We're Doomed to Buy Smartphones Forever
And they're not getting much better!
Something is definitely up. There is data, and it points to a specific direction, but also there are some long shadows and heavy circumstances as well as long-standing and well-founded assumptions. But we might as well start with the data. There is copious evidence that smartphone sales have been on a steady decline for the last few years. This sort of phone-related hijinks, or something like it, is certainly related to the lack of innovation over the last decade in Big Tech and elsewhere, which is most certainly related to overdetermined and unchecked executive dipshittery that has become like the weather. The bigger concern, by far, is how neatly this bit of sagging sales fits into the broader pattern of escalation and arbitrariness, as the Moloch profit monster has an insatiable appetite for making various numbers go in various directions.
It seems likely that some dopey boardroom consensus determined that if the smartphone is tweaked just enough to inspire an epic marketing campaign, people flocking to Apple Stores in droves would eventually sort itself out. And for a while, it worked. But now it’s wrecking the marketplace out of greed and spite. It seems like these megacorps are engaged in something too lazy and brazen to be considered an elaborate attempt at gaslighting the public into believing the new iPhone is worth $1,500, but they have normalized technological stagnation and rationalized every reason not to substantially improve their product. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about how we will keep buying smartphones for the rest of our lives. It seems right to question everything up to and perhaps past the point of paranoia, but I did the math. I’m on a disheartening trajectory to own about 30 phones throughout my life. This is way too many phones for someone who is not in a cartel.
I will be in my old age sitting on the front porch with my girlfriend staring out at the sunset behind our front yard, and we will complain about how the iPhone 83 Pro is too slow and the battery is dying whenever we use the Uber Eats/Spotify/Venmo mega-app and we need to upgrade to the new iPhone 85 for $300,000. Roughly every two-ish years until we die, we will be forced to talk to a teenager in a blue t-shirt about how we don’t need Apple Care.
The smartphone is fully developed tech at this point, and any new feature is just an immaterial tweak or something very obscure and barely used. Nobody expects toasters to have new features, and soon it will be the same for phones. And toaster manufacturers don’t have thousands of engineers working on marginally improving their product while spending hundreds of millions on advertising to convince customers to upgrade to a slightly better iteration. At least toasters have added an air fryer component. I just want the headphone jack back. Even a functional camera will suffice; I don’t need the lens James Cameron used to film Avatar, I’m good with whatever they used to capture Big Foot. I can imagine Apple adding AI that will force you to be polite to use your phone. Siri will say, “It sounded like you said something problematic a little while ago. I’ve gone ahead and ordered White Fragility from Amazon for you. After you read a few chapters, I’ll unlock the rest of your phone.”
This all feels more like a casual marketing gimmick that metastasized into something that still falls short of a plan and doesn’t fit into anything like a strategy. The same reason why new tech is only slightly different than it was only five or ten years ago is fundamentally the same reason why so many other things about capitalism are broken or breaking. That reason being, fundamentally, that the people in charge of these companies don’t seem to care about their products very much. At the very least, they don’t take that responsibility seriously enough to stay in their head for even a moment when confronted with the temptation to mess with it. Corporate execs know that they will not and effectively can not be held accountable for failing to uphold their end of the deal, and instead are just doing what they want. Sometimes that means releasing 16 iterations of the iPhone, which are more phones than Land Before Time films. Smartphones should be like pets: With good care, you will get 10+ years with a cat or a dog, but our phones are like hamsters. You’re maybe getting three years if you’re lucky and don’t sit on it in a weird way.
hahaha big foot. That's a good point though........ I lost faith in phones when a toothbrush needed an app, and when despite spending $$ on the new smart thing, all photos of UFOs are the blurriest thing. My phone can zoom into the moon and magically craters appear and we can't find bigfoot in nevada or wherever it's chilling?! come on
It’s funny because it’s true, and tragic because it’s true. 😂🥹