The Phone Is Not a Computer

Context

Apple designed the iPhone around three main use cases: communication, media consumption, and web browsing. Steve Jobs was explicit about this during his 2007 original iPhone announcement, teasing “three revolutionary products”, before delivering the punchline: “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator … Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device!”.1

So from a product design perspective, the iPhone was the very popular iPod music player upgraded with phone and internet capabilities. This turned out to be a winning combination. It didn’t take long for the iPhone to completely take over our lives, unseating the personal computer to become our most used device today.

Problem

1960s researchers designed the personal computer as a tool that amplifies human cognition.2 By that standard, the phone is still not a computer. It doesn’t help us think better.

In fact, the phone never evolved beyond its first three use cases. Nearly two decades after the initial launch, we still use the phone mainly to communicate, consume media, and browse the web. These activities are naturally more focused on the external world, making it harder for us to concentrate on our own thoughts.

Ultimately, the phone pulled us away from the personal computer without taking over its responsiblity to extend our minds. And when a device captures our attention without enhancing our thinking, it actively degrades our cognitive capacities. This, for me, is the defining software design problem of our generation.

Analysis

Imagine the computer as digital space that allows us to offload some of our thinking. Now it becomes clear that there is a big problem with the phone user interface. There isn’t any space for us to think!

On the personal computer, we had the freedom to place files anywhere on the desktop and inside folders. This allowed us to use the space to collect digital artifacts like text, images, audio, and video. In the early days of personal computing, files were the main way people created and shared media, so it’s not an overstatement to say that the computer user interface was designed to help us represent our thoughts and captured experiences.

On the phone, only app icons and widgets are allowed on the home screen. Here’s some historical context behind this limitation. By the early 2000s, Apple had found that people struggled to learn how to use the file system, but had no trouble picking up multimedia apps like Mail and iTunes. This led Apple to believe that apps should be the primary interface for the computer, with the file system abstracted away behind apps.3 So when it came time to design the iPhone user interface, Apple took away the file system completely, and made the home screen a simple grid of apps.

There’s no denying that the file system was outdated by this point. It was a far better user experience to interact with rich objects like songs compared to managing files like MP3s. But the lesson here shouldn’t have been that apps are inherently more intuitive, but that interfaces that present information as tangible, context-rich objects are easier to use.

In fact, as we have learned over the last couple of decades, an over-reliance on one-off apps can lead to a less coherent user experience overall due to inconsistencies and poor interoperability across the system. And without the ability to organize media in a flexible way, we can’t use the phone to offload what’s in our heads. We can only fill the space with the outside world, leaving us with little room for ourselves.

Form

The phone needs an entirely new kind of computing environment that we can use to think. Such an environment would give us the freedom to lay out objects in space, combining the flexible structure of the file system with the rich interactivity of media objects. This environment would blur the lines between what feels like system and what feels like app, as the primitive expressions and the means of combination would be the same for both.4 With these mechanisms made directly available to the end user, the phone would finally become a computer that we can use to express our ideas in computational form.

Immediately after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he announced that they were removing the word “Computer” from “Apple Computer”. This was a sliding doors moment because the phone never became a computer. Maybe we can reintroduce the phone to the word that slipped away, so that we may think different, once again.

References

Footnotes

  1. This quote is from a YouTube video of the original iPhone announcement in 2007. ↩

  2. See Alan Kay’s The Early History of Smalltalk for a detailed history lesson on the early days of the personal computer. ↩

  3. Here is a YouTube video of Steve Jobs discussing the file system in 2005. ↩

  4. The phrases “primitive expressions” and “means of combination” are from SICP, but I first came across them in this tweet by @yoshikischmitz. ↩