The End Of Stuff

Good article, and true for me as well.

Let me just say though, as a developer of a compass/GPS app for the iPhone/iPad/Android, and as a serious hiker, I do not take my Garmin GPS with me anymore. I bring paper maps and a compass for back-up, but I never use them. My iPhone is plenty good enough for me.

On the other hand, I'm also a serious enough photographer that I prefer an SLR to my iPhone camera, and even though we built a camera into our app, I never use it personally.

I have this analogy in mind where the modern-day smartphone is the equivalent of a technological swiss-knife. In 80% of all situations it is sufficient for the task at hand.

I don't use it often, but I keep a real GPS around for two reasons: it runs on AA batteries and doesn't need a cell tower. I actually bought it a couple months after being lost in a hurricane-stricken area. Even maps don't work well when all the street signs are blown down (or away). But I've been on enough back roads in the years since to know that I can't count on a phone GPS for maps.

I also carry a decent flashlight (Fenix LD01). I used to carry a weaker light (Arc AAA-P) but once I had to go from full daylight to a dark interior room with it in a hurry during a power outage and the little light was useless. A phone's screen or photo "flash" LED would have been even worse.

I still carry paper notebooks (Moleskine and others). I use Evernote and stuff for notes on my phone, but I still keep some more personal things on paper, in one place. I also can't sketch worth a darn on any of the phone sketchbook apps.

Dropbox is what eliminated USB thumb drives for me, not my phone. I still keep a couple in my bag, but mostly to boot from.

True enough. But for this to truly happen you need to have a device with a battery that you can feel confident will last all day with regular use.

"The end of stuff" seems rather hyperbolic. More like "the consolidation of gadgets I don't actually use that often".

The Swiss Army Knife analogy is telling: how much have sales of Swiss Army Knives affected sales of woodworking tools, kitchen cutlery, garden shears, fancy bottle-openers, etc?

I can certainly see smartphones supplanting special-purpose devices that have similar form-factors and UIs, such as hand-held GPSs. But devices that have different physical forms or interfaces will still retain their popularity for serious uses. For example, how many smartphones can be tripod-mounted? Anyone who spends hours typing large amounts of text on a laptop every day is unlikely to want to replace it with a smartphone (unless the benefits of increased portability so outweigh the inconvenient interface).

Don't get me wrong, smartphones are great, and increased versatility is cool, and having lots of gadgets in my pocket all at once is wonderful (I've carried the same Swiss Army Knife in my pocket since 1979), but there are times when I want buttons I can press without looking (like a stopwatch), or a device I can glance at unobtrusively without having to pick anything up or pull anything out of a pocket (like a wristwatch), or a compass I feel comfortable carrying in my hand while running through the woods.

One thing that bugged me tho. Why android? Symbian did that years before android. IPhone too. Even simple Nokia/SonyEricsson not-so-smart phones were able to do most of those listed tasks years before android. We realized that statement that 1-task gadgets/tools will sooner or latter die long time ago.

Edit: Spelling

Surprisingly, I meet a lot of people who still use wrist watches. It almost feels like a renaissance of the wrist watch to me.

Can't wait to get rid of stuff. Unfortunately, computers and phones also aren't immune to cluttering, though. In fact, it is even easier to amass virtual stuff.

I have fund it is almost impossible to clean out a computer manually.

The next step will be uncluttering computers by moving stuff to the cloud. The last clutter will consist of bookmarks.

Some things are cooler / more fun than others. Like, wearing a watch or using a real compass.

I have a notebook in which I write directions to a place before going there for the first time. Lame, I know... but every time I have a get a copilot, they end up looking through the book. I doubt they would have done the same if the directions were stored in a smartphone.

Cash is still king.

I like the idea of having less stuff in general, I think there was a pg essay on it a while back.

Temporarily moved back to my Dads place recently so I had to cut back down to only really having a room for my stuff, was a great opportunity to clear out a lot of stuff that I wasn't really using.

Strangely enough, I completely don't agree. Most of these items are available on my phone, but if I wanted to really use them I'd buy the real thing. For example, if I needed a GPS unit it'd be strapped to the bars of my bike, so it'd need to be durable, waterproof, operable with gloves- things my phone is not. The same applies in one fashion or another to almost every device on that list, particularly calculators and alarm clocks.