The new iPhone is exactly what nobody needs or asked for right now.
I think I’m done with the future… And I know that is a slightly inconvenient position to take when everyone around me is very excited about the newest, smartest, fastest, most technologically advanced thing humanity has managed to produce this week. But honestly? I am fucking exhausted.
We don’t necessarily want a better smartphone We want less smartphone.
I am exhausted by my phone.
I am exhausted by notifications. I am exhausted by Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, emails, news alerts, screen time reports telling me I spent six hours looking at my phone and then apparently expecting me to congratulate myself for reducing it by twelve minutes. I am exhausted by opening my phone to check one thing and resurfacing forty-five minutes later having watched a stranger clean their fridge…
And after years of being told that technology was going to make our lives easier, more efficient, more connected, I think a growing number of us are quietly asking a very different question: Can you please just leave us the fuck alone? And then Apple announces the new iPhone Duo, its first foldable IPhone, with a 7.6-inch internal display designed to give us more room to multitask, work, watch, create and generally do more things on one device.
The culture is moving backwareds whle the technology companies keep sprinting forwards.
And I understand why it’s impressive. It is impressive, and I want it. Why wouldn’t I, right? A giant screen in my pocket. Two apps side by side. More room to work. More room to watch. More room to… presumably never look away from my phone ever again. But do we, ACTUALLY, really, REEEALLY, want this? Because culturally, I don’t think we do.
The strange thing is that the culture is moving backwards while the technology companies keep sprinting forwards. And I’m starting to wonder whether they have completely misunderstood what we’re asking for. We don’t necessarily want a better smartphone. We want less smartphone. There is a huuuge difference.
I’m not asking for less technology because I hate technology. I’m asking for less because I like my life.
Somehow along the way, our phones stopped being tools and became environments. They became our alarm clocks, calendars, cameras, banks, offices, televisions, dating lives, shopping centres, newspapers, social lives and tiny little portals into everyone else’s existence. They are in our bedrooms when we wake up. They’re in our hands while we eat. They’re beside us while we work. They’re with us when we walk. They’re in our pockets at dinner. They’re charging next to our beds.
Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
And apparently the solution to this deeply “healthy arrangement’ is to make the screen bigger. I’m sorry, but… What the fuck are we doing? I’m not asking for less technology because I hate technology. I’m asking for less because I like my life. I want to walk somewhere without documenting it. I want to have dinner without half my brain wondering what notifications I’ve missed.
I don’t want technology to remember my life for me. I want to remember my own life.
I want to have a conversation without a device sitting between us, quietly recording, tracking, pinging and predicting. I want to be bored, actually bored. The kind of bored where your brain has to entertain itself. And this is where I think the tech industry has completely missed the cultural mood.
I don’t want a smarter life. I want a life where I can occasionally be stupidly, gloriously offline.
They keep asking: What else can we add? What else can AI do? What else can our watches hear? What else can our phones remember? What else can we automate? What else can we optimise? What else can we put on a screen? How about instead we ask: What can we take away?
So no, Apple. I don’t want your biggest screen. I don’t want another device that remembers more, hears more, tracks more, predicts more, or gives me another reason to stare at a screen.
I, actually, really, really, want less… Less fucking everything. And if that sounds anti-tech, maybe that’s the point. What if the most revolutionary thing Apple could build right now is a reason to put the fucking thing down.
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I didn’t write this, but it definitely resonated with me. Odd, considering tech has been my entire adult life…
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