Last week, we argued that we might be approaching the end of luxury smartphones. With the speculated introduction of an Apple folding phone releasing in the fall, could we be completing a second “Circle of Luxe” — a twenty-year cycle, traversed twice since the 1980s, of ultra-elite to ubiquitous phones?
But what if all that is nonsense? Maybe there’s something enduring about the traditional, rounded rectangle smartphone form factor.
Some objects are just pleasant to hold. A pack of playing cards. A small notebook or passport. A nice, ergonomic TV remote. These are objects designed and iterated over decades or centuries to fit nicely in the majority of human hands.
But handheld tech starts long before modern innovations like playing cards and notebooks.
Handheld tech
The most enduring human technology went out of fashion about 100,000 years ago. For about one and a half million years, our recent relatives created many, many millions of hand axes. They’ve been called “the Swiss army knife of the Stone Age,” speculated to have been used for chopping branches, butchering animals, chopping vegetables, digging for water and who knows what else.
There has even been controversial speculation that the quality of a person’s hand axe might have carried social and even sexual cache. Were these the stone age equivalent of luxury smartphones? A signal that you could make, or acquire, the very best?
It’s easy to see the appeal of a handheld, portable tool that does a little bit of everything. These things look pretty nice just to hold.
Sound familiar?
The modern hand axe
It’s hard to beat the smartphone form factor for what it does. A pocketable, handheld window that can show you just about anything, connect you to just about anyone, play most of the music ever recorded, and perform a literally infinite number of other tasks.
There’s a lot of reasonable, well-founded concern about excessive smartphone use. But like… of course we’re addicted to these things. They’re with us all the time and do just about anything we ask them to do. In so many ways, our billions of smartphones are the modern, ubiquitous hand axe.
And it’s not hard to imagine the smartphone form factor lasting a very long time, even long after more advanced tools are available. Smart glasses, more advanced watches, brain chips… it’s hard to beat a nice little rectangle that’s pleasant to hold and does everything.
What do you think?
We previously argued that the traditional rounded rectangle luxury smartphone could be on its way out, in favor of folding phones or whatever the next thing is. But as long as the traditional rounded rectangle design dominates, there will always be room for more and more luxurious phones.
So what do you think? Have we reached peak luxury smartphone, or are rounded rectangles here to stay?
And what phone, for you, was the most luxurious?
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