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The Perils Of Early Adoption vs Late Adoption And Risk Of Buyer Remorse

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

by Charles W. Moore The Perils Of Early Adoption vs Late Adoption And Risk Of Buyer Remorse

Somebody has to go first, but not me if I can help it. I’m not an early adopter by nature or temperament. I like to have an established frame of reference to go on before making purchase decisions, especially for big-ticket items, and am virtually immune to impulse-buying.

As I’ve mentioned here previously, I’m now seriously in the hunt for a MacIntel system upgrade and having difficulty making a decision. Happily, the MacBook Air has not complicated my personal dilemma here. The new machine will become my primary workhorse production machine, and here is no way I would ever consider a compromised and features-crippled unit like the Air for that purpose, but I expect that the new subcompact will enjoy a healthy degree of market success with folks who plan to use it as a portable auxiliary to their main workstation computer, and are willingness to trade connectivity, upgradability, expandability, drive capacity, internal optical drive convenience, a user replaceable battery, and general versatility for the convenience and comfort of a thin, light form factor.

I hope for their sake that the MacBook Air proves to be one of Apple’s relatively un-bug plagued revision A hardware launches, but I can’t say it’s a very lively hope. The Air is ploughing new ground in so many contexts that the probability of teething trouble has to be deduced as high. I mean, remember the tribulations suffered by so many early adopters of the relatively conventional Revision A MacBook in 2006.

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For example, my columnist colleague at Low End Mac Andrew Fishkin burned through no less than three defective Revision A MacBooks before throwing in the towel and reverting to PC machine and a dependable 12” PowerBook. After that experience, Andrew vows, “I will never again buy Rev. A of anything until its been on the market for at least six months.” However, Andrew likes the MacBook Air, noting that it “will let me (finally) have a modern Mac that doesn’t weigh me down and allows me to enjoy all of the goodness of OS X without having lug the kitchen sink around for the ride,” but he plans to wait for the Revision B edition before committing. A wise plan I think.

However, there’s a potential downside to late adoption as well, in that your honeymoon at the cutting edge will sometimes be painfully short. A close to home case in point was back in January, 2000, when one of my progeny whose WallStreet PowerBook had been stolen on the bus ride home for Christmas purchased one of the last Lombard G3 PowerBooks over my protestation that the Pismo revision was imminent. Impatience won out, and the Pismo did appear less than two months later - a superior machine to the Lombard, whose value of course took a dive with the new model release.

Right now, my system upgrade shortlist has been pared down to either a 2.2 GHz MacBook or a base model 15” MacBook Pro - possibly Apple Certified Refurbished in either case, but I’m fully aware that both machines are due for refreshment and the MacBook Pro perhaps with a major new revision, but at minimum Penryn CPUs by the customary April/May Apple notebook update release window - possibly sooner. The MacBook will likely have to wait until a few months after the MacBook Pro Penryns debut to get the new chips.

On the upside, both models are mature and should be thoroughly debugged, the Santa Rosa CPUs have proved a good performer, and the 15” MacBook Pro even has the cutting edge LED display backlighting. Going with one of these should be relatively low-risk in terms of trouble at least, so I think I can be content with that even if Apple does spring a new MacBook Pro design this winter or spring. For reasons articulated above, I would be disinclined to be an early adopter anyway. Historically, I’ve been more oriented toward buying Apple ‘Books late in their production run.

I bought my first PowerBook, a 5300, as a discounted leftover in November, 1996. While the 5300 served me well, my daughter likewise after she took it over, and still works now well past its 11th anniversary, that purchase was one instance where I would almost certainly have done better as an early adopter; the PowerBook 1400 that immediately succeeded the 5300 in autumn of ‘96 was an altogether better computer, and would have justified the extra cash outlay, so being early adoption phobic doesn;t always serve one well.

On the other hand, the later revision 133 MHz and 166 MHz 1400s with their level 2 caches were much superior to the original 117 MHz model, so in a context limited to PowerBook 1400s, early adoption still wasn’t the best deal.

My next computer wasn’t a leftover, but I did wait until the second “PDQ” version of the WallStreet G3 Series PowerBook had been out for a few months before placing my order. Actually, the original WallStreets were pretty solid and reliable computers from the get-go, save for some troublesome issues with the 13.3” screen models. Two other family members purchased 233 MHz G3 Series PowerBooks identical to mine, and two of them are still in the family in working condition, passed onto other members, while the third was stolen.

By the time the widescreen Titanium PowerBook G4s debuted in January, 2001, I was in the hunt again for a system upgrade. I thought the super-slim, metal-skinned TiBooks were uber cool, but after the initial dazzle subsided, also deduced that such a radically new design would probably have reliability issues, so I put in an order for a leftover PowerBook G3 Pismo from MacWarehouse Canada. As it turned out, their remaining stock of 500 MHz Pismos got overbooked with sales orders by a factor of six to one, and my order was one of the canceled majority.

I eventually did get my Pismo, ten months later, after detour purchase of a G4 Cube, which was a very nice desktop computer but wasn’t as satisfactory a substitute for a laptop as I had hoped it would be. I traded the nearly new Cube for a year-old used Pismo in pristine condition in October, 2001. I still have it, now upgraded to 550 MHz G4 power and with a 8x SuperDrive, and still use it every day for an hour or two. In fact I’m typing this article on it right now. It wasn’t a leftover, and certainly not a low-end laptop - being the highest-spec. Pismo Apple offered with a 500 MHz G3 processor and a 20 GB hard drive.

As it turned out, the Titanium PowerBook did have some issues, although not so much with its internals (the original motherboard used in TiBooks was essentially the reliable architecture introduced ten months earlier with the Pismo, reengineered to support the G4 CPU and to fit inside the much thinner titanium case), but things like lid hinges seizing and and tearing away from the thin metal case, battery contact problems, optical disks fouling the inside of the case, and paint prematurely wearing off contact services. I’ve never regretted going with the Pismo instead, and indeed I bought a second Pismo in almost brand-new condition last spring. That’s very late adoption!

By the time I bought my next laptop, the dual USB iBook had been in production for 19 months, although the 700 MHz G3 version I got was just a couple of months out. The original, 500 MHz version 1 in this case was statistically a more reliable machine than the “Revision C” unit I ended up purchasing, but despite that model’s spotty reputation, mine has been completely trouble-free, now in its sixth year of service as my wife’s laptop.

Indeed, by that time the iBook turned three in January, 2006, I had nothing to complain about in terms of dependability, but the 700 MHz G3 CPU,16 megabytes of video RAM, and the system RAM maxed out 640 megabytes weren’t quite cutting it anymore performance-wise.

Apple’s switch to Intel chips was a complicating factor in my next upgrade decision. With the MacBook Pro having just been introduced at Mac World Expo 2006 and the MacBook replacement for the then nearly five-year-old white iBook design imminent, I was faced with the conundrum on whether to roll the early adopter dice and go with a MacIntel ‘Book, or follow my cautious instincts and get one more Power PC machine.

After ruminating over it for a month or so, I went with my gut and ordered it a refurbished 1.33 GHz 17-inch PowerBook from TechRestore, and and hindsight confirms that for me, the old gut was right. This machine has been completely reliable, and I was very satisfied with its performance until OS 10.5 Leopard came along. That, plus some new softwareports: I want to use that demands a MacIntel has convinced me that it’s time to make another move.

The version 1 MacBook Pros challenged many of their owners with extreme heat, “mooing” and whining noises, a battery recall, and other issues. All of these problems were addressed, although they still run hotter than is desirable.

The early MacBooks also had heat and “mooing” issues as well as a “sudden shutdown” glitch. Everyone I know who bought a Revision A MacBook had problems with it, which is not an auspicious lookout, nor was the fact that refurbished MacBooks began showing up on the Apple Store Website only a few weeks after the machine’s May, 2006 introduction (as had MacBook Pros earlier in the year,). One of the worst MacBook early adopter experiences I heard of Andrew Fishkin’s:
http://lowendmac.com/fishkin/06/0915.html

Like I said, somebody has to go first, but I’m persuaded that it’s not likely going to be me. I have a low tolerance for reliability problems, and I attribute the almost flawless dependability I’ve enjoyed with my PowerBooks and iBook over the years to resisting the urge to surf the bleeding edge.

Folks who buy the early production version of any complex machine more often than not end up being late beta or prototype testers, and paying top dollar for the dubious privilege. As with investment risk, whether early adoption is for you depends on your tolerance for (at least highly potential) aggravation and inconvenience, and your threshold for sleeping well.

CM