There’s a new iPhone. Again. Improbably, we are on the 17th iteration (give or take) of the product that single-handedly ruins our lives every day with incessant vibrations alerting us to some horrifying calamity, plus every song in the Bruce Springsteen back catalog. Coming up with new features for the never-ending information machines we all keep in our pockets isn’t easy, but this time, Apple managed to develop a big (or should I say small) one. There’s now a thinner iPhone Air, which is being marketed as the thinnest iPhone ever. These gadgets have never exactly been gargantuan, so it’s kind of like identifying the tiniest grain of sand in the desert. Still, people around the world are fascinated by the sheer lack of phone here.
Technology, design, and art are all trending toward a certain scarcity model, prepping us for a lack of bells and whistles, as though both your parents are unemployed and they want you to expect fewer trips to Disneyland. Life on Earth feels more and more like the experience of entering a Sweetgreen – beige, spartan and unobtrusive. Sure, iPhones haven’t gotten cheaper, but they have certainly gotten … lesser. The iPhone Air is so small, I feel like I’ll sit on it and it will slide seamlessly up my rectum, never to be seen again. For some, I’m sure losing your device inside your bowels might be a feature, but I think it’s a rather uncomfortable bug.
I mean, I don’t know who the target demo is that looks at an iPhone and says “cool, but it’s just too thick.”
Y’all appear to have forgotten what phones felt like before things got to this extreme.
It was for ergonomics; it’s easier and more comfortable to hold a phone when it fits better in your hand. The phablet phase broke this for most people by making the screens super big, so they tried to correct by making the phones thinner.
A reasonable size phone that is thin enough would be perfect, but marketing doesn’t like it when they can’t advertise a bigger screen number, or a smaller thickness, so here we are.
Easily the most comfortable phone to hold that I’ve owned was the Nokia I got in 1998 (my first cell, in college). It was heavy, the battery life was shit and it still had an antenna, but the grip was nice.
I don’t see anyone in public who doesn’t keep their phone in a case now, so the actual thickness of a naked phone is irrelevant to the final experience day to day.
No, exactly. That’s the problem. You can’t really advertise ergonomics without it looking really different; so everyone just says “wider and thinner than ever before” and calls it a day. So we’re here; with everything the wrong size and shape.
The most comfortable phone I ever used was similar to the middle phone in this picture; except the buttons were raised even higher, and the middle key wasn’t a scroll wheel, just another simple button. It was also thinner, and had less rounded edges.