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or how i am just sick of seeing companies sacrifice features in lieu of thinness. obsidian says this takes 4 minutes to read

So today Apple unveiled yet another lot of boring iterative iPhones, yet one of them jumped out at me: the iPhone 17 Air. It is pretty much the thinnest iPhone ever created (if you ignore the massive camera bump). And as soon as I saw the image of one, I realized the future of this phone. It will be Bendgate 2.0, because there is no way something that thin can resist bending and everyday wear and tear. I am also wondering how good the battery of a phone this thin would be, and there is already speculation over the probably pathetic battery life that we will see whenever it launches. Apple claims that this phone has something like “whole day battery life” but do you really believe them? And I think the funniest thing after the stupid camera bump is how the phone looks like with its Magsafe battery pack thing. Like wow, we made a phone so thin that we had to sacrifice the battery life, but here is the battery pack that can extend your battery, only a smooth $100 dollars! And it makes the phone thicker which defeats the damn purpose of having a phone this thin in the first place! You can also just, buy the regular iPhone 17 and not deal with the battery too, but that doesn’t look fancy enough, I guess.

And I am left to wonder, does anyone even want this? More thin tech that can be crushed in a back pocket? More stupid thin phones that are impossible to take apart to replace the battery when it dies? Did we not learn how awful Macbooks were, because Apple had the obsession of thinness over practical usability? Like fine, new thin phone, who gives a shit, why not just give us thicker tech instead that had expandability, removable batteries, expandable storage instead?

I think this race towards thinness is because phones (and really tech in general at this point) have reached a plateau. Think about new innovation inside our phones, or how there really hasn't been any innovation for a while at this point. Like sure, we get new cameras on every smartphone refresh, better screens, more powerful phones but like what is the point of all this? Cameras have gotten so good on most phones that it is pretty much impossible to market them as a selling point, pretty much every phone has high refresh rate screens, even those bargain bin Motorolas have them at this point, and we have gotten to the point that we reuse last years processor on the refresh because absolutely no one notices the extra power, or it gets limited by locked down operating systems (like with iPadOS on Apple Silicon iPads). And no, AI is not an innovation, especially when it lies to you every time you ask it, and the fact that it takes shitbillion gallons of water and three gigafucks of electricity to serve that request.

And while sure, people go and say “wow! look at how thin it is!” when they look at a very thin phone, after 5 minutes the novelty wears out. Now you notice how you pretty much need a case now, which pretty much negates the thinness, then you notice that performance is probably being impacted because the phone is so thin that it can’t expel heat fast enough. You would probably notice how hard a phone this thin is to repair, to the point it starts to feel it was made with the point of being disposable.

If there is something I want to see again, it is the return of repairable, thicker tech. I want my phones to be thick and repairable, upgradable, and not locked down. I want phones from manufacturers that sell every single part of the phone as replacements so that anyone can fix their own phones whenever and if they break.