There is a feeling coursing through the populace. It is just now bubbling over, spilling through the cracks and taking its many shapes. The world changed forever with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007—it is a fool who thinks it can’t change again. I am a fool who thinks it is going to change very imminently.
Let’s be honest, making a new primary device is effectively impossible. We probably won’t see a smartphone-killer or a computer-killer ever.
Louie Mantia, Jr.
These two sentences represent the prevailing wisdom on mobile computing. Not just that consumer hardware is hard—it is, with even great successes like Pebble eventually collapsing—but that it’s not worth pursuing: that we’ve already figured it out. It’s the most dominant form of technology worldwide. Billions of people make their digital homes on their phones. Surely that means the field is done.
To my mind, this has always sounded ignorant. Look at your phone: it’s a rectangular screen. What is this optimized for? What does this form factor make easy? The screen is a blank canvas. It enables Jobs’ vision of a device that doesn’t need physical updates to gain new functionality. But it’s also profoundly lazy. It is the lowest common denominator of interfaces.
A game for everyone is a game for no one.
Arrowhead
The screen is also uniquely condemnable for the way it inherently hijacks our attention. Our brains are ill-prepared to encounter the light of a thousand suns or colors more vibrant than any Amazonian tree frog, but that’s what we see when we check our phones at 3am. Try and have a conversation with a phone in your peripheral vision. Play a video with the sound on mute: can you avoid distraction? Alternatively: could you actually recognize the contours of your palm? The common turn of phrase would suggest this to be the most familiar thing in the world. I suspect we all know our home screen much better.
*wakes up and looks at phone*
ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device
@missokistic
At the same time as I am thoroughly steeped in technology, I hate it. I want to maximize the amount of time I spend present with the people I love: my friends, my family, random kind and exciting people. The time I spend “in” a device—the fact that such a turn of phrase even exists—is despicable, in my eyes. And I’m not alone in this:
If you’re looking at a phone more than someone’s eyes, you’re doing the wrong thing!
Tim Cook
The status of this crusade, as it stands, is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there are a metric ton of reasons to despair: there’s a whole generation of “iPad kids” out there who have grown up breaking Cook’s ironic axiom above. I myself just quit a Reels addiction. The status quo is riddled with the ills of our devices, from the wasteland of social media to the phantom notifications plaguing our pockets. However, there is some cause for hope and excitement: that feeling I mentioned earlier. People don’t just live amidst all the garbage—they’re starting to feel it.
Some of these people are seeking to do something about it all. Throughout the industry there are new takes on what the coming device paradigm might look like: new minds finally tackling the question of what it should look like to live alongside our technology. Obviously, none of them have come close to supplanting the phone or the laptop or the screen at all. Not just yet. But I hope they will, eventually, and I want to be a part of that.
There are numerous significant and cool initiatives in this area these days. Humane has been universally panned but I’m extremely interested in rapidly developing their laser display technology as an alternative to traditional display panels. Origami Computing is actually the reason I’m writing this post, because I promised Sarvasv I would do so over six months ago and I want to reply to his email. I steal his line about the love-hate relationship we have with our devices all the time. The Apple Vision Pro may initially seem like its going the exact opposite direction of what I’m advocating in this post, but if you look at it closely you realize that it too is seeking to eliminate the role screens play in our lives today. tinyPod is such a compelling reason to buy an Apple Watch that I might actually do it. I own the reMarkable 2 and use it every day for school: for years it replaced all my paper use, though I’ve built up a nasty habit of of sketching and journaling on dead trees again. I met an angel investor in Daylight on a flight to New York—I’m most interested in their tablet because it runs full Android, and there are good apps I use on my phone that I wish I could use on an e-ink-ish display. I have similar feelings toward the Palma. I’m not sure that Freewrite belongs among this new wave, because they’ve been around for a while, but it is yet another e-ink device that I want to buy. Limitless’ pendant and Avi’s friend strike me as products similiarly oriented around the question “what if a microphone was maximally intelligent?” Spatial Pixel gives strong tldraw/todepond/Ink & Switch vibes, as well as relying on cool projection technology that we’ve previously established I’m a fan of. The Oura Ring is not as much of a general computing device as the rest of these, but it has the great quality of delivering utility to me on a daily basis while not having a screen, so it has won a spot. And frankly: Roll Call was inspired by this very scene/movement and was explicitly an expirement in alternative display technology!
Gruber wrote the sharpest critique of these sorts of efforts two years ago when the Ai Pin was first announced, in a post entitled If You Come at the King. In essence, he says that Humane’s founder, Imran Chaudhri, may be right that our phone addictions are sad and problematic. However, he points out, people don’t care. The objective truth has no bearing on the fact that everyone loves their phone. Addicts love their compulsions, even when they know they’re self-destructive. I agree with Gruber. But I think that the need is too dire to simply give up. We need a Pareto improvement in our mobile devices: new digital companions that are not only healthier for us, but that we love even more. People won’t change their behavior for abstract concepts like well-being, but they will absolutely change their behavior for better.
And something better is possible. We do not have to take the good with the bad. A more humanistic future is out there: one with technology that is helpful and ubiquitous but totally dissolved into the background of our existence. We have designed our present, and we can design a future with all of its benefits and none of its downsides. We must right our priorities by building a better system on the back of the one that came before. There is no area of more impact than hardware, and no better time to experiment wildly. It is time to build new hardware. It is time to turn our focus to the world we were given.