Lagging Behind
I have forgotten how it was before we had working supply chains. Before we had always ready stock for almost all the product variation a vendor offered. The waiting time for pieces. The little importance we gave to buying the latest of the latest. The focus we put on just solving our problem and not focusing on having a marginally better product.
It was this way because it was very hard to get your hands on the latest device anyway - and because choices were limited anyway. But recently we have fallen down the rabbit hole of too many options available to pick and every option is also available for purchase and can be purchased right away from many vendors in many places.
All this availability creates a FOMO environment because a device can never have the best on all of its attributes and will always be better or worse on some aspects versus other devices. To breakout we have to go back to the ways we decided when availability was a problem, to when we actually had a problem to solve.
If you need to make the purchase because you don’t have a device and really need one, just purchase it and keep going because once you have the device you will be able to actually solve your problems and you won’t be thinking much about the specs. Take for example an old car, if the engine doesn’t give you much trouble, an upgrade is not justifiable unless you want more comfort or luxury.
If you already have the device, be real, does it really makes a difference for you if your device has all the latest features? If the new device so much more secure than your own that it justifies the upgrade? Does it enable you to perform your job optimally, and this doesn’t mean at the highest standards industry standards but a a high level performance for your context.
Still in doubt? Then ask yourself what can make this purchase so bad a month from now, a year from now? Do you really think technology will move so fast in a year that your device will become obsolete? Maybe something can be available on the market that will be 25% better than you have but that doesn’t make what you have obsolete. For example, let’s get back to the iPhone, it shook the industry, no one saw that coming but let’s be real it was the iPhone 2 and the introduction of the App Store that really started the revolution and that’s about a 2 years time span, so don’t worry much about what other better options might be available in the future.
As I see it, there are 3 ways in which you can look at a purchase.
Steps, each time there is a new version, just upgrade to it. This approach requires a lot of time spent on being up to date on tiny increments, always needing to learn the latest of the latest to almost no use.
Jumps, every major version there is on the market, you upgrade do it and stick with. You might miss one or two cool feature that would make something look nicer or work a tiny bit faster but there is nothing you need to do that you can’t with your current version. You need to spend some time to get up to speed to everything that is new.
Leaps, every time it breaks down. Your software version is so old that is constantly crashing, it has security issues or it has been deprecated all together because better software has been built. You need to spend a lot of time acquiring skills for the new software or machine you are operating because a lot has changed in between the many versions you have skipped.
The end goal is to have the objects that enables us to do the things we want, not having the object for the sole purpose of having that object.