They didn’t. They spy on you more and more to extract more value from you after purchase. They have non-replaceable batteries and screens, which means you can’t service them easily. They are worse at being phones than plastic Nokias 20 years ago. Companies are incentivized to create apps which are trapped in the phone’s walled gardens rather than creating webpages which anyone can access. The list goes on.
People don’t care about replaceable batteries and voice calls. They want the magic also won’t pocket oracle to just work with a minimum of gaffing about.
You have to make reach people on what THEY care about, not preach to them about what they should care about. (And yes, I’m self-aware enough to see the inherent irony of this comment.)
For instance, Apple tends to drive how mobile phones look and what external features they have even if their changes are objective steps backwards in functionality. People generally liked headphone jacks, but not enough to cut themselves off from flagship devices. There is no way to make an apples-to-apples comparison since usually there are never two devices whose literal only difference is the specific feature under discussion.
What was this supposed to say?
And the first-gen iPhone didn't have a replaceable battery or screen either.
As far as I can tell, iPhones have only gotten better. And ever since Apple introduced the SE, they've become more affordable as well.
It's way better at being a phone than an old Nokia as well -- the convenience and sound quality of wireless earbuds, using higher-quality audio and background noise removal, is really something.
Well, based on Docorow's term, it's because there wasn't a 2 way market. Instead of phone manufacturers playing 2 sides off each other, it was a a much simpler arrangement: manufacturers sell phones to consumers, and there are enough manufacturers that they can't get entirely complacent.
Perhaps in the early days, when manufacturers acted as an intermediary between the carriers and consumers, that was more prone to enshittification. And phones in those days were pretty stagnant, looking for new ways to grab a couple of bucks (remember when they charged for ringtones? Or wildly overcharged for SMS messages?). Phones becoming unlocked, and phones rapidly improving in abilities and price did happen roughly around the same time, but perhaps that's unrelated to enshittification.
Do you have any friends who are companies?
Its all people, all the way down.
They don't need to be. They are automata with emergent behavior independent from the individual humans comprising them - paperclip maximizers in a very literal sense. The overly-simplistic "corporate decisions are just human decisions" take entirely ignores corporate policies, material interests, and countless other drivers of corporate decisionmaking with zero dependence on any particular actual human.
And those policies came from...?
And those material interests relate to...?
...the ether? Jesus Christ? The "Invisible Hand"? The void?
Those policies were written by people at the direction of people to be given to people to do because some people are interested in achieving that goal.
And those policies continue to be in effect long after any of their authors or beneficiaries have left or otherwise ceased to be authors or beneficiaries - as highlighted in the part of my comment immediately following that which you quoted.
People being involved at one point says nothing about their continued involvement or about the eventual autonomy of the thing with which they were once involved - just like how any person's decisionmaking is independent from that of one's constituent cells, and from one's parents and their constituent cells. The interests of the creation can and do diverge from the interests of the creators.
Your argument is like saying "we've already solved biology -- it's physics all the way down!" Except, it's not. The information-processing and entropy-generating capacities of biological organisms surpasses those that would be expected from a purely physical perspective.
Specifically in the case of companies, they're generally deliberately organized such that specific humans in the leadership/ownership are not individually responsible for decisions, otherwise it would be easier to pierce the corporate veil. Hence diffuse responsibility, meetings and meeting minutes, reams of pages justifying decisions, etc - what we commonly know as "bureaucracy", with a life of its own. Each human-reasoning-unit only focuses on some very small part of the company's behavior, adds their own personal incentives to not rock the boat, and then rolls the shit downhill.
So no, it doesn't sense to pigeonhole company behavior as just "human behavior", especially when individual humans in the system often would very much like to choose differently, but for all the incentives lined up against them.
Yes, companies would like to make more money for doing the same work or less. So would everyone. Would you like a raise every year, even if you’re the same person doing the same job? Would you like to have passive income so you don’t have to work so hard?
It explains why some things get worse over short or long periods of time, but is not great at explaining why so many things get better over time. Like if I held mobile phones from 2003 and 2023 and said “you can buy either for $600,” for most folks it would be a no-brainer. How did mobile phones, a huge market with huge investment, avoid “enshittification”?
Now I know that Cory’s writing is more sophisticated than what I’m saying. But most folks who throw the term around (like this blog post) are not. It’s become a broad label for anything some people don’t like, like “late stage capitalism” or “woke.”
App changes interface slightly: “enshittification!!”
The original essay was interesting. The broad application of the term, I am finding tiresome.