The All-in-One Device Vs Digital Focus
There is a general trend of convergence in the tech’ world — more functionality is better — but how much has this convenience affected how we get things done?
In 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. This moment has gone down in twenty-first-century tech’ lore as one of the most successful product introductions in history. Jobs stood on stage and told his audience that ‘today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.’ After toying with his audience for a moment, he came to his crescendo: ‘These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone’.
The non-phone functionality of the iPhone (and the Android phones that followed) was its superpower. The iPhone became a Swiss army knife, leading Matt Devost to write a blog post in 2009 entitled ‘23 devices my iPhone has replaced’. Among other things, he listed his camera, his Kindle, his radio, his travel alarm clock and his compass as being ousted by his iPhone. Fast forward over a decade and each year, Apple executives announce the latest, greatest iPhone. And each year, we get the obligatory feature summary slide as the phone and its software obtains new functionality.
The real revolution of the smartphone was replacing physical buttons whose functions were set at the factory with an infinite canvas of possibility. A slab of metal and glass with huge compute power could become anything from a high-powered camera to a dictaphone or a GPS tracker to an artist tablet. And with the phone’s increase in processing performance, it meant its computing power could be repurposed to other, more varied, functions. Rinse and repeat.
There’s a trade off, though. As the phone and tablet ventured into new territory — seeking new functions, their famous simplicity and ease of use is lost. In 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that ‘You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user’. The following year, aiming a swipe at Microsoft’s increasingly popular Surface range of tablet computers, Cook said that ‘The competition is different…they are confused’. Apple, he said, would attempt to stay focused. But with the great performance increases of Apple’s processing chips each year and pressure to enter new and potentially lucrative markets, Apple’s devices will inevitably gobble up more functionality. But at what cost?
I have been reflecting on how tech’ is shaping, rather than enabling, my life (see Nicholas Carr’s work on how our tech’ is literally changing how our brains think). There has been a trend in recent years towards such reflections, driven in part by Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World by Michael Harris. These books effectively encourage time away from screens to give us time to reconnect with the world around us and ourselves. In other words, we need to reduce the noise.
But what if we can’t fully disconnect? What if the world won’t allow everyone the privilege of being able to take some time, literally or metaphorically, in the woods? What if we want to embrace some of these gains? I think this is where focus comes in.
Some case studies of this in action. A couple of months ago, I stopped using my Apple Watch. I found it useful to track my runs, but found little use for its other features. I was wearing it in anticipation of going for a run and found the health metrics interesting and perhaps useful for the future. The tradeoff was a watch that is not aesthetically pleasing, would require charging each day and would potentially distract me from what I was doing. After some digging around, I replaced the Apple Watch with a Withings ScanWatch and a Coros Pace 2 running watch. I had to accept that the Apple Watch could never live up to the standards of the Coros watch for running metrics, nor the ScanWatch on mere aesthetics. The two devices (the cost of which added up to an Apple Watch) allowed me to do what I needed, removing from my life those functions that were distractions.
Liberated (perhaps too strong a term!), I wondered if I could pull off this same trick in other areas of my life. I have used an iPad and Apple Pencil since the latter was first released in late 2015, but I’d used the tablet with a paper-feel screen cover to make it feel more like a pen and paper. I also used the iPad to read ebooks, but found that my reading progress was slowing due to distractions (hello, internet!) and that the LCD backlight was causing me some discomfort. I decided to try out a Kindle and was delighted with how it felt to use: the battery life was fabulous and I could read in bright or low light with no glare from the screen or discomfort. I started doing some digging into e-ink tablets to see if this same tech’ might allow me to make digital notes instead of the Apple Pencil — acting as a sort of half way house between paper and the iPad. After watching the wonderful work of Kit Betts-Masters on YouTube, I decided to pull the trigger on a Boox Note Air 2. So far, it’s clear that it isn’t an iPad. It has limitations, but those limitations have allowed me to stay focused on reading and getting my work done.
I appreciate all of the above is born out of privilege, but let’s reflect on how far we’ve come. Our mobile devices freed us from many different gadgets and tools, all of which required effort to learn, manage and maintain. These powerful new devices have empowered people and produced massive revenue for companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google. However, with each step closer to the multipurpose device, we lose something integral from the original: from the way the Apple Pencil changes the tactile experience of writing, to the ways that Apple Watch changes how we think about individual style or fashion. We need to reflect carefully on the second-order effects of multi-purpose technology. What do you want a piece of tech’ to do? What does this sort of tech’ take away or alter? How will it change things in ways we were not seeking?
To return to a Steve Jobs-ism, this time from 1990, computers were described as a ‘bicycle for the mind’. The language of tools sowed the seeds for the challenges we’re seeing today: on the one hand, more tools, more functionality is better. On the other, those tools might not be the best at the job or they might not be what you needed in the first place. This will be something we need to consider with the development of generative AI: Instead of rejecting technology’s role in our lives or embracing it uncritically, we need to consider what we want it to achieve and how it will have impacts on other aspects of our lives. Without such reflection, the tools we invent will slowly change the tasks for which they were designed in the first place.
