The Fifty-Year Question
My Apple laptop sits beside me, perfectly capable hardware, abandoned by its operating system. It didn't break. The infrastructure around it simply moved on.
This week Ferrari unveiled the Luce, their first electric car, co designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. The same Jony Ive who designed the laptop now sitting obsolete on my desk. Rosso Corsa is not just a color, it's a century of racing heritage compressed into a single shade of red. When the car, the silhouette, and the soul all shift simultaneously, people lose their grip on what they thought Ferrari was.
But the Luce is an SDV, a Software Defined Vehicle. No longer just a machine. A platform. And at half a million dollars, you're not buying a car. You're buying into a system that requires Ferrari to keep caring for the next fifty years. The car industry invented planned obsolescence, and now it's embedded in the software itself. Battery tech shifts. Standards change. APIs sunset. In fifty years, will Ferrari still patch the onboard systems? Will the components still be available? Will anyone care to keep it running?
A Ferrari from 1965 is still drivable, still magnificent. The craftsmanship outlasted the era. But unlike a mechanical masterpiece, you can't simply rebuild what you don't understand.
That's the real brand gap. The distance between the luxury myth, permanence, something to pass down, and planned obsolescence dressed as innovation.
Until luxury brands commit to fifty year sustainability, not just fifty year styling, the brand promise is incomplete.