Why Smartphones Got So Damn Boring
The iPhone 11 and Galaxy Note 10 follow an established playbook, leaving consumers with few truly unique options
This week, Apple announced its latest iPhones, including the photography-oriented iPhone 11 Pro. It has all the bells and whistles that a semi-professional could want from their phone. For dedicated mobile photographers, it might be an exciting release. But at a time when hardware innovation has slowed down, they’re the only niche Apple seems to pander to.
In recent years, the design of smartphones has become homogenized, leaving anyone who wants niche features — like a hardware keyboard for those who type a lot, or even a smaller phone for people with smaller hands — out in the cold. Take a look at flagship phones from Apple, Google, Samsung, or even the beleaguered Huawei and you’ll see largely the same thing: a mostly featureless slab with a screen taking up as much of the front as physically possible. The camera might bulge out of the back a bit. There will be three, maybe four buttons on the side. No headphone jack, sorry, but if you’re lucky you might get a fingerprint sensor on the back.
When most major phones follow this formula, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for hardware innovation. Drastic changes to the form factor are rare, and when they appear they’re often attached to subpar phones that could never stand toe-to-toe with some of the more popular handsets on the market.
One of the few genuinely new and potentially useful innovations this year came in the form of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold. This device, as its name suggests, is designed to fold closed into a phone shape and unfold into a tablet. It’s an interesting development, but given the unpopularity of Android tablets, it’s unclear if a larger Android screen is much more useful than a normal phone would be. It doesn’t help that it cost $2,000, far more than buying a high-end phone and tablet combined. And the product was so poorly designed that Samsung had to delay its launch for months and even cancel all preorders until the company could develop a fix for its hinge.
In the modern world, almost everyone needs a phone, so sacrifices have to be made.
