Why is my phone the wrong shape?
Here are some devices that give you magic permission to go to the beach
I’m reading so much about Charlie Kirk right now that I honestly need to cleanse myself by thinking and writing about something other than guns, and move on to phones, AKA those other handheld objects that ruin our lives especially when operated by men.
Apple just announced the iPhone 17 air; a ridiculous wafer thin cry for help. Who would buy this? Why would anyone buy this? Why pay more for a thing that is worse just because it’s thinner? I mean I know it’s weird obsessive men, and also 99% of the USA because they are all stuck in iMessage hell and no one wants to be the only green bubble in the group chat. But still, a razor thin iPhone is so stupid. I look forward to the videos of toddlers breaking them in half.
This design choice mistake demonstrates that Apple have an acute awareness that those who care about hardware design and form factor are sick to death of buying the same shiny rectangle over and over — but Apple also lack imagination and have no idea what to do about it. If the main thing you sell is hardware, wouldn’t you want the new thing you release every year to at least be something other than a small touch screen computer? The answer to this is that they of course aren’t selling hardware at all, they’re selling a way of life, and they suck at that too. Remember that horrible iPad ad where they crushed everything you love into one small sterile pane of glass?
Either way, the gadget-addicted masses are scrambling for something new. The rectangle shape makes no sense. You cannot control it with just one hand anymore. We as a species cannot evolve to meet the thirsty needs of smartphone supply chains. Phones keep getting bigger while human hands remain the same size, and crave the tactile feedback of buttons. Look at this guy. He says he built his own phone because “innovation is sad rn”. It’s a hinged flip phone with a square screen and a qwerty keyboard. It took him months of soldering and honestly I wish him the best. Then there’s Beepy, a small Blackberry looking thing, with a Raspberry Pi shaped hole in the back. For those who want to pay money first before giving themselves an electric shock.
Then you’ve got more off-the-shelf stuff like this literal square phone which is still in the kickstarter phase. Or the Meadow — a very light-touch attempt at a ‘dumb phone’, or rather just ‘dumb thing to have in your pocket’, in that you still need your actual phone if you buy one of these. The tagline for this product is “Ditch your phone and make some memories”, meaning: if you go out partying, or you go to the beach, or you’re on your Californian sunrise hike, maybe you don’t want your whole phone with you distracting you with social media — because you’re a flaccid-brained baby who can’t stay away from TikTok, even when edging towards orgasm during an orgy. The Meadow plays podcasts, makes calls, tracks your fitness, takes notes, calls cabs when you’re ready to go home to your real phone and continue doomscrolling, etc. It really is just another phone, but it cannot be your only phone because it does not take a sim card. You need an additional sim-card having device with a phone plan for it to work.
Meadow et al are a kind of non-AI version of those cumbersome overpriced male midlife crisis gadgets such as the Rabbit R1 or this absolute tragic waste of components by Humane Inc, who were acquired by HP earlier this year (lmao). These devices are expensive, don’t do everything a phone does, and also require a monthly subscription. Again, who are these for? I mean I know it’s men with too much money, but why? Why is ‘my phone’s the wrong shape!’ a male problem? Women never complain about this, women are never in the ads for these devices, women never make videos on how to jailbreak your Light Phone to finally make Spotify work on it. Probably because women have actual problems (not me! My only problem is that I don’t have a square phone with an eink screen that somehow runs iOS).
I’m not sure if I’ll ever buy a janky dumb phone made by an agile marketing team who also happen to know how to use CAD software. Because none of these people are trying to sell gadgets to us. Maybe they think they are, but they aren’t. It’s just aspirational vapour. They’re running through the Apple playbook pretty systematically as if they have no other choice. Where Apple sells status and wealth through indistinguishable gimmicks, the makers of premium dumb phones make a gimmick out of your own need to detach and touch grass.
A gimmick is not the same as being innovative, even if the gimmick is bootstrapping a whacky Android device so that there’s no Play Store on it. I really commend companies like Meadow and Light Phone for giving this a go, because it’s really hard to hype up the promise of less rather than more. They’re literally selling you the idea of going to a park and hanging out with your friends without looking at your phone — a thing you can already do without buying a new device.
I want to finish on these stupid Meta Ray Bans which has just had an upgrade. They now have a display which obscures your vision and makes you look like you’re dissociating as you scroll Instagram with a grim thousand-yard stare — just like with your actual phone except this is attached to your face, and just like everything else discussed here today, is far less capable. Now THIS is the kind of hype I can get behind. The tech entrepreneur who tells me to unplug and hang out with my friends and a monochrome tablet device is insincere; but when Mark Zuckerberg prophecises a dystopian future of wearables, where you are sheathed in gadgets like a member of The Borg, the world makes sense again. He wants you to asphyxiate yourself in a tomb devices, lost in the metaverse forever, with no legs.
This is very easy to argue with this because it is objectively bad. You’re obviously not going to buy the silly wearables, because you respect yourself (I assume?). But do not get lost in the allure of dumb phones and different form factors. Change is bad. Accept your boring shiny rectangle as the forever-shape. A feature-sparse device cannot give you special permission to go to the beach, or to pay attention to the speeches at your own wedding. Don’t buy a dumb phone, just put your current phone down, honestly it’s okay, you’re going to be okay.