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A socialist iPhone?

Yes, yes, yes, new iPhone, new IOS, new stuff, cheap, expensive, blah blah blah. Nobody needs to tell you that your phone is obsolete about an hour and a half after you buy it, and nobody needs to tell you that your old phones either build up in our house (I can put my hands [...]

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Yes, yes, yes, new iPhone, new IOS, new stuff, cheap, expensive, blah blah blah.

Nobody needs to tell you that your phone is obsolete about an hour and a half after you buy it, and nobody needs to tell you that your old phones either build up in our house (I can put my hands on two old phones without leaving my desk) or join in a surging tide of electronic crap either building up in the waste stream or being shipped to developing countries, where the poorly paid risk exposure to chemicals and other dangers to mine valuable metals from the mountain of junk.

These dudes at phonebloks.com have figured out a way around that.


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The idea is simple. Various manufacturers cooperate in a Lego-style model of phones built of separate blocks: a camera block, a memory block, a battery block, a screen block, all fitting into a basic grid base. You design your own phone -- choosing your own components by Apple or Samsung or Nokia or Motorola or whomever. It's assembled, and there you have it. New, faster chip comes out? You replace that, not the whole thing. If you want to.

Okay. I'll just wait while you stop laughing. Didn't get past "various manufacturers cooperate," did you? Me neither. It's a lovely idea -- just like unbundled cable programming choices and the valuable and cheap automatic door locks without the unreliable and expensive automatic windows on your car. Or like cars that get the highest possible MPG.

I love this idea -- but for it to work so many companies have to choose to make a reasonable profit delivering a good and long-lasting product according to the choices of their customers instead of an enormous profit delivering a good but short-lived produce according to their own models for profit maximization that it's a borderline nonstarter.

I mean, share the video, yell as loud as you can, try to get manufacturers to start designing electronics that last longer than their packaging. I'm for it, and I'm with you.

But I can't say I'm optimistic.

 

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

More by Scott Huler