The Phone Now Has a Hinge. Civilisation May Have Peaked.

There are moments in human history when you can feel civilisation advancing. The invention of the wheel was probably one. The steam engine was another. Antibiotics were definitely up there, as was electricity, sanitation and the ingenious discovery that if you put a kettle in every British kitchen, society becomes considerably less likely to collapse before 10am. And then, this week, Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first folding iPhone, which opens to reveal a 7.6-inch screen and, here in Britain, starts at a not inconsiderable £1,999.

And I find myself wondering whether this is progress, or whether we have finally run out of genuinely useful things to invent.

Because essentially, after nearly twenty years spent perfecting the smartphone into an increasingly thin, flat rectangle, somebody in California has walked into a meeting and said, “What if we put a hinge in it?” Presumably there was then a thoughtful silence while everyone stared at a whiteboard containing several words such as innovation, ecosystem and reimagined. And instead of somebody eventually saying, “Why?”, seventeen engineers stood up and started designing one.

This is where we have arrived. We have cured diseases, crossed oceans in hours, put humans on the Moon and developed cars capable of warning you that there is a vehicle in your blind spot while simultaneously heating your steering wheel. We can video-call somebody in Australia from a field in Wiltshire, assuming the field happens to be one of the three in Wiltshire containing a mobile signal. And now some of the most intelligent people on the planet are concentrating their efforts on making the telephone bend in the middle.

I suspect we may have peaked.

The Great Modern Problem: Things Which Were Already Fine

The trouble with technology today is that increasingly it seems less concerned with solving problems and more concerned with finding perfectly satisfactory things and interfering with them. There are objects around us which reached their final form decades ago, but nobody appears prepared to admit it. Somewhere, in a glass office building full of beanbags and ethically sourced coffee, there is always somebody convinced that the humble domestic object simply needs Bluetooth.

Take the light switch. For perhaps a century, the light switch was essentially perfect. You entered a room, noticed it was dark, pressed a small plastic object attached to the wall and the room became light. Total operating time: approximately half a second. Training required: none. Software subscription: none. Battery level: irrelevant. Internet connection: unnecessary. You could invite your grandmother into the house and, without watching a twelve-minute YouTube tutorial, she would have a reasonable chance of illuminating the lavatory.

But apparently this was unacceptable. Today you can buy a “smart lighting ecosystem”, which allows you to illuminate your kitchen using an app while sitting in your kitchen. This requires a Wi-Fi network, a hub, several expensive bulbs, an account, a password containing at least one capital letter, two numbers and an obscure punctuation mark, plus regular firmware updates and inevitably a moment every six months when the entire thing stops working and you find yourself standing in darkness rebooting the router because you wanted to see the fridge.

The old switch, meanwhile, is still sitting there on the wall, quietly wondering why everyone has lost their minds.

And this philosophy has spread throughout the house. We have smart kettles, smart ovens, smart doorbells, smart washing machines, smart thermostats, smart speakers and smart watches. There are refrigerators which can apparently tell you what is inside them, although since the door is two feet away and made specifically to open, I have never entirely understood the urgency. At some point we must surely acknowledge that the only object left in the house which isn’t smart is the person who bought all of them.

The Appification of Absolutely Everything

Apps were originally rather useful. You had a few of them on your phone. One told you the weather, one showed you your bank account, another allowed you to send photographs of the dog to people who had not specifically requested photographs of the dog, and somebody had invented one in which you threw cartoon birds at pigs. It was all perfectly harmless.

Then somebody decided that absolutely every interaction between a human being and an organisation should require an app. You cannot simply park a car anymore because that would be absurdly straightforward. Instead, you arrive at a car park, discover that the ticket machine has been removed and find a sign proudly announcing that parking is now “easier than ever”, which is one of those phrases that should immediately fill you with dread.

What follows is approximately twelve minutes standing in the rain downloading something called ParkGoPayEasy247, creating an account, entering your registration number, adding a debit card and attempting to establish whether you are parked in Zone 4821 or Zone 4812. Then the app sends you an email asking you to verify your email address, so you switch to email, find the verification message buried under three promotional offers, click the link and return to the parking app, which has naturally logged you out.

Eventually, having paid £3.40 to leave a car stationary for an hour, you receive a triumphant notification saying, “You’re all set!”

No. I was all set twelve minutes ago. I was in a car park. All I needed to do was leave the car there.

We have somehow used several billion pounds’ worth of telecommunications infrastructure, banking technology, satellites, encryption and cloud computing to make putting three coins into a metal box considerably more complicated. This is considered progress because the app has rounded corners and asks whether you would like to receive notifications.

The QR Code Has Much to Answer For

Restaurants have enthusiastically adopted the same philosophy. There was a time when you entered a restaurant, sat down and somebody handed you a menu. The menu was made of card. It required no charging, was largely impervious to poor mobile reception and could be passed between four people without anybody remembering their Apple ID.

Now you sit down and there is a small black-and-white square glued to the table. “Just scan the QR code for the menu,” says somebody brightly, as though they have relieved you of a dreadful burden.

Why? There are twelve tables. Surely printing twelve menus cannot represent such a catastrophic drain on the global economy that we must instead involve a telecommunications network.

So you get your phone out. Face ID doesn’t recognise you because you are wearing glasses, or because the sunlight is at the wrong angle, or perhaps because you look considerably more irritated than you did when you registered your face. Eventually the camera opens, you scan the code and Safari launches. A cookie banner immediately appears covering most of the screen and asks whether you consent to several hundred advertising partners analysing your lunch.

I am trying to order a sandwich.

Eventually the menu appears as a PDF designed for an A3 sheet of paper, meaning you spend the next five minutes zooming in, zooming out and accidentally selecting “Download PDF”. By the time you discover that the club sandwich is £14.95, your phone battery has lost six per cent and the people at the next table have already ordered because, irritatingly, they brought reading glasses.

Again, this is called progress.

Cars Have Joined In

Cars are perhaps the finest example of technology fixing things that nobody realised were broken. My first cars contained buttons, and buttons are wonderful things. If you were cold, you turned a knob marked with a blue section and a red section. If you wanted music, you pressed something marked RADIO. If the windscreen misted up, there was a button containing a small drawing of a windscreen with some wiggly lines on it. You didn’t need to understand any of this because somewhere in Germany or Japan an engineer had already done the understanding for you.

Modern cars frequently replace all this with a touchscreen. This looks magnificent in the showroom. The dashboard is beautifully uncluttered and the salesman moves elegantly between menus while explaining that the entire vehicle is now intuitive. Then, three weeks later, you are travelling at 70mph on the M4 in horizontal rain and decide you would like the temperature to be one degree warmer.

This now requires navigating through a submenu. Climate. Front. Temperature. Up. Except you’ve hit Seat Settings, and now the passenger seat is moving backwards while some entirely different menu has appeared asking whether you wish to adjust the ambient lighting.

Meanwhile the car itself is flashing a warning telling you to pay attention to the road because you have looked away for several seconds.

Which you did because the car removed the heater button.

The machine has effectively created a dangerous situation and then reprimanded you for participating in it. That is extremely modern.

And of course cars now have software updates. I am old enough to remember when you bought a car and it was considered finished. Nobody woke up one morning to discover their Ford Cortina was installing version 12.4.7, that some features might be temporarily unavailable and that under no circumstances should the ignition be switched off for the next forty-five minutes.

Even Weddings Aren’t Safe

Working at weddings gives you an excellent view of how enthusiastically technology can be inserted into occasions which managed perfectly well for several hundred years without it. There are online planning portals, wedding apps, digital seating plans, QR-code photo galleries, electronic guest books, shared playlists and occasionally enough WhatsApp groups to coordinate a medium-sized military operation.

Some of this is genuinely useful. Being able to share information quickly is enormously helpful, and no sensible person would really want to return to the days when every wedding detail had to be written on paper and entrusted to the Royal Mail. But there is still something rather pleasing about the parts of a wedding which remain resolutely analogue.

Someone walks into a room, somebody else plays some music, two people get married and everybody has a drink. No firmware update is required.

Indeed, one of the pleasures of playing live music is precisely that it cannot be completely automated. If the bride takes forty-three seconds longer to walk down the aisle than expected, we simply continue playing. If she arrives more quickly, we bring the music to an appropriate conclusion. Nobody needs to press “extend entrance music” in an app. There is no loading screen, nobody has to enter a password and a buffering symbol does not appear above the cello.

We look at what is happening and adapt accordingly. This apparently ancient technology is called being human and remains surprisingly effective.

And Now the Phone Folds

Which brings us back to Apple’s new telephone. I should say that I actually like Apple products. They are generally beautifully made, easy to use and, in the main, extremely good at what they do. My phone is one of the most useful things I own. It is a camera, diary, sat-nav, notebook, recording device, bank, library, weather station, newspaper, calculator and communications system, all contained in something that disappears into a trouser pocket.

Which rather raises the question of what else it actually needs to become.

Apparently the answer is a book.

The iPhone Duo folds open, giving you a much larger screen while remaining relatively compact when closed. Technologically it is undoubtedly impressive. Making screens bend reliably is not easy, and achieving it in something thin enough to carry around involves engineering considerably beyond my own capabilities, which currently struggle to put a screen protector on without trapping underneath it one microscopic particle of dust that I will then stare at for the next three years.

But at £1,999, I can’t escape the feeling that we are now innovating because innovation itself has become the product. The original iPhone was extraordinary because it fundamentally changed what a phone could do. This one is extraordinary because it changes shape. That isn’t quite the same thing.

The great problem faced by consumer technology companies is that they must unveil something new every year, even though the thing they made three years ago is already astonishingly good. The camera becomes slightly better, the processor slightly faster and the battery lasts slightly longer, but none of these improvements produces the sort of launch event where people gasp and applaud. Eventually somebody in marketing starts looking nervously around the office and suggests making it fold.

And suddenly everyone has something to talk about again.

We Have Forgotten the Joy of Finished Things

Perhaps that is what I increasingly miss: things which are finished. Not obsolete, not neglected and not old-fashioned, but simply complete because somebody eventually reached the point where there was very little left to improve.

A piano is finished in this sense. Yes, you tune it occasionally and repair it when necessary, but Steinway does not remotely install PianoOS 18 overnight and move middle C three inches to the left. A cello does not suddenly announce that certain strings will cease to function unless you accept revised terms and conditions. A dining table doesn’t require a monthly subscription to continue supporting plates and a book remains stubbornly the same book every time you open it.

There is something wonderfully reassuring about objects which have reached the end of their development because they already perform their intended purpose rather well. The knife and fork industry understands this. Nobody unveiled Fork Pro Max this week. There was no press conference announcing a revolutionary new four-tine architecture constructed from aerospace-grade stainless steel and designed to allow diners to experience peas like never before.

Nobody needs that because the fork has been sorted. It is done. We should congratulate it and move on.

The ordinary door handle is another excellent example. You push it down and the door opens. Nobody has ever stood outside the bathroom thinking that what this experience really requires is facial recognition and an accompanying app. Give modern technology another decade, however, and I fear this is precisely where we will end up. Your lavatory door will recognise you, greet you by name and then refuse to open because it cannot connect to the cloud.

Technology Is Brilliant — Until It Starts Making Work

None of this is an argument against technology. Quite the opposite. Modern technology is extraordinary. I can drive almost anywhere in Britain and know precisely where I am. I can carry thousands of pieces of music on a device smaller than a paperback, photograph something and send it across the world in seconds, work from a café, manage a business from a phone and communicate in ways that would have seemed like science fiction when I was at school.

The problem isn’t technology itself. The problem is our inability to recognise when technology has actually completed the job. Once something works, we seem psychologically incapable of leaving it alone, perhaps because an economic system built around selling new things cannot survive for very long if everybody looks at the old thing and says, “Actually, this is fine.”

So the simple thermostat becomes a smart thermostat. The doorbell becomes a video surveillance system. The television becomes a computer that occasionally shows television. The fridge gets Wi-Fi, the lightbulb needs an account, the restaurant menu becomes a website and the car park becomes an IT project. We haven’t necessarily improved the underlying experience; we have simply surrounded it with more technology and then congratulated ourselves on the sophistication of the result.

There is an important distinction here between technology which removes difficulty and technology which merely relocates it. The washing machine was good progress because it saved hours of physical labour. Sat-nav was good progress because it ended generations of married couples having blazing arguments over a road atlas somewhere outside Birmingham. Contactless payment is excellent because buying coffee now takes approximately four seconds. These are technologies that make life demonstrably simpler.

Requiring me to download an app to switch on a lamp is not progress. It is a practical joke involving Bluetooth.

Perhaps the Next Great Innovation Is Knowing When to Stop

Maybe the genuinely revolutionary technological breakthrough of the next decade will not be inventing more things but learning when to stop adding things to those we already have. There ought to be a point at which an engineer is allowed to put down the screwdriver, step backwards and say, “That’s finished.”

Make the phone better, certainly. Make the battery last longer. Make it survive being dropped onto a stone floor from exactly the height of a trouser pocket. Improve the camera. Give me mobile reception in those parts of rural Britain where radio waves apparently still require planning permission. Make the charging cable last longer than approximately seven minutes before acquiring that peculiar grey bend beside the plug.

But when all that has been achieved, perhaps we can simply enjoy the fact that an object works.

A telephone does not necessarily need to transform into a tablet like something Optimus Prime might carry around to check his emails. My washing machine does not need to message me. My fridge does not need a personality. My lightbulbs need not know my location and my car should not require three screen presses to turn off a heated seat.

There are already quite enough things in modern life demanding passwords, updates, verification codes and permission to send notifications. Sometimes it is rather nice to encounter an object which merely does the thing it was designed to do.

Of course, millions of people will buy the folding iPhone. Many will love it, and they may well be right. In eighteen months’ time I shall probably see enough of them in cafés to discover that the folding screen is actually extremely useful. Somebody will open one beside me, effortlessly display two apps at once and demonstrate some fiendishly clever feature that suddenly makes my normal iPhone look like something Alexander Graham Bell might have rejected for being too primitive.

I shall then start wondering whether I need one.

And that, of course, is how they get you.

The clever bastards.