At least two of the company's upcoming machines could debut a little later than the company initially planned, referencing the refreshes to Apple's desktop and its laptop that's expected to get a touchscreen.
The fix, he told me, was temporary - he didn't have the right part and couldn't get it. This experience revealed a broader shift in how modern products are designed, sold, and owned - one that increasingly treats repair as optional and replacement as inevitable.
In the nineteenth century, entire railway networks became obsolete almost overnight, not due to physical deterioration, but because of changes in the technical standards that supported them. The expansion of railroads across Europe and North America adopted different track gauges, and as a dominant standard gradually emerged, these infrastructures became incompatible with one another.
One of the weird quirks of working from home and owning a lot of cars is that I might go a month or a few between driving a specific vehicle. This is especially true in the winter, when I just won't drive my favorite cars at all to keep them out of the road salt. Many of my vehicles don't have the privilege of sipping from a battery tender. Yet, when I'm ready, the cars fire up when it's time to drive.
Retail point-of-sale systems today offer a wide range of options for peripherals and hardware. Their technical specifications play a major role in selection, and big retailers often choose multiple vendors to reduce a single point of failure. This gives them an advantage to negotiate price or support as well. Technically, these peripherals also require updating with new models and may have new feature sets. This necessitates the redevelopment of point-of-sale applications, increasing development costs.
At that point, backpressure and load shedding are the only things that retain a system that can still operate. If you have ever been in a Starbucks overwhelmed by mobile orders, you know the feeling. The in-store experience breaks down. You no longer know how many orders are ahead of you. There is no clear line, no reliable wait estimate, and often no real cancellation path unless you escalate and make noise.
We are now in a time of manufacturing where precision is more than a technical necessity; it's a business requirement. The more complex, globally dispersed and demanding things get, the less slack remains in the system. Under these circumstances tolerance management has become a decisive competence and affects competitiveness not only in terms of controlling costs, ensuring quality and improving production efficiency but also for long term market success.
My grandmother's refrigerator ran for forty years. The washing machine she bought in the 1970s? Still spinning when she passed away. Meanwhile, I'm on my third coffee maker in five years, and don't get me started on the laptop that mysteriously died two weeks after the warranty expired. This isn't just bad luck or nostalgia talking. There's something fundamentally different about how products are made today versus decades ago.
AI-driven memory and storage price hikes have been the defining feature of the PC industry in 2026, and hobbyists have been hit the hardest-companies like Apple with lots of buying power have been able to limit the price increases for their PCs, phones, and other gadgets so far, but smaller outfits like Valve and Raspberry Pi haven't been so lucky.
