Gadget hibernation, not death
DECEMBER 8TH, 2016 — POST 332
“Winter is coming for gadgets.” The words ring out in a recent piece by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times that claims in its headline “The Gadget Apocalypse Is Upon Us”. This is sentiment that one could have expected, especially almost a decade out from what Manjoo calls the “Thing That Does Everything”, the iPhone. It has generally been understood that the iPhone is a mass of excessive density, collapsing other technologies into it like a supermassive star (or black hole?). As Manjoo writes:
“The gadget age is over — and even if that’s a kind of progress, because software now fills many of our needs.”
Manjoo is lamenting the loss of the dedicated little do-hicky piece of hardware that is something you can hold in your hand, something that has a utility with clearly defined limits. The event that has surely sparked this line of thought this week is the purchase of Pebble by FitBit, a sale that was mostly about the fledging smartwatch company’s software (notably not about their smartwatch hardware). Beyond Pebble, however, Manjoo points to a personal experience buying a cheap knock-off action camera instead of a GoPro — a sentiment that if GoPro’s woes are anything to go on is shared by more than they would like.
There are plenty of counter examples to Manjoo’s proclamation of gadget death one can point to, none more persuasive than Snap Spectacles. But Ashley Carman of The Verge did a pretty good job of covering them. What these products show, most specifically Spectacles, is that there is actually an extreme hunger for gadgets born out of the same impotent nostalgia Manjoo is clearly suffering from — a nostalgia that pines for the days of old when you’d just press play on an iPod and hear music. It turns out that doing everything on a smartphone is just not that satisfying and everyone’s starting to realise it.
David Pierce of Wired spoke of his impressions of Spectacles during Wired’s Gadget Lab podcast a few weeks ago. One of the most powerful things about Spectacles as a product is the single-button action — press once: record 10 seconds; press three times: record 30 seconds; that’s it. In a climate of multitouch where no button (or location on a touchscreen) has just one function, there’s something refreshing is just imagining the reduction of mental load when interacting with technology. This is not to say that the image capture interaction loop is simpler with Spectacles than having to pull out your phone, launch Snapchat, then capture (though this is true) but something more fundamental. The certainty of interaction one gets with a physical button is seductive, when a single input type always equals a single output type.
The capture button on the Spectacles is dedicated — it does one thing. But that’s not the reason people are lining up blocks to buy $129-camera-in-glasses from a bright yellow vending machine. But it might have something to do with the fact the device itself only does one thing — one thing that would promise to make your interactions on the hottest social app ever hotter. Spectacles are dedicated, are frivolous, are fun. Bundle all these together and Spectacles are fundamentally luxurious. And, it turns out, we love luxury. You don’t need Spectacles to use Snapchat, just like you don’t need heated seats or electric windows in a car to get from A-B. But no one would turn them down if offered.
Interestingly, as we have become accustomed to turning $1000 into a magic machine of black glass and aluminium that does everything every year or so, we’ve deprived ourselves from a special kind of embodied experience humans can’t help but be drawn to. Like Manjoo, we all like to hold things, to wear things, to behold things. Even though we’ve all agreed that the smartest technology purchase is the smartphone, they are not exciting. Just as we all agreed buying a fridge makes a lot of sense, we know we have to have a smartphone but are rapidly learning the limited scope of joy its able to provide (I can’t recall the last time I delighted at the marvel of a fridge either).
Snap’s positioning with Spectacles took a few by surprise. According to the Wall Street Journal’s profile of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, the company is not in the social network or app business. They’re in the camera business. I suspect Spiegel is well aware of how all the physical technologies we allowed the smartphone to condense into software are primed to be spun out to be physically instantiated once more. It will start with certain “elites” — whether that be Spectacles for the social media slayer or $3000 audio players for those with expensive taste — but the trend is already being set for the rest of us. Gadgets aren’t dead. We’ve just passed the point of gadgets winter, of the smartphone’s maximum potency. But spring is coming. And spring is luxurious.
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