The Upgrade
The Least Imaginative Holiday Gift Is the One Everyone Will Be Getting
When everything’s a screen, where’s the fun in shopping?
Tech companies are asking one big question this holiday season: Which screen do you want to unwrap?
There is a banality to the would-be gadget gifts introduced in 2018. So many of them are large, flat panes of glass, dark and featureless until you power them up. It makes you long for the days of a Lionel Train marking its circuitous route around the Christmas tree.
We’re surrounded by screens, though that hasn’t reduced our demand for them, and for good reason: they improve products and make life more convenient. But too much of a good thing can be boring — or worse. Just as we’ve reached peak screen, companies like Apple are introducing features to protect us from their addictive qualities, complicating our relationship with them all the more.
We can blame, to some extent, Amazon, Google, Lenovo, and Facebook, which all think the answer to our prayers is yet another screen situated in the heart of our homes. Last year, the tiny Alexa-hosting Echo Dot was Amazon’s best-selling holiday gift. Smart speakers alone weren’t enough. This year, we have Alexa’s latest big-screen device, the 10-inch Echo Show, which sits…
