Disruptions: You Know You Can\'t Live Without Apple\'s Latest Glass Rectangle

Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president for marketing, strode across the stage of the California Theater in San Jose last week trumpeting the virtues of new Apple products. As he caressed the side of the latest iMac personal computer, he noted how thin it was - five millimeters, 80 percent thinner than the last one. Then he said, with an air of surprise, as if he'd just thought of it: “Isn't it amazing how something new makes the previous thing instantly look old?”

Umm, yes, Mr. Schiller, you design your products that way. It's part of a plan that Apple has perfected. How else can the company beguile people into replacing their perfectly fine iPhone, iPad, iMac and iEverything else year after year?

In the past, electronics makers could convince consumers that the design was different, because it actually was. The first iMac, for example, was a blue bubble. Then it looked like a desk lamp, and now it's a rectangular sheet of glass with the electronics hid den behind it. The iPod designs changed, too, over time, before they became progressively smaller sheets of glass.

In the last few years, consumer electronics have started to share one characteristic, no matter who makes them: they're all rectangles. Now, companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google need to persuade consumers to buy new rectangles once a year.

“This phenomenon happened to the TV manufacturers a few years ago. They all started to look the same: flat panels on a wall,” said Donald A. Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things.” The consequences for manufacturers were disastrous. “Customers no longer had to buy the higher-end Sony model; instead, they could get the cheaper, Chinese one,” Mr. Norman said. “This is what today's companies are scared of. Turn off the screen on a smartphone or tablet and they look identical. They're just rectangles.”

Each year, Apple and other companies seem to put those rectangles in a vise, flatten them slightly, alter the exterior dimensions and showcase them as the next big, or little, thing.

This wasn't always the case. As a child I remember exploring my father's Minolta film camera - a camera from the mid-1950s that was given to him by his father. Although film cameras are now for the most part obsolete, you can bet that camera can still take 36 pictures without a hitch.

Yet can you imagine, 10 years from now, someone handing a child an iPad Mini, the latest Apple gadget? They would scoff, just as people do today when they see an older - two or three years old - version of the iPhone.

There is a term for all of this: “planned obsolescence,” which was popularized in the 1950s by Brooks Stevens, an industrial designer who specialized in making new cars. Briskly adopted by postwar consumer goods industries, the strategy coaxed Americans to sell their 1955 Cadillacs for the 1956 Cadillacs with their pronounced tail fins, and then the 1957s with even more exaggerated fins, and then '58s, '59s and so on.

Mr. Stevens's term was often misinterpreted as meaning things were designed to fall apart on a regular schedule. But he believed that true upgrades and design changes would make people want to buy the latest thing. That still holds true in this era, when consumers are supposedly wary of the hucksterism of manufacturers. If you don't upgrade to the latest iPhone or iPad, you fear you may look dated and clueless, even though the rational part of your brain says, “This is a perfectly fine, useful device.”

Consumer electronics companies, Mr. Norman noted, have adopted the same marketing techniques the automobile industry perfected decades ago. “This is an old-time trick - they're not inventing anything new,” he said. “Yet it's to the detriment of the consumer and the environment, but perhaps to the betterment of the stockholder.”

He added: “For Apple, you forgot the other trick : change the plugs!” While the rest of the electronics industry has adopted micro-USB ports, Apple just changed the proprietary ports and plugs on all of its latest devices - laptops, iPads and iPhones included.

Even so, my first iPod still plays music. My laptop from four years ago can still browse the Web. And my first e-readers can still display books.

It seems some consumers are starting to feel upgrade fatigue. There is no lift in PC sales, and people are owning them longer. A report by Recon Analytics, a market research firm, found that people around the globe were waiting longer to buy new mobile phones. In 2007, Americans upgraded their phones every 18.7 months on average; three years later, that number had stretched to 21.1 months. In Finland, people now wait 74.5 months to upgrade, compared with 41.8 months in 2007.

Maybe Mr. Schiller's comment about the iMac isn't how consumers see it anymore. Instead, people are starting to realize that these upgraded products are simply flatter rectangles that don't really offer much more than the last model. Just like the tail fins on the '56 Cadillac.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

I.B.M. Reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough

I.B.M. scientists are reporting progress in a chip making technology that is likely to ensure the shrinking of the size of the basic digital switch at the heart of modern microchips for more than another decade.

The advance, first described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday, is based on carbon nanotubes, exotic molecules that have long held out promise as an alternative material to silicon from which to create the tiny logic gates that are now used by the billions to create microprocessors and memory chips. The I.B.M. researchers at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have been able to pattern an array of carbon nanotubes on the surface of a silicon wafer and use them to build chips that are hybrids of silicon and carbon nanotubes with more than 10,000 working transistors.

Against all expectations, the silicon chip has continued to improve in both speed and capacity for the last five decades. In recent decades, however, there has been growing uncertainty over whether the technology will continue to improve. The end of the microelectronics era would inevitably stall a growing array of industries that have fed off the falling cost and increasing performance of computer chips.

Chip makers have routinely doubled the number of transistors that can be etched on the surface of silicon wafers by routinely shrinking the size of the tiny switches that store and route the ones and zeroes that are processed by digital computers. They have long since shrunk the switches to less than a wavelength of light, and they are rapidly approaching dimensions that can be measured in terms of the widths of just handfuls of atoms.

The process has been characterized as Moore's Law, named after Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, who in 1965 noted that the industry was doubling the number of transistors it could build on a single chip at routine intervals of 12 to 18 months. To continue the process, semiconduct or engineers have had to consistently perfect an array of related manufacturing systems and materials that continue to perform at ever-more Lilliputian scale.

The I.B.M. advance is significant, scientists said, because the chip making industry has not yet found a way forward beyond the next two or three generations of silicon.

“This is terrific. I'm really excited about this,” said Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor who specializes in carbon nanotube materials. The promise of the new material, he said is that not only will carbon nanotubes allow chip makers to build smaller transistors, but it is likely they will turn off and on more quickly as well.

In recent years, while chip makers have continued to double the number of transistors on microprocessors and memory chips, their performance, measured as “clock speed,” has largely stalled. This has forced the computer industry to change its design and begin building more parallel computers. Today, even smartphone microprocessors come with as many as four processors, or “cores,” which are used to break up tasks so they can be processed simultaneously.

I.B.M. scientists said they believed that once they have perfected the use of carbon nanotubes sometime after the end of this decade, it will be possible to dramatically raise the speed of future chips as well as dramatically increase the number of transistors.

This year, I.B.M. researchers published a separate paper describing the speedup made possible by the new material.

“These devices outperformed any other switches made from any other material, said Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences at IBM Research. ”We had suspected this all along, and our device physicists had simulated this, and they showed that we would see a factor of five or more performance improvement over conventional silicon devices.”

Carbon nanotubes are one of three promising te chnologies that engineers hope will be perfected in time to keep the industry on its Moore's Law pace. Graphene is another promising material that is being explored, as well as a variant of the standard silicon transistor, which is known as a tunneling field effect transistor.

However, Dr. Guha said that carbon nanotube materials had more promising performance characteristics and that I.B.M. physicists and chemists had perfected a range of “tricks” to make the materials easier to make.

Carbon nanotubes are essentially single sheets of carbon rolled into nanoscale tubes. In the Nature Nanotechnology paper, the I.B.M. researchers described how they were able to place ultra-small rectangles of the material in regular arrays by placing them in a soapy mixture that makes them soluble in water. They used a process they described as “chemical self-assembly” to create the patterned array in which the nanotubes stick in some areas of the surface while other areas are left untouched.

Perfecting the process will require a more highly purified form of the carbon nanotube material. Less pure forms are metallic and are not good semiconductors, Dr. Guha said.

He said that Bell Labs scientists figured out ways to purify germanium, a metal in the carbon group, chemically similar to silicon, in the 1940s to make the first transistors, and he was confident that I.B.M. scientists would be able to make 99.99 percent pure carbon nanotubes in the future.