paperbits:

jayblanc:

paperbits:

whichlights:

Simply put, Phonebloks is the opposite of what it appears. Phonebloks makes an appeal to our love of order and simplicity, while actually being significantly more complex. Phonebloks tells us smartphones can cost less, while making each component within them cost more. Phonebloks says that we can upgrade our smartphones without being wasteful, while making it significantly more likely that we’ll have to throw away our phones because they’re broken. And so on.

Excellent, yes. 

Now stop fucking linking to this goddamn thing.

Said it before on this, I’ll say it again, Phonebloks is the concept of a designer who hasn’t even talked to an engineer about it.

All product designers and students should have to work front-line technical support for gadgets, so they can see how things get damaged in normal use.

If you think Apple builds their products out of solid machined slabs of aluminum for no reason, you’ve never seen what a 14-year-old can do to a notebook computer. And any malfunction, including a shattered screen, is blamed on the manufacturer. Who then ends up absorbing a huge amount of the cost of repair and replacement, in the name of customer service.

If you think Phoneblocks is a good idea, imagine a teenager coming up to the Genius bar, flinging a plastic baggie full of (what used to be) their phone at you, and loudly demanding that you fix this obviously defective product. Imagine an entire crowd of this, playing off each other, in the store full of people deciding whether to buy your product.

Have fun with that.