Facebook, Winamp, Five Thousand

We were looking for a laptop, and the requirements were impressively modest.

It needed to open Facebook.

It needed to play music.

That was more or less the complete technical specification.

Somehow, we had still reached a budget of five thousand lira.

At that point, I felt that everyone working at a premium computer company deserved customers like us.

The absurdity was not that anyone wanted a nice laptop. A computer is also an object you touch every day, carry around, look at, and perhaps keep for years. Design, weight, screen quality, materials, and simple pleasure all matter.

The funny part was the distance between the official requirements and the purchase we were considering.

“Must open Facebook” had somehow evolved into discussions about processors, memory, storage, build quality, and whether spending a little more now would somehow protect us from every technological development in the future.

Shopping is very good at expanding requirements after the shopping begins.

A better screen appears.

Then the better screen becomes necessary.

More storage appears.

Then life without more storage begins to look irresponsible.

By the end, the product is no longer solving the problem you arrived with. It is solving problems created by the product catalog.

I still think there is value in writing the real requirements first.

Facebook.

Music.

Everything after that should at least have the honesty to call itself preference.