Latest Is Not Greatest

by

Back in the day, whenever we bought the latest model of a product, we got more features than we had in the previous model. Barring very few exceptions, the feature set of a new model of a PC, laptop, smartphone, mobile app or enterprise software was a superset of the feature set of the old model.

Sadly, that’s no longer true.

Companies are increasingly dropping features as they upgrade their products. Forget about being supersets, many new hardware and software products are functionally inferior to their previous versions.

I call this “Latest Is Not Greatest”. Here are a few examples of this trend.

#1. MICROSOFT WINDOWS 

Vista and earlier versions of Microsoft Windows supported an excellent Advanced Search feature. It was particularly useful to find a set of files that had changed during a certain time window in one environment and copy them to another environment. I’ve used this feature extensively in the past to copy files from the STAGING to PRODUCTION sites of gtm360.com website.

WINDOWS ADVANCED SEARCH

Alas, Advanced Search is missing from Windows 7 onwards. Promoting changed files from staging to production has become painful now.

#2. LENOVO LAPTOP

My old Lenovo IdeaPad laptop had LED lights for the CapsLock key, RJ45 Ethernet socket and AC adapter. My new Lenovo ThinkPad, which is supposed to be a higher class of laptop, does not.

On my IdeaPad, I’d know whether the CapsLock key was on or off with one look at the LED on it. In the absence of this LED on my ThinkPad, I need to press the CapsLock key – which changes the state – and take a quick glance at the icon on the lower right side of the monitor before it vanishes. This causes a major PITA while entering (case sensitive) usernames and passwords on websites and desktop apps.

The LED on the RJ45 socket of my IdeaPad would tell me whether the loss of my Internet connection was caused by poor signal or loose contact in my Ethernet cable. In the absence of this LED on my ThinkPad, this has become a guessing game now. (Because the WiFi signal strength is patchy in my office, I use a wired Ethernet connection, which plugs into the RJ45 socket.)

On my IdeaPad, if there was a loose contact in the mains plug, I’d know it immediately because the LED on the adapter would be off. Since there’s no such light on my ThinkPad, I could be draining my battery without realizing it. There’s a small icon on the taskbar of the ThinkPad to tell me whether I’m on the mains or battery but it’s not as prominent as the LED light on the IdeaPad’s adapter.

#3. APPLE IPHONE

Recent models of iPhone don’t have an audio jack.

Even diehard Fanboys are annoyed by this missing feature.

Ditto home button. Donald Trump berated Apple CEO Tim Cook for removing this button..

While launching iPhone X, Apple pitched Face ID as a better alternative to Touch ID on the home button. Maybe that’s true in general but I know a lot of people who find it very painful to make Apple Pay payments with Face ID.

After experiencing the growing number of items missed out in newer models of iPhone, a Fanboy quipped, “one day I’ll give money to Apple and all I’ll get is an apple, that too a worm-bitten one”!

(He’s obviously a Fanboy because, even after anticipating that he’ll get a worm-bitten apple in return, he’ll still give his money to Apple:).)

#4. ATM

At one point, my bank’s ATM supported a “Favorite Transaction” feature. I had set it as “Withdraw INR 20K and print a receipt”. This feature considerably reduced the number of keystrokes required to withdraw cash. Those days, I’d be in and out of the ATM center in 15 seconds (down from one minute that it took me before the bank had introduced this feature).

A couple of years ago, on some of my visits, the ATM used to prompt me to set up the Favorite Transaction, presumably because the setting was lost while the ATM switch software was updated. It’s not a good sign to forget old settings during upgrades. But, since I was fond of this feature, I’d treat this missout as a minor annoyance and take the trouble to set it up everytime.

Nowadays, I can neither find my favorite transaction nor the option to set it up from scratch. Also, as soon as it dispenses the cash, the ATM logs me out. I need to start all over again to get a receipt.

Thanks to these missing features, I now spend around two minutes per ATM visit (up from 15 seconds in the past).

I used to think that the growing practice of skipping features in higher models was more of a pinprick until I realized that it could be a lot worse than that after reading the following tweet:

A couple of Apple insiders lament about the “later is not greater” trend in their article entitled How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name in FASTCOMPANY:

Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.

No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.

Latest version does not mean greatest features.

This is not a good thing from the customer point-of-view.

In a follow-on post, I’ll speculate on the causes of the “latest is not greatest” trend and what a user can do if upgrades actually turn out to be downgrades. Watch this space!