Apple Ruined Smartphone Design, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: Every phone looks the same, some folks want to be cremated by water and the most likely nuclear bomb is a van.
Apple Sucked All The Color From Consumer Tech
Within the past few years, gadgets have, for better or worse, started to look all the same. This week Quartz technology editor Mike Murphy argues that that this is a bad thing. And it's all Apple's fault.
As it turns out, when you've become one of the world's most successful companies based on the design of your smartphone — and to a lesser degree your tablet and laptop designs — you're bound to get a few imitators.
Murphy correctly points out that Apple wasn't always like this. Their iPods and the iPhone 5C offered bursts of color to what was an otherwise monochrome company. But while Murphy points to the influence of former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts as a main driver of the shift of Apple towards a more pared-back, luxury good color pallet, I think there's other, maybe less intentional, factors at work here.
Sure, the late '90s and early '00s were a boomtime for inventive smartphone design. But, I think, this is partially because no one knew just what the heck to do with mobile phones at this point. The introduction of additional processing power beyond the ability to make phone calls and send and received text messages presented an awkward problem no one really knew how to solve. Heck, even mobile phone users themselves were still figuring out how to fit these things into their lives. Flash forward a decade after the initial iPhone was released, and it's safe to say that society has pretty much figured out the hardware uses for a mobile phone.
Which is to say: the main attraction for a smartphone is the screen. Instead of trying to design something of an accessory that looks cool, Apple chose to go functional, offering phones with larger displays and smaller bezels. Sure, lined up with the displays turned off every modern phone is going to look the same, but when the display is taking up, like, 97 percent of the surface area of a single side of your device there's not that much room for much else.
And with folks opting to use cases to add their own personal flair to their device, there's not that much more incentive for device companies to produce multiple color schemes for their devices.
This isn't to say that Murphy is wrong to say that device design isn't fun anymore. He's exactly correct. The technological demands have pared back what designers have to play with, and from a design diversity perspective, that's a huge bummer.
[Quartz]
The Death Care Industry Is Afraid Of Water Cremation
You would assume that, given the nature of death, those who work in the death care industry wouldn't be too worried about the rising popularity of an old way to dispose of our loved ones. But this week in the New Republic, Emily Atkin details a new rift forming in the world of laying folks to rest: Water cremation.
At a base level, dealing with dead bodies is a bit of an issue. Land is a finite resource, and if humanity's stay here on Earth is to be, presumably, infinite, then we can't just keep embalming and burying our dead. Cremation reduces the literal footprint of our dead, but its carbon footprint is massive. Water cremation, on the other hand, requires just water, pressure, heat and a little alkalinity to essentially dissolve a body's soft tissues. It's been around since the late 19th century.
It's a simple way to solve the logistical issues with our dead that doesn't involve toxic chemicals or fancy technology. Great right? Not for the casket-makers. That puts them out of a job. There's also religious interests who think they know best how folks should lay their loved ones to rest, and water cremation ain't it.
As a result, water cremation is legal in some states, but illegal in others. Sure, you can pump a body full of toxic chemicals, seal it in a box and bury it six feet under, but dissolving a body in water is apparently beyond the pale. If water cremation is the thing that will trigger a moral backslide in this country, then maybe we're already beyond saving.
The Most Likely Nuclear Attack On The US Is In A Van
Perhaps it's the current political climate we find ourselves in, but we seem to be fascinated by hypothetical tales of annihilation. Nearly a year ago, David Wallace-Wells published what he considered to be a worst-case scenario for climate change. It was extremely grim, and the rhetorical hook he used — what might happen if we literally do not change a single thing — was painted as maybe-too-alarmist by some climate scientists.
Now, New York Magazine has another doomsday scenario for you to chew over: a nuclear attack. Going off the assumption that there have been hundreds of instances where weapons-grade nuclear material has gone missing over the the years, that to construct an improvised nuclear device would be simple for a "sympathetic engineer" and that smuggling it into the US would be relatively easy — the magazine then details what would happen if one of these bombs was detonated in Times Square.
It is an undeniably gripping read. It is both worse than you think and not as bad as you might expect. Folks living in any of the outer boroughs or on the extremes of Manhattan would be relatively fine, while still hundreds of thousands near ground zero would most certainly perish.
