The history (and future) of technology form factors
And the hunt for a billion dollars
This is not a super-technical deep dive. But I’ve been thinking it for a long time.
It’s a piece about UX. About form factors; past and future. Think of it as a palate cleanser between deep-dives on concurrency, Metal, and job interviews.
Chill (⛄️).
Whoever cracks this is going to make a billion dollars. Legit. That’s 5.5 million years of Premium Membership to Jacob’s Tech Tavern. Perhaps a few more if you subscribe annually.
But, before we get there, a history lesson 🧑🏫
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Inception
In 2007, the iPhone was announced. Like ChatGPT 15 years later, or Netscape Navigator 13 years prior, it ushered in the next great technological era: Mobile. In one swoop*, consumers had access to:
Multi-touch capacitive screen
A desktop-class web browser
Cellular and Wi-Fi networking
GPS and location
Motion sensors
A decent photo and video camera
An App Store that made your device more valuable every day
And you got all this in a portable handheld device!
*two swoops if you pedantically point out that the App Store/GPS/video didn’t arrive ‘till 2008. I see you.
Early apps got nearly-free distribution on relatively crappy hardware. To-do lists, fart apps, and static PNGs were making tens of thousands of dollars*.
*It’s true. I once worked with a greybeard who paid his mortgage by shipping a calendar app in 2010 and getting untold thousands of paid downloads.
Heavy hitters like Facebook scrambled to stake a claim in this new land-grab. So Zuck did what he knew best, shipping an HTML5 app that ported the existing news feed from the web.
Nobody knew how to make the most of the new platform. Not Meta. Not Apple. Not even Instagram.
In 2010, this mobile-native new challenger wrote OpenGL shaders to filter photos and squeeze out value from the meagre early camera hardware, transforming your iDevice into a surface for creation as well as consumption.
Many of the big hitters you know and love to hate began in this early scramble: Uber. Snapchat. Instagram. WhatsApp. Tinder. Waze. Erm, Yik Yak.
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