Tech’s cult of thinness needs to come to an end

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Gadgets are getting thinner.

Some of the latest victims of the seemingly endless drive towards making our devices as thin as possible were seen over the past few weeks. Some of the most popular phones of the year will be thinner than last year's models, and held back by disappointing battery life. The new Dell XPS 15 is extremely thin and light, but barely lasts four hours on a charge, and runs nearly as hot as the sun. The OnePlus 10 Pro is a flagship phone that can be snapped in half with your bare hands.

It seems that despite a decade of chasing the lightest phones and computers, companies still haven't learned their lessons.

The science is simple. If you put a bigger battery into your phone or laptop, you will get more battery life out of it. A bigger laptop has more space to keep it cool. It is harder to break a device in half if it is thicker.

One of the reasons why Apple's iPhones have smaller batteries than their flagship Android counterparts is because they are still competitive on battery life. The one with the larger battery pack will win if you take the same hardware and software to two different batteries.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales

The manufacturers are still trying to make the lightest device. Dynabook wants to be one of the lightest 14-inch laptops ever, but that weight has to come from somewhere.

It doesn't have to be this way. Lighter and thinner devices are good, but there is balance. Apple is one of the biggest worshippers at the altar of thinness.

For years, Apple has tried to slim down its laptops by either using thinner butterfly switches or excising ports in favor of an all-usb-c setup. It was trying to pack more powerful parts and bigger displays into its computers at the same time. The company's laptops were worse off for it.

The company caught on after removing the butterfly switches and then going even bigger and heavier with its redesign in 2021. Despite the fact that Apple's new Arm-based chips take up less space than its old Intel ones, the new MacBook Pro is almost 9 percent heavier and 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 Apple chose not to be thinner. It made a laptop that is a little thicker but also one of the best laptops we have ever used, with battery life and cooling that no other computer on the market can touch.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Take last year's iPhone 13 lineup. The thicker and heavier models in the new line of phones were due to Apple's decision to put in bigger batteries. It worked, and the iPhone 13 was a better device than the one it replaced. The latest phones from the company were made thinner but with worse battery life.

Tech's race to the bottom is a losing game. Even if you could make a laptop as thin as a few sheets of paper, the battery life would burn out quicker than a matchstick. The tradeoffs in the fragility of such a product would doom it if you could somehow solve the first two issues.

The cult of thinness in consumer tech needs to end so that the phones and computers of the future can move on to bigger and better things.