The strange lesson the Ford Pinto can teach us about the new iPhone
The strange lesson the Ford Pinto can teach us about the new iPhone
There’s a funny game I’ve been playing with my three-year-old iPhone lately. The objective is to drain my battery as often as possible to degrade its health enough that Apple Care covers the replacement. A new battery would make my phone feel brand new — or at least new enough to avoid buying the latest iPhone, which isn’t really any better than my old-timer.
I can’t play this game forever. In a few years, I expect Apple to stop supporting my model, as it has with countless other geriatric devices, in a tradition that’s become derisively and even conspiratorially known as planned obsolescence. At that point, the new iPhone will probably cost hundreds of dollars more than mine did a few years ago, thanks in part to a global memory shortage that’s driving up the cost of gadgets and arguably making them worse. Apple raised the prices of iPhones by $100 this year, and not just the latest models either. Last year’s models got a price hike, too. As with so many other consumer goods right now, we’re spending more to get less.
“It just doesn’t feel that revolutionary anymore,” said Lee Vinsel, a professor at Virginia Tech and the co-author of The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession With the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most. “When a technology settles down and you’re being asked to pay more for it and it doesn’t feel like you’re getting that much more, it’s frustrating.”
This isn’t the first time in recent history that American consumers have been faced with the degradation of an expensive item they’ve come to rely on. In the 1970s, the American automotive industry went through what’s become known as the Malaise Era. During a decade-long period, from about 1973 to 1983, a cascade of external factors, including rising oil prices and new safety and emissions regulations, upended Detroit’s deeply ingrained tradition of building big, beautiful, and very inefficient cars. What American consumers got instead were models like the Ford Pinto that cost more and underperformed. Ultimately, this embarrassing decade changed the way Americans bought cars (less Chrysler, more Toyota; fewer muscle cars, more minivans).
Key takeaways
- Today’s smartphone market has some things in common with the Malaise Era of the American auto industry, when prices went up but cars didn’t get better.
- The Malaise Era can help us think about the enshittification of everything as an opportunity to break free of upgrade cycles and compulsive buying.
- Emissions standards forced car companies to improve their technology, and right-to-repair laws might push tech companies to be more consumer friendly.
I’m not saying the iPhone is the same as the Pinto. (For starters, your phone isn’t bursting into flames upon impact.) However, there is something to the idea that the iPhone — and possibly the consumer tech industry in general — is suffering through its own age of malaise. External factors are forcing companies like Apple to break away from a longstanding bargain with its customers, one that promised significantly better products at or below the same price point. Instead, we’re getting mediocre new devices that cost more.
What’s happening with Apple now, and what happened to American cars during the Malaise Era brings to mind another term, too: enshittification.
Coined in 2022 by the science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow, the term specifically refers to tech platforms that degrade products and squeeze profits out of users; Doctorow writes, “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
I think the crappy cars of the 1970s can teach us a lot about enshittification. First, that it’s not unprecedented for everything to get worse and cost more, especially in a world where wars lead to oil shock or AI bubbles lead to product shortages. And second, that these episodes offer people like you and me an opportunity. They represent a chance to do something different, to escape the product cycle any given company has looped you into.
Enshittification is a great excuse to be a more empowered consumer.
The global memory crisis isn’t ending any time soon
The rapid buildout of AI data centers has put computer memory in high demand, and there are basically only three companies that make the stuff: Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung Electronics. As early as last August, there were warnings that everything from cars to smartphones would rise in price, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Apple has raised prices on its gadgets by as much as 29 percent. Samsung and Google have done the same for their devices.
Memory manufacturers have known since the pandemic that they needed to build more capacity, but they pulled back on those plans after consumer demand slowed down a couple years ago. That was right around the same time that investors started pouring billions into the AI industry, and demand for memory surged as data centers needed massive amounts of it to keep ChatGPT and Claude alive.
All of the companies are doing fine in this crisis. The memory manufacturers are posting eye-popping profits. Meanwhile, the market intelligence firm IDC predicts that global shipments of smartphones will fall nearly 17 percent this year, but the total market value will increase by more than 6 percent. How? Higher prices, of course.
“Forget the prices most of us were used to paying for any consumer electronics,” Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for data and analytics at IDC, told me. “Even when the crisis gets better, prices will come down, but not to the same price level that we saw a year ago.”
The memory crisis is not getting better tomorrow, either. Jeronimo said that “there’s no light at the end of the tunnel,” although IDC expects that the situation might start to improve by early 2028. Tarun Pathak, a research director at the market intelligence firm Counterpoint, told me this is not a one-year problem, but it’s not a decade-long crisis either. Until the shortage ends, however, you can expect innovation to slow, at least somewhat, and for prices to keep climbing.
What the Malaise Era reveals about enshittification
My dad is not a car guy, but when I was growing up, he liked trading cars. The worst one that ever graced our driveway was a 1978 Lincoln Continental, a land yacht that weighed nearly 5,000 pounds. We nicknamed it “The Grey Ghost” because it was often dead. Once, on a family vacation, we couldn’t turn it off for two days for fear that it wouldn’t start back up and we’d have no way home. Cars like this defined the Malaise Era.
Many automotive historians place the beginning of this period at 1973 for a few reasons. That was the year that OPEC issued an oil embargo on the United States, leading to fuel shortages and spiraling gas prices. Suddenly, the gas-guzzling muscle cars of the 1960s didn’t look as appealing as something smaller and more efficient, like the Volkswagen Beetle, for instance.
This was also around the same time that car manufacturers were making big changes to their models in order to comply with the 1970 Clean Air Act, which called for the industry to reduce emissions in new automobiles by 90 percent over five years. This challenge led to underpowered and less reliable engines. Detroit, after all, had designed its whole manufacturing process around gas-guzzling muscle cars. Congress then enacted the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in 1975, requiring cars to be even more efficient. (The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 eliminated the penalties for violating these regulations.)
“There was a whole host of cars that appeared on the scene that were anything but desired by the public,” said John Heitmann, a professor emeritus at the University of Dayton, who studies the history of the automobile. “It’s epitomized by cars like the Chevy Vega, Ford Pinto, of course, which actually I think was a better car than it’s ever given credit for.”
Rising fuel costs and new regulations in the 1970s, not to mention double-digit inflation, contributed to higher prices for those cars, too. Adding insult to injury and partly driven by new safety standards, automotive design also took a weird turn during this period, leading to huge bumpers, fake wood paneling, and vinyl roofs.
“In a nutshell, that was the Malaise Era and it marked, some would say, the end of the love affair with the car,” Heitmann added.
What really stands out to me about this period, however, is the fact that consumers pushed back against the idea of spending more money to buy worse cars — and actually came out ahead. German and especially Japanese carmakers, who had anticipated the new regulations, made great cars throughout the 1970s, and American consumers started to consider foreign-made vehicles. By the 1980s, these companies had gained a strong foothold in the US.
In other words, a decade of crappy American cars turned loyal Ford customers into Toyota drivers. And while it’s hard to imagine that a few more years of lackluster devices will turn Apple fans into Android users (especially because all devices are getting more expensive), it’s clear that waning enthusiasm for the annual iPhone upgrade is shaking up the industry. I’m not just talking about the $2,000 foldable iPhone, either.
Our version of progress: Buy refurbished and keep repairing
A key difference between buying a car in the ’70s and ’80s and buying a new phone today relates to switching costs. If you wanted to ditch your boat-like Lincoln, you could just buy or lease a Toyota Camry and drive away. If you’re sick of boring iPhones and want to try a Google Pixel, however, you’re looking at a big headache that involves moving your data from one platform to another and learning a new operating system.
Apple has made it difficult to leave its ecosystem, sure. But much like car drivers in the ’70s, we do have options, and buying a new iPhone every two years isn’t inevitable.
The secondary market for smartphones is thriving, and refurbished devices are practically as good as the new ones. You can buy a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro, which is the phone I use and love, for about $550. The price of a new iPhone 18 Pro is more than double that, and as far as I can tell, the main differences between the two models are a new chip and some marginal camera upgrades. And while Apple might argue that AI features in its current iOS require more processing power, you would also have to be a power AI user to really care about that.
Meanwhile, all kinds of gadgets are also getting easier to fix thanks to new right-to-repair legislation being enacted across the country. Similar laws in the European Union, which went into effect this year, also aim to “create a system that favours repairing a product over purchasing a new one.” Such an ambitious raft of regulations could even reshape how manufacturers design their products worldwide. Apple devices are already becoming more repairable ahead of EU battery regulations that are set to go into effect next year.
I find myself wondering if regulations like these will reshape the consumer tech industry the way that environmental regulations transformed the auto industry half a century ago. Again, cars and phones are very different machines, but they’re each essential to millions of people’s lives.
“People treat their cars like precious objects and we worry about them,” said Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of iFixit. “We need to start thinking about electronics as something that we’re going to baby and treat carefully and preserve as long as we can.”
Let me tell you, taking care of your things and keeping them for a while is fun in the same way I imagine tending to your classic car was once fun. While I have stayed in the Apple ecosystem, I haven’t bought a new Apple product in years. My phone, once I finally get that battery replaced, will last a couple more years. My Apple Watch, which I bought refurbished, will get a new battery and a new life soon too. Now if we could only figure out a way to make batteries last longer, these devices could last as long as classic cars.
No comments