‘Peak’ Smartphone Design: What We Can(not) Expect from the iPhone 15 and the Galaxy S24

Nevertheless, there is nothing normal about your smartphone shattering to bits after a single drop. It is a conscious choice on the part of the manufacturer - the hardware is fragile by design. It does not take cutting-edge technology to create a durable phone - just ask Nokia.

The same goes for battery life. Smartphone manufacturers have (collectively) agreed that good battery life is measured in hours, not days. It is perfectly feasible to design a smartphone with a week-long battery life, but nobody does it. Why?

Smartphone Design: What Manufacturers Value

In short, my view is that smartphones are stagnating because companies have decided to (marginally) improve upon a number of parameters that they deem important, while ignoring everything else in the process. This is where the concept of diminishing marginal utility comes in.

To put it simply, increased consumption leads to a reduction in the relative satisfaction gained from each additional unit being consumed. For example, if you are thirsty and chug a glass of water, you will derive a great deal of satisfaction from quenching your thirst. However, after the first glass, every subsequent sip will be less and less enjoyable. When you are on your third or fourth glass, it may well become unbearable.

This is what is happening with many aspects of smartphone design. Yes, blazing performance is nice and an impressive gigahertz count is indeed impressive, but there is only so much utility a user can derive from a immensely powerful chipset. At some point, many would sacrifice a nano-second of speed for a couple of minutes of battery life.

Luckily, the ‘bigger is better’ philosophy has been abandoned in some areas of smartphone design. For instance, there seems to be a consensus amongst manufacturers that anything more than a QHD resolution panel on a phone is wasteful. However, in many aspects, the big numbers craze is very much alive. The worst part - there is so much to be gained from putting an end to it

In order to elaborate, I will give a real-life example. For a long time, Apple was obsessed with making its products as slim and as light as possible, disregarding many of the tradeoffs that had to be made in the process. This eventually led to the iPhone 6 and one of the biggest scandals in smartphone history - ‘Bendgate’.

 

Naturally, Apple was quick to rectify the durability concerns by using stronger (and heavier) materials. It seems that weight is not the most important part of a smartphone, especially if it can fold like an origami.

Interestingly enough, the Cupertino company is actually adopting the opposite approach nowadays e.g. the iPhone 14 Pro is actually heavier and bulkier than its predecessor. Apple has acknowledged that there is a lot to be gained from abandoning the mania for thinness.

That is not to say that a handset should feel like a brick, but that there is a middle ground to be found in all areas of smartphone design. However, flagships are not seeking it.

Smartphone Design: What Consumers Want

Would you make your smartphone 20% less powerful, if that meant it could last a whole day without a problem? Would you sacrifice camera quality for a less prominent camera bump? These are all valid questions, and nobody is asking them. Worse still, no manufacturer is giving consumers the option to make the decision for themselves.

The reason why many are sick of the current ‘perfect smartphone’ formula and the lack of any alternatives to it is that all handsets compete in the same category. For the most part, the only real differences are (1) price point and (2) numbers. It would make so much sense to allow smartphone choice to come down to the tradeoff every individual user is willing to make, instead of the one the company deems adequate.

This would, partially, solve the problem of the seemingly stagnating smartphone form factor. After all, there are still many things that could be improved upon, but this cannot happen in the context of the constant competition for CPU cores, megapixels etc.

So what is the way forward? Only by realizing the limitations of the current status quo can any real progress be made. So long as the rules of the game remain the same, smartphone design is bound to appear derivative, because everyone will be trying to perfect the same formula in the same exact way.