Have We Reached Peak Smartphone?

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 572 Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Phones have been pretty boring for a long time. Don’t get us wrong—phones are still amazing little devices! It just feels like we haven’t seen any truly innovative phone designs or new standout features in a long while. This year’s phone looks and works a lot like last year’s phone. Your phone looks and works a lot like my phone. Have phones actually plateaued, leveled off, or chilled out? Is their transition from fetish object to commodity complete?

The perfectly fine boringness of phones gets thrown into focus every time a new handset is launched into the world. This week, we saw the debut of the newest Samsung Galaxy devices. WIRED staff writer (and our podcast's producer) Boone Ashworth joins us to talk about those new phones, and phones in general, and how breathtaking and bland they all are, all at once.

Show Notes

Read our roundup of everything Samsung announced at Galaxy Unpacked 2023, including three new Galaxy phones and five new laptops. If you want to preorder a Galaxy device, we have some buying advice for you. Last year’s model is also just great. Read Lauren’s story about safely buying a used phone.

Recommendations

Boone recommends Barbarian, which you can watch on HBO Max or rent elsewhere. Mike recommends Sichuan Gold hot sauce from Fly By Jing. Lauren recommends the HBO documentary Navalny.

Boone Ashworth can be found on Twitter @BooneAshworth. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike.
0:00.8	Lauren.
0:01.8	Mike, when is the last time you felt compelled to buy a brand new smartphone?
0:06.8	I think it was 2018.
0:09.9	So I thought it was about 17 years ago at this point.
0:12.7	Feels like it, yeah.
0:13.9	Why? What at that time made you want to buy a new one?
0:16.5	I had an iPhone 6 plus. It wouldn't hold a charge anymore.
0:20.2	It was like three years old at that point.
0:21.9	And I would charge it and it would die after about 90 minutes. So I was like, okay, I guess I have to buy a new phone. That was the only reason I really felt compelled to upgrade. Everything else about it was fine. And the features in the new phones that were coming out were just like not enticing. Well, a lot of people are feeling that way right now because smartphone sales are down,
0:41.9	like really down.
0:43.2	I think we may have reached peak smartphone.
0:45.9	Somewhere, Tim Cook just did 100 extra pushups and vowed to make it not so.
0:51.0	All right.
0:51.6	We're going to talk about exactly that.
0:53.2	Well, maybe not exactly that today. but we're going to talk about phones.
1:03.2	Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. And I'm Michael
1:08.6	Colori. I'm a senior editor at Wired. And we're joined today by
1:11.9	the excellent Boone Ashworth, who you normally know as the producer of this podcast, but who's also
1:18.2	a staff writer at Wired and had the pleasure of covering a big smartphone launch event this morning.
1:24.3	Boone, welcome to the mic. Hello. It's good to be over here facing this direction instead of the other wall. I have a feeling that after this, people in our review section of our podcast are going to say, Bring back Boon. Yeah. We want more Boone. Yeah. Boone Ashworth Encore. I'll be silencing all of those voices, de-platforming all of those commenters.
1:46.5	Boom, congratulations in your promotion.
	...

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