Personally I believe it goes on more than people think. The whole retail economy largely relies on it.
When I was young, we only ever had one refrigerator that I can remember, only ever had one oven and I can only ever remember one Vacuum cleaner.
We originally had a twin tub but that was replaced with a front loader washing machine and again, it might have been repaired, but was still there until the day my mum died.
Even her TV, I replaced it for her in about 1994 for one with a remote control as she still had the original colour Sony TV that was bought around 1972, it was still working fine, had a dial to change the channels on.
Compare that to my house, hi tec stuff aside.
I've lived in this house since 2000. Our second dishwasher has died, not going to replace it this time.
We are on our 4th washing machine in 13 years. The last one we only had for less than two years when the bearings started to go. My wife took out an extended warranty, the service guy (I'm not using the word engineer) came out, spend 5 secs listening to it and simply said he would write it off and get us a replacement under the warranty, its too much work to fix.
None of these washing machines were that cheap (not the most expensive but minimum about £400 ($620) each)
We are on our second refrigerator and that is going to need replacing soonish.
My widescreen CRT TV (Phillips, wasn't very cheap) started acting up within 4 years of ownership.
My Sony Bravia Flatscreen TV isn't 3 years old, sometimes the HDMI ports play up, it was one of the first smart TV's with internet access and we were promised all sorts of apps
Not one extra app materialised, it just had a very few basic apps supplied with it such as weather, clock etc. Sony bought out various apps such as facebook for their newer models but made it clear on their site that they had zero intention of doing so for their older models (mine was about 8 months old at the time)
We are on our 3rd vacuum cleaner since moving in 13 years ago (and we mainly have wood floors)
We are on our second oven.
Now compare my family in the past 13 years with my mums as I was growing up, spot the difference?
The whole retail electrical white goods market etc would collapse if we weren't replacing things every few years. The whole reason we have huge out of town retail parks with huge white goods stores is that they rely on us regularly changing them. Why would a company make something that's going to last 20 years, make it easy to repair etc when they could sell it slightly less and make one that will be lucky if it lasts 5, knowing the customer will have to go out and buy another.
Considering most white goods companies in the UK are owned by a very few bigger companies, they have a good chance of getting your money whatever brand you buy.? And I say UK, not one company in the UK actually makes washing machines in the UK any more.
In fact more often than not, they simply chuck their brand name on particular models made by a third party for marketing reasons.
In the UK for instance, if we look at washing machines,
Electrolux own over 50 brand names (although not all of those are for washing machines) such as Zanussi, AEG, Tricity Bendix and things like John Lewis (retail store in UK) own brand.
Candy own Hoover, Zerowatt, Kelvinator and others
Merloni own Aristin, Indesit, Cannon, Thorn, English Electric, Creda, Hotpoint, New World, Philco and many others
Between those three they own almost all washing machines and most are owned by just two.
But if we bring hi-tec into it, it gets completely silly. Having to use authorised repair places rather than say take it to the local electrical repair shop.
I went through 3 ps2'S (and I look after my stuff, air flow all around, vacuum out vents etc regularly etc), my PS3 died in January this year, was one of the next on from the originals (couldn't play PS2 games on it), was the fat version. I now have the PS3 slim.
I thought I had got away with the red ring of death on my 360 but that eventually died after a few years with the problem, although MS still offered to fix it for free as it was a known problem (you listing Korg
)
My original Xbox mind you is still going strong (although doesn't get much use now)
I guarantee that 99% of everyday users could make do with office 95 and I doubt even then many would use hardly any of its features.
I bought myself Adobe CS4 suite in late 2008. It's now 2013, they are on CS6.
Sure there's a few things I like about the newer version but there's nothing that is going to want me to upgrade from CS4, it does everything I want. Well almost, I was sent an CS6 illustrator doc recently and my CS4 wouldn't open it.
I realise companies need to evolve and make new products, but we reach saturation point and I think we've almost reached it with a lot of things now.
For the average user, their PC bought in the last few years will run everything they throw at it. Why should they upgrade to windows 8, even if it wasn't slated in the press (I like it personally). Companies complain about declining PC sales that's simply because a few years ago, people found their PC's crawling along and wished it went faster, now most are happy with what they have.
Many have moved to tablets, those that have their ipads or androids, many aren't going to upgrade every other year, especially with the cost of things like the ipad.
You will of course always get the designer name crowd, the people I simply cant understand that pay a premium to advertise a brands product for them, they will always want the latest must have item.
And you get the tech freaks and I'm a bit like that with my PC. I spend so much time on it and I'm heavily into gaming hence when I upgrade parts every 3 - 4 years, I always spend a lot on something that in 3 years time, is still going to be perfect for almost everything I throw at it, but I'm not the normal average PC customer that goes down the road and spends a few hundred pounds in the local superstore.
We've (wife and me) now reached a point where we don't see the point in paying a lot for good quality goods as the quality never is good any more. Why pay £450 for a washing machine when we can pay £200 for one that does the same and will probably last just as long.
Our last kettle cost £5 from our local supermarkets value range. we've had it for about 7 odd years, its working 100% fine.
Our toaster, I paid £40 for and within a year it's total crap, 4 slice toaster where I have to turn the toast over to get it evenly brown, next time I shall buy a value toaster too.
The only things I care about quality is my TV (in that I want it to have a good screen) and my monitor for the same reason. Hence if those died, I would buy high end ones that come with 5 year warranties etc.
Most of the above mentioned purchases were in no way cheap, but also none of them was anywhere near the cost of half the price of my Korg Kronos.
Whether Korg would do this, who knows. The thing is, with the birth of soft synths, something like the Kronos will probably be the last purchase for many many years for a lot of people. After all it can sample any soft synth I want. For those that use it at home and don't gig regularly, I cant see much point of ever having to fork out that sort of money again.
Did they deliberately cripple it, I don't think that was exactly the case and I realise that things have moved on since the Kronos was being designed. But they could have put a much more powerful motherboard and CPU in for not much more cost at all.
And if they had, we could have had quicker loading times, less note stealing etc.
They could have used 64bit allowing us to use a lot more RAM.
I've compiled Linux from scratch many times, adding 64 bit support is not hard.
Looking at my Kronos, when it's out of warranty I might look at a way of allowing the screen to tilt. I realise they needed to save on costs, but I believe this could have been done again very cheaply.
But lets role on 4 years.
The new Korg Super synth is released,
64 bit op system,
file names as long as you want,
up to 32Gb RAM (I'm presuming they will still be behind enough not to use the latest motherboards that can accept 64GB etc)
Tiltable screen
User upgradable RAM and SSD
Ipad (or whatever flavour of the month is in) compatible editor
Now most if not all of those things could have been put into the original Kronos at very little cost. But I bet if they released the above, within months, the Kronos forum will be as quite as the M3 one is now and the new super synth forum will be where everyone is hanging out.
So whether they deliberately held things back, who knows, but from a business point of view it sort of makes sense for them to do so.
I however think they've reached the point where they should simply sell a super Kronos with off the shelf parts that anyone can shove any MB in they like (ok an authorised service centre can) or at least a broad range picked (and regularly updated) by Korg, as much RAM as that MB will take and Korg simply sell updated OS systems every year and new addon synth engines.
And maybe from time to time sell an improved keybed version or one with more buttons/knobs, but still make the op system for both versions etc.
That to me would be a sensible approach and I've gone way off topic, so I'll shut up
