations of iPhones, they can deliberately make past models obsolete and force consumers to upgrade to the newer, “better” version. Apple is promoting a wasteful consumerist society by intentionally making their products obsolete in a few years, which pressures American consumers into buying the newest version of the product and discarding the other. In the 1980’s people bought things in excess, but it was not like they bought them knowing that they were going to upgrade only a few years later. Wasteful