Gadgets are getting too thin, again.
These past few weeks saw some of the latest victims of the seemingly unending drive towards making our devices as thin as possible, no matter the consequences. Samsung’s Galaxy S22 and S22 Plus — what will undoubtedly be some of the most popular Android phones of the year — are thinner than last year’s models and held back by disappointing battery life. The new Dell XPS 15 is “exceptionally thin and light” but barely lasts four hours on a charge and runs nearly as hot as the sun. And the OnePlus 10 Pro is a flagship smartphone that can somehow be snapped in half with your bare hands.
It seems that despite over a decade of chasing the thinnest, lightest phones and computers around to the detriment of battery life, cooling, and durability, companies still haven’t learned their lessons.
I prefer a few more millimeters if it means better heat dissipation, less fan noise, and better battery life. I’m not entirely sure if consumers in general prefer thinness over these other aspects, but I doubt they do.
There is a place for thin laptops. I have a Samsung Chromebook from work, and it is a great portable workhorse. With 4K screen, i5 processor, lots of RAM and storage (for Chrome OS) and having no fan makes it a really interesting device.
On the other hand, my personal machine is an XPS 15, but definitely not this thin one. It already has cooling issues with the discrete GPU, and I am not sure how it would perform with even less space to move air.
We should keep them separate. Each optimizing for their own superiority is helpful. But this hybrid “thin XPS” will neither be as portable nor as performant as the alternatives.
I guess women (without any pejorative connotations intended here) prefer thinner, and lighter models. Sure, I still use my haswell-based 17″ cheap acer as my backpack computer, but my wife can’t carry it for any extended period of time. Ergo, the race for the lighter and thinner.
I just hope this trend would apply for the phone sizes in general, and bring back the compact phones. But somehow it doesn’t.
A thin laptop with the performance of a thin client as everything you’d do on it is cloud based anyway.
I could never get it. Yes, scaling things down is good, to a point. Ultimately, tools have to remain in human scale. We’ve seen that when ultra small phones have increased in size to accommodate larger screens. I’d love this to happen to device thickness as well. It is not unusual to see watches that are 15mm thick and are made if stainless steel. Why not phones? It would be great to have a decent battery life, sturdy phone body and IO going beyond USB-C.
Same with laptops, if one needs a docking station simply to connect 2 monitors and an ethernet cable something has gone wrong.
ndrw,
I agree. I’d rather be able to get a week out of a phone for camping and traveling. This is not realistic using today’s tech, but the point is there are tradeoffs and the trend to thin is moving in the wrong direction for some of us.
Sturdy ? But what about the poor manufacturers who need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence so they can sell new phones every few years ?
I don’t feel that thin devices in general are a bad thing. As long as the device is ergonomic and does the job good. But i do agree that if the technology is not there yet then don’t do it.
Amusing comparison, if you dare to engage in some serious question :
Fragile OnePlus 10 Pro not sold in the US “because they are careless overweight”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idX-x5W5O30&t=6m57s
Sturdy Fairphone 4 not sold in the US “because… reason”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-ZAMsMO-7c&t=9m11s
What a gimmick.
Companies prefer thinner: less material, less packaging, less shipping costs, etc.
Also design becomes the main differentiator when the intrinsic technologies (CPU/GPU/Storage/OS) are the same among vendors.
And to do what ? Phone ? Take pictures for Instagram ?
Can we get rid of the stupid notches while we’re at it? Tech geeks used to consider displays defective if they came with a single dead pixel and here we are now, tolerating displays with freaking holes in them.
jbauer,
Here here! I hate the way everyone feels the need to copy the same thing. Everyone’s got a notch now. It’s to the point where it’s hard to find phones that have the features you want because they all strive to be the same. Be different, geez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbmgV7Oyp0w
i wonder if their is actually a real production process reason why it’s easier (thus cheaper) to produce such screens.
When people look at a phone at a store (or a website), they cannot evaluate battery life, cooling etc. Battery life estimates are infamously a joke and things like throttling aren’t even mentioned. People are more likely to buy based on what they see, and thin devices are more aesthetically pleasing.
But aside from that, a real-world advantage of thin phones and tablets is that you can put a case on them and they will still be of normal thickness. Either we like it or not, the days of phones being disposable are over, so people care about resale value, which means they tend to put cases on them.
When it comes to laptops, an advantage of thin laptops is they can fit in handbags or briefcases easier. I personally never understood “mainstream” laptops that were too small to be desktop replacements (15.4 inches or smaller) but too thick to be used as actual laptops (aka easily fit in a handbag or briefcase).
The real problem here is the “need” for high-end components on a tiny package. I mean, Dell stuck an i7 and RTX 3050 in a wedge-shaped laptop, and it turns out it runs hot? Who could ever anticipate that /s Which goes back to the software that creates that “need”. Which goes back to the decision about bloat in software, the overreliance on Javascripts and the system requirements in games…