We are living in an interstitial period. In the early 1980s we entered an era of desktop computing that culminated in the dot-com crash – a financial bubble that we bolstered with Y2K consulting fees and hardware expenditures alongside irrational exuberance over Pets.com [1]. That last interstitial era, an era during which computers got smaller[2], weirder[3], thinner[4], and more powerful[5], ushered us, after a long period of boredom, into the mobile era in which we now exist. If you want to help innovate in the next decade, it’s time to admit that phones, like desktop PCs before them, are a dead end.
We create and then brush up against the edges of our creation every decade. The speed at which we improve – but not innovate – is increasing and so the difference between a 2007 iPhone and a modern Pixel [6] 3 is incredible. But what can the Pixel do that the original iPhone or Android phones can’t? Not much.
We are limited by the use cases afforded by our current technology. In 1903, a bike was a bike and could not fly. Until the Wright Brothers and others turned forward mechanical motion into lift were we able to lift off. In 2019 a phone is a phone and cannot truly interact with us as long as it remains a separate part of our bodies. Until someone looks beyond these limitations will we be able to take flight.
While I won’t posit on the future of mobile tech I will note that until we put our phones away and look at the world anew we will do nothing of note. We...