Gadget ennui
I'm skipping Apple's WWDC keynote because my passion for gadgets is slipping away.
I will not watch Apple’s WWDC keynote this year.
You probably won’t either, because you’re a normal person who doesn’t stay up until 3am for two solid hours of product announcements. But this is a big deal for me. I loved them.
For me it’s not just about what’s announced, but what isn’t. It’s seeing the order of events, the emphasis placed on some things and not on others. Measuring up how the rumors compare to the reality, and making a mental note to upgrade or downgrade the reliability of a particular rumormonger. Seeing the which executives are given a chance to present and which aren’t.
All this is probably terribly boring to most people, but it’s the sort of thing I dissect like a royal watcher, looking behind the words for the signs of palace intrigue. And it’s not just Apple: I watch plenty of tech keynotes on livestream, ready to analyze not just the products on show but the way they’ve been presented.
And yet here I am, skipping one of Apple’s biggest events of the year for the first time in decades. It’s not a boycott, or something targeted towards Apple. It’s actually part of a wider malaise I’ve been feeling about tech. Quite simply: I don’t care anymore.
I’m having what I described to a friend as a crisis of faith in gadgets. Where once most of my idle web browsing time would be consumed by cycling through The Verge and Gizmodo, scouring the wider internet for leaks, bugging people in the industry for more information… I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about the specs of the iPhone 17 Air’s screen. I don’t care to look up the list of unannounced DJI drones that appeared on the FCC database. I just don’t care.
Maybe I’m going through the same process everyone else has gone through over the past few years, albeit a little later than most. Think back a decade or more and regular people — the wider public — were excited about new iPhones, not just hardcore gadget fans. But those days of wild innovation are over. We’ve reached a plateau, with each model bringing incremental updates that are increasingly hard to get excited about. There’s always going to be a hardcore few who are excited about them — I mean, I was in that group until fairly recently! — but you don’t see the sort of excitement for a new iPhone among the general public that you used to.
It’s not just smartphones, though. It feels like a lot of the other gadgets I’m interested in have hit a wall; all reaching a stage of diminishing returns.
One of my most recent passions is retro gaming handhelds, portable consoles from China filled with emulators that play classic games. These devices saw a rapid evolution: the first handhelds were only capable of emulating 2D games from the 1980s and 90s, but within a few years you could play PS2 games flawlessly on the go.
Ravi Hiranand
That jump was enabled by the adoption of powerful smartphone chips — and like smartphones, retro handhelds have hit a plateau. The difference is that in this case, it’s about the software, not hardware: there are no decent Xbox, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 emulators for Android, the operating system used by many popular retro gaming handhelds. And without that, there’s no reason to upgrade from my current device. I don’t need any more power or features because everything that’s possible to emulate now runs almost flawlessly on the Odin 2.
What about drones? I love drones! I bought the original DJI Mavic Pro eight years ago and it was life-changing. I’ve never been into photography, but being able to see the world from new perspectives and angles was addictive. I upgraded to the Mavic 3 a few years later, and that was incredible too: a much-improved camera sensor allowed for amazing night photography. After a few years of flying the first Mavic, it seemed like I'd already photographed the good spots in Hong Kong. Being able to shoot at night with the Mavic 3 was a real game-changer, something that made this hobby feel fresh and exciting all over again.
Well, last month the Mavic 4 was just announced, and… I mean, it’s better, sure. But none of it seems game-changing, not to someone like me, anyway. I’m sure it’ll take better shots, but it doesn’t unlock a whole new area of photography like the Mavic 3 did.
In the past, I’d be haunting the DJI Store, picking up the dummy model of the new Mavic, feeling how the new controller fits in my hands. I loved popping into shops with gadgets on display. I'd go through and pick up all the phones and tablets laid out on the store's tables, feeling the balance and weight distribution, eyeballing the way the components fit, running my fingers over the finishes. I’d try to imagine where they’d fit into my life, constantly trying to justify to myself why I should make room for this in my budget.
Truth is, budget might be a factor here. Money is tight right now, and maybe that’s part of my gadget ennui. Before, I’d be… well, you might call it wasteful, but I prefer to say that I liked to take chances on things, to buy devices that I didn’t necessarily need. That’s how I ended up with Sony’s flip-top Clié UX50 PDA, a sort of PalmPilot crossed with a micro-laptop; or the GoPro Hero9, an action camera for someone who, uh, doesn't do any action sports.
Okay, in the end, I didn’t really need or use those two devices; I should have saved my money. But on the other hand, they were inspiring in their own way. They allowed me to explore and discover other developments in tech, other strands of the industry that I wasn’t fully aware of. And, to be fair, some of the wild swings paid off. Like I said, I wasn't interested in photography before getting a drone. And I would never have seen myself getting into coding before buying the Raspberry Pi. I feel like those devices taught me new skills, and that only happened because I took a chance on them.
When I look around the gadget landscape now, I do see a handful of things that I might have dived into if I had the budget. Beepy is a hackable BlackBerry-like handset, exactly the sort of thing I’d sink too much time into. And I’ve had my eye on King Jim’s Pomera DM250 as a go-anywhere writing tool. Who knows, maybe one of those would have ignited a new spark and sent me down a new rabbit hole of devices to explore.
Or maybe I’m just getting older. Maybe, having sat through a rapid series of leaps, the more incremental pace of upgrades holds little excitement. Maybe seeing too many false dawns means I’m a bit more cynical about new devices, having seen early hype turn into dead ends too often. (I’m thinking of the four VR headsets I’ve bought and barely used.)
There is a certain irony in writing this now, because this week sees the release of the one tech product that I am extremely excited about: the Nintendo Switch 2.
That might be because the Switch 2 is as much a gaming product as it is a gadget, and I haven’t yet lost my love for games. At the same time, I've followed the Switch 2 the way I used to follow new smartphones and drones: I spent months scouring the internet for information and rumors, and when I get it the first thing I'll do is to look over every surface and corner, inspecting the fit and finish.
Maybe the passion is still there. It's just waiting for the right gadgets.
