Moving way from screen
We have reached peak screen, now revolution is in the air, writes Farhad Manjoo
IN the 11 years since the iPhone made its debut, smartphones have subsumed just about every other gadget and altered every business, from news to retail to taxis to television. But now that smartphones have achieved dominance, revolution is again in the air.
Global smartphone sales are plateauing for a very obvious reason: Pretty much anyone who can afford one already has one, and increasingly there are questions about whether we are using our phones too much and too mindlessly.
ALTERNATIVE WAY
At Google’s and Apple’s recent developer conferences, executives took the stage to show how much more irresistible they were making our phones. Then each company unveiled something else: Software to help you use your phone a lot less.
There’s a reason tech companies are feeling this tension between making phones better and worrying they are already too addictive. We’ve hit what I call “peak screen”.
For much of the last decade, a technology industry ruled by smartphones has pursued a singular goal of completely conquering our eyes. It has given us phones with ever-bigger screens and phones with unbelievable cameras, not to mention virtual reality goggles and several attempts at camera-glasses.
Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.
This could be a nightmare; we may simply add these new devices to our screenaddled lives. But depending on how these technologies develop, a digital ecosystem that demands less of our eyes could be better for everyone — less immersive, less addictive, more conducive to multitasking, less socially awkward, and perhaps even a salve for our politics and social relations.
THE INVENTORS
Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don’t discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones.
If it works, it could change everything again. There are many ways that screens have become too dominant in our lives. The sooner we find something else, the better.
THE GLORIOUS SMALL-SCREEN FUTURE
There are two ways we may break our fevered addiction to screens.
First, we will need to try to use our phones more mindfully, which requires a combination of willpower and technology. Help is on the way. Screen Time, one of the new features in Apple’s next version of its mobile operating system, gives you valuable information about how much you are using your phone, and it can even block you from using apps that you deem unhealthy. But in addition to helping us resist phones, the tech industry will need to come up with other, less immersive ways to interact with digital world. Three technologies may help with this: voice assistants, of which Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant are the best, and Apple’s two innovations, AirPods and the Apple Watch.
All of these technologies share a common idea. Without big screens, they are far less immersive than a phone, allowing for quick digital hits: You can buy a movie ticket, add a task to a to-do list, glance at a text message or ask about the weather without going anywhere near your Irresistible Screen of Splendors.
If Apple could only improve Siri, its own voice assistant, the Watch and AirPods could combine to make something new: a mobile computer that is not tied to a huge screen, that lets you get stuff done on-thego without the danger of being sucked in.
Imagine if, instead of tapping endlessly on apps, you could just tell your AirPods, “Make me dinner reservations at 7” or “Check with my wife’s calendar to see when we can have a date night this week.”
Apple has never been scared of disrupting its own best inventions. By rethinking screens, it may have a chance to do that once more.