After a few faithful years with my iPhone SE Gen 3, I finally had to upgrade to a new phone. The battery performance had dropped off a cliff, and a growing list of other small issues was becoming harder to ignore. Of course, this meant I also had to give up the beloved home button, since Apple doesn’t make a phone with one anymore. I still can’t stand using a device without it, but that’s life in the modern tech world.
[Viewpoint: If You Build It, Will They Come?]
What’s interesting isn’t the effort or cost of getting the new phone itself, it's everything else that came along for the ride. The new phone uses USB-C instead of Lightning, so all my cables, spare cables, and emergency cables had to be replaced. It also needs a higher-power charger, meaning all my home chargers, travel chargers, and docking stations needed an upgrade, too.
Then there were the accessories: wireless microphones, Bluetooth headsets and speakers, portable batteries, cases, even the overly restrictive Apple Watch needed significant adjustments. (Side note: That was the last straw for the Apple Watch. I’m now using a $29 knock-off from Amazon that looks and works almost identically—and doesn’t make me jump through hoops to move it to another phone.) Then, all the album covers in the music app got reassigned to other artists. All the music had to be deleted from the phone and reloaded.
Unintended Consequences
On the surface, buying a new phone seems simple, but the long tail of upgrades—the cascade of problematic changes needed just to make the one new device functional—is expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes downright exhausting.
In the AV and collaboration world, it’s no different. It’s easy to say you’re swapping out an old videoconferencing device for a newer model, but is the new device compatible with the room’s displays? Does it work with the microphones already installed? Will you need backward-compatible adapters to bridge analog, older digital, or IP-based connections? Will you need to replace cabling in the walls or ceiling?
And if your meeting space uses a control system for AV gear, collaboration tools, or even room scheduling, will the control system need to be reprogrammed? Is it even compatible with the new gear, or will it throw a digital tantrum at the first handshake attempt?
I could easily spend four pages listing more questions that come up when you tug on the string of what seems like a simple upgrade. This is why many organizations choose to skip piecemeal updates and instead do a full forklift replacement. In many cases, it’s actually easier: What once took seven components might now be handled by two or three, delivering better audio, crisper video, and more reliability, often for less money.
This is why many organizations choose to skip piecemeal updates and instead do a full forklift replacement.
Technology marketing loves to pretend every upgrade is like getting a shiny new toy. In reality, it’s often more like Clark Griswold trying to untangle the Christmas lights. One yank leads to a hopeless mess you didn’t see coming.
It may surprise you about me, but that’s one reason I recommend against upgrades. Sure, wholesale system changes can be a smart step, but only if there’s a clear feature or benefit you’re aiming to achieve. But interim, partial upgrades, especially software updates, are a definite "no thanks" from me most of the time.
A Hasty Retreat
When I look back at my four-decade-plus career, I can rarely think of a time when a firmware upgrade helped me do anything, but I can distinctly remember all the updates that killed functions I needed, destroyed compatibility, or worked so poorly that they needed to be stopped and reverted.
That leads to one of my key rules about technology changes at enterprises (and in life, too): No changes without a definite, documented rollback strategy. I can’t begin to tell you how many times the decision to “stop this BS and roll back and we’ll regroup and strategize tomorrow” kept organizations that were counting on technology I was responsible for in business.
Another key principle in engineering design and operations is realizing that the primary system, backup system, and emergency system must, by necessity, be three separate things. I could sadly tell you about the dozens of times that I inspected facilities that used devices with dual power supplies—which were both plugged into the same power strip.
It is important for everyone to understand that while upgrade has a very positive connotation, it has that long tail of complications that can easily turn the positive into a nightmare. Technical managers need to really think through how changes will impact everything, both as part of the commissioning/testing and for the operations team or users left with the change.
[On Your Business: Put Me In, Coach]
As for me, while I'm still fumbling with my new, oversized phone—trying to use it one-handed, dropping it half the time, and wondering why nobody at Apple considered that a palm-sized phone with a button might actually be the best form factor for normal humans—I’ll point out that I scoffed at the idea to trade in my iPhone SE as part of the upgrade. That device can be my backup if I have to roll back, simply by popping the SIM card from the new one back into the old one. Wait, what? The new iPhone doesn’t use a physical SIM card? The long, problematic tail strikes again.
