The Midnight Hour

I like gadgets.  I like tinkering with gadgets.  It doesn’t really bother me when one of my gadgets doesn’t work perfectly when I fire it up the first time, because I am reasonably confident that I can dig into its settings and change the undesired behavior.  If intuition fails me then I am confident I can find information from other users on the internet to help me solve the problem, and I’ll learn much about the gadget in the process.  I’ve been tinkering with gadgets for a long time, and I have no desire to stop.

However, recently I saw one of my traditional “gadgety” items make the transition from a gadget to merely an “appliance.”  An appliance is something you use for sheer utility.  You want it to work; you don’t care how it works; and it aggravates you greatly and causes you great inconvenience if it doesn’t work.  A remote controlled car is a gadget.  A washing machine is an appliance.  GPS: gadget.  Blow dryer: appliance.

As you might expect, the line between gadgets and appliances blurs for different people.  I tend to make more things into gadgets rather than appliances.  My wife tends to use things as appliances…and seek my assistance when they unexpectedly become gadgets.  A cell phone could be a gadget or an appliance, depending on how you use it.  The GPS cited above as a gadget could easily be an appliance for someone with only basic expectations of it.  Leo Laporte said that the iPod is successful because Apple was the first company to treat portable music players as appliances rather than gadgets, and therefore made them accessible to the public.  I tend to agree.

Wait, where was I?  Oh, my gadget that turned into an appliance.  Well, in quite an unexpected turn of events a PC in my household has gone from gadget to appliance status–specifically, my home theater PC (HTPC).  I use my HTPC for watching and recording TV in high definition.  When I built it I considered it quite the gadget.  I had to tweak many settings, access many varied sources of information, and spend many hours configuring it to work just right.  But now that I’ve got it working, I seem to consider it an appliance.  I don’t play with it–at all.  I take for granted that it will work perfectly every time.  On the rare occasions that it doesn’t I simply reboot and hope for the best, a prophecy that is usually fulfilled.  I treat it like an appliance in almost every way.

This revelation came about recently as I decided to upgrade several pieces of software and firmware that are critical to my HTPC’s capability.  Specifically, I’m referring to updated drivers for the video card, updated firmware for the HDTV tuner, updated software for the HDTV tuner, Windows security updates, and Windows Media Center updates.  Yeah, that’s a lot of updates (and variables once something goes wrong…which it will).  For me, part of owning gadgets has been keeping current with developments in the corresponding world of that gadget.  In the case of computers and software, that means updates to the operating system and other software/firmware.  I am a Windows Update Nazi.  Not only do I use automatic updating, but I regularly visit the Windows Update site on my own to browse non-critical software and hardware updates that might make my computing experience better.  I actually enjoy this.  Yes, I understand that is sad.  Hackers, be advised, if you want to get into my network to exploit a known vulnerability in Windows then you have from the time of discovery until the time Windows Updates patches it, because I’ll have the update the first hour it’s available.

Coincidentally, it’s Windows Update that prompted me to start treating my HTPC as an appliance.  Back in October my HTPC was set to automatically update, and it downloaded the Windows Media Center rollup that was released that month.  I know this because my Xbox 360 extender stopped working properly.  My wife and I couldn’t watch TV.  After I connected the HTPC to my PC monitor to do some maintenance I found that by rolling it back to a restore point I set this summer it would work great again.  Problem solved.  This reminded me of a similar instance when I was building the PC where I had to experiment with different versions of video drivers.  Slowly I realized that contrary to all gadget lore, the latest updates were not necessarily the best when you’re dealing with a very complex system.  “Best” is also a very relative term when you weigh a functional system with an updated system that will require a couple hours of troubleshooting to perform only marginally better.

So I rolled back the restore point, turned off automatic updating, made a couple tweaks, tested it, and created a fresh restore point.  I put the HTPC back in its place and ceased to worry about it.  Why should I bother updating it if it has all the functionality I want?  We’re not talking about grandiose GUI enhancements here. We’re talking about things that I probably won’t notice (unless it causes my HTPC to cease working properly).  So where’s the motivation to tinker with it?  There isn’t any.  I don’t want to tinker with it.  I want it to work every time I turn it on and never think about the underlying structure.  It’s not a PC anymore, it’s a hair dryer…an appliance.

Now it appears that some of the updates I listed above actually stand to add some functionality to my HTPC.  If I’m going to work on it I might as well get it as up-to-date as possible, so I’m going to perform all the updating in one fell swoop.  I say one fell swoop to mean “one session of my butt sitting in a chair in front of it.”  Of course, I plan to perform the updates incrementally, checking for proper function after each one in order to troubleshoot potential problems if they arise (they will).  After I perform the preventative maintenance I will return it to its hole once it proves itself appliance-worthy once again.

Have you seen anything in your life shift from a gadget to an appliance, or vice versa?