State of Hardware Pt. 1

Michelle Santiago Cortés explores the state of hardware in a two-part series. You’re reading part one.

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We will eventually look back on 2023 as a pivotal year for hardware. Cell phones have been around for over 50 years and the first iPhone went to market in 2007. Since that time, the worlds of entertainment, news, retail, and social media have turned into mobile-first enterprises, anchored to our pockets by that rectangular slab of metal and glass. Now, the “builders” are getting anxious and Silicon Valley is getting hard for ware again. 

The world works and looks the way it does because of the hardware that inhabits it. Hardware changes the number of electrical outlets we have in our homes and the shape of their holes. Hardware determines the size of our backpacks and affects which muscles and joints begin to hurt over time. If the self-appointed heralds of the future are serious about pushing the metaverse and mainstreaming artificially intelligent tools, both software-first initiatives, they will have to envision complementary hardware cultures that can compel the average consumer to adapt and adopt. Consumer trends are already pointing to a hunger for adventures beyond desktop and mobile. This year, Yamaha went back to producing its iconic 2001 5-disc CD changer and secondhand photography equipment retailers told Dazed about the spiking interest in digital point-and-shoots. Eager investors and tech companies have every reason to race to visualize what their brave new worlds of corresponding hardware will look like. 

“I've never seen this many folks swinging at hardware at the same time,” says Reggie James, founder of new media platform, Eternal. “And also, an entirely new sort of software culture that it's attached to.” New software begets new hardware. James looks to augmented reality (AR) devices like Meta’s Oculus and the Sol Reader VR headset for book-reading, as examples of what that might look like: “They’re not necessarily wedded to the form factor of a mobile device or your typical desktop laptop.” In fact, most of the devices asking consumers to step away from mobile phones are forms of wearable tech, which pose additional challenges in terms of how we dress and even think of our bodies. 

Tyler Mincey, creative technologist and product designer, shared a similar observation. “It’s a big shift,” he tells me over the phone, “people are really starting to have these product and computing experiences that live outside of the universe of mobile devices.” Mincey is also a co-founder and general partner of Baukunst, a collective whose inaugural fund is committed to leading pre-seed investments in companies “at the frontiers of technology and design.” Among these investments one will find several startups working in the hardware or hardware manufacturing space like Solidworks, Tempo Automation, Vention, and Desktop Metal.

However, there is no talking about post-mobile hardware without mentioning Humane’s Ai Pin. After its November 2023 pre-sale went live, Wired called the pin a “$700 smartphone alternative.” The Humane Pin is thinner than a gummy bear and housed in three possible colorways of High Strength Aluminum. Most importantly, it runs on Cosmos, an operating system for “the AI era.” It projects its visual interface onto your palm and you control it through hand gestures like tilting your hand or pinching your fingers. The pin takes photos, sends messages, and acts as a virtual assistant powered by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. On top of the $699 for the metal, users also have to pay $24 a month for unlimited data, talk, and texts. While only a few millimeters thick, it’s otherwise about the same size and shape as an Airpod case and it sort of looks a lot like one too. As the name suggests, this pin is meant to be worn on your shirt or blouse, although I imagine it would struggle with a slinky blouse and most kinds of subversive basics. (God forbid you go sheer.)

If hardware demands are any indication, all signs do in fact point to a consumer interest in experiences that de-center the phone and the computer. From the steady 17-year rise of vinyl to Kpop’s reliable CD-sales, music has always been able to pull people away from their demanding software interfaces. For want of good time spent away from the screen and its notifications, people are willing to pay for devices that enhance their music-listening experiences and divorce some of their beloved music from the precarities of streaming. 

It’s true, and perhaps limiting in the long term, that most popular audio hardware is synonymous with older media like CD’s, vinyl LP’s or cassettes. When it comes to imagining or creating a hardware culture that is not anchored by mobile or desktop devices, we tend to default towards the nostalgic, in the case of old music media, or the futuristic, like the Ai Pin. It’s like there is no hardware for the infinite present. 

While Mincey finds hope in companies like Syng and its alien-esque speakers, he admits that nostalgia and even futurism are much easier sells than the present. But he knows people are trying: “It’s more of a philosophical conversation or a train of thought that I see existing in the product design world,” Mincey observes. “But the exact commercial product implementations of these ideas haven’t totally crystallized yet.” In other words, designers and creators know there are new paths to forge beyond the nostalgic or futuristic, but hardware that responds to present-day needs and desires is still a work in progress. One possible barrier, might be a lack of funding attributable to VC’s aversion to hardware projects.

I remember when I first laid eyes on Teenage Engineering’s OB-4 Magic Radio. I was on the market for a new speaker: something I can move around the house, perhaps take to the beach. Something that’s stylish and says something about “me” by aligning me with makers I didn’t totally despise. I liked the playful design–a Bluetooth speaker that also plays FM radio and has very minimal remixing capabilities. Features that don’t make much sense as a group but would seem fun to play around with. More than anything I loved the fact that it would feel like an intentional addition to my modest collection of gadgets. A device built with repairability and whimsy in mind, that could wrest some of my streaming time away from the Spotify interface and my MacBook’s speakers. In other words, a device that helps me live according to my wants and values. 

The $646 price tag kept me from pulling the trigger on the OB-4, some might say luckily. Because I then started hearing the brand name being thrown around in the same way we talk about Koss’s Porta Pro headphones–a cool product turned status symbol that in turn, now offers a hollowed out version of its original values. James says it more succinctly: “It’s the most gorgeous paperweight” for people that “want to signal that they're creative and have a Teenage Engineering product, but not because they're using it.”

As gadgets are made to be more mobile and more wearable, they move to becoming a part of our presentation. These aren’t just things we use, these are things that represent us. To be aware of how hardware can be a design object or even a fashion item, is to be aware of “what that says about you, what it’s expressing about you, the communities that you're a part of,” according Mincey. In the case of a product like USB Club, “it’s not just the device,” Mincey adds, “what you’re really buying into is a community and sometimes a media distribution platform.” It’s extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, for a product to come to market without becoming hollow in some way, even if its early backers resemble a community with shared values. 

We’re also seeing regular household items incorporate the language of advanced hardware into their marketing materials. James says the longtime focus on, if not primacy of, software has led us to an inflection point or a turn to hardware. Droplette, the world’s “first smart skincare” is a device that turns serum capsules into a micromist that claims to deliver products in a more absorbable and effective way. Droplette is self-described as a “smart” product backed by research from NASA, MIT, and the US Army. Droplette is a tech startup that manufactures skincare devices with corresponding apps, but there is nothing computerized or software-driven about them (at least for now). But the product’s mere proximity to hardware works to further legitimize its claims of efficacy.

Similarly, Weber Workshops is a coffee brand and maker of “precision coffee tools,” gaining a name for itself among tech bros and coffee snobs alike. The brand’s about page is quick to inform the reader that founder Douglas Weber was an original member of Apple’s iPod product design team, which gives Weber an “extensive patent portfolio, dozens of strategic vendor relationships, and several core technologies that Apple uses throughout its product line to this day.” In other words, Weber Workshops sells coffee grinders with the halo effect of Apple’s signature suite of products.

When I asked James what a hardware culture that responds to the present rather than selling us a version of the past or the future might look like, he almost drew a blank. There is no talking about the status quo of hardware without talking about Apple. James explained that everything is so governed by Apple as an aesthetic, “that if you try to be too present, you're going to look like a bad version of what Apple would do and no one wants to look like a bad version of what Apple would do.” 

Hardware gives tech companies access to our physical spaces–from the bed to the toilet–their stories and ideologies are ever-present. It de-emphasizes local storage in favor of cloud storage, giving an added dimension of meaning to its choice of rounded edges and white casing. The shiny aluminum finishes propose a seamless and frictionless world with no wires or buttons, where software developers have carte-blanche in designing an interface. Apple’s version of the future-turned-present has always alienated its users from their hardware and after decades of dominating hardware culture, it’s starting to change as new generations of users and makers get their hands dirty.

Part 2 of this series will run on December 29th.