For sure, I feel the same. But I think part of the disconnect is around the word “need.” Because there is “need” as in “I will not survive without this thing, or my life will be more difficult and unpleasant without it” and then there is “need” in the marketing sense, the desire to buy a thing that is fun and interesting and exciting. The consumerism desire to fill the whole in your life with that new purchase that you hope will finally make you happy.

For the latter definition of “need,” smartphones used to do a good job of triggering it. Every year there was something new and a flashy about the latest batch of phones, some new must have feature. If you didn’t get the new phone, and your friends did, you’d feel like your missing out, like your lugging around some obsolete junk.

In the last few years (or more), new smartphones have just been modest performance upgrades, slightly better cameras, and that’s about it. The new iPhone 15 has an action button, neat. You don’t “need” to upgrade from your 12 because you don’t feel like your missing out on anything major, and your right.

It’s less about the form factor itself, and more about the lack of innovation. Apart from foldable, there hasn’t been something truly new and interesting is years. I think the idea here is, what if we (they) reimagined what a smartphone is, how you interact with it, what you do with it, and do that by making AI the center of the experience. I don’t know what that looks like, and I hope it’s more than “talk to your phone instead of touching it” because there is very little time during my day where I’d feel comfortable talking out loud to my phone, but it’s still an interesting idea, and there’s some smart people and big money that suggests this isn’t just a pipedream. Basically, it could be the first major innovation in how we compute on the go in a long time. And if they pull that off, you will “need” it.