[NetBehaviour] Gadgets Built to Fail.

[marc]

Gadgets Built to Fail.

By Kris Wagner.

Someday, much sooner than you'd like, that shiny new toy you just bought 
will break. When it happens, you'll swear, you'll cry -- then you'll 
sigh and open your wallet. You've been here before, with the jammed 
Walkman, the DOA answering machine, the fritzed digicam, the blue screen 
of death.

As map editor and go-to tech guy at Backpacker magazine, I deal with 
more gadgets in a summer -- from GPS systems to laptops -- than most 
people will use in a decade. Over the past two years, I've grappled with 
digital cameras that spontaneously lost the ability to focus, GPS units 
that were unable to find themselves, memory cards that forgot, and a 
cell phone that refused calls from my wife. I've missed deadlines, lost 
data, and made wrong turns onto one-way streets, all thanks to 
technology we claim we can't live without.

Of course, no R&D department would ever admit to creating products that 
are intended to crash and burn. But I believe that, like humans, the PDA 
holding your business contacts and favorite songs has a preordained 
lifespan. It's simply a matter of when it will die.

Let's call it the buy-die-buy theory: Manufacturers design technology to 
fail so you're forced to upgrade regularly.

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