Few times I’ve been really excited by hardware to the point that I felt like I saw the future with my own eyes. (Note: This is strictly based on my own personal experience and not saying these are the pinnacle moments of technology.)
These were:
The launch of the Nokia 3210, finally realizing that everyone will eventually have a phone in their pocket. It was just the right size: you can actually fit it in your pocket being the first mass market phone with an internal antenna. The design was just expressive and curvy enough to warrant style, reminiscent of other devices at the time like the Walkman and the G-Shock, and yet it was robust and sleek. It might not have had the apps we think of today, but it made T-9 as a typing mechanism that changed communications behavior and ushered in SMS to the mass market. This was also my first cellphone. I still get a very nostalgic feeling when I see an image of the 3210. Being in a Nokia store in the early 2000s felt like being at a sports car dealership; the marketing met the product, and the experience elevated the brand.
The iPhone 3GS, arguably the first fully-fledged version of the iPhone. This was met with lukewarm reception but this was the first iPhone with things we consider basic features now like cut, copy, and paste functionality, MMS support, and video recording. Its predecessor the iPhone 3G was the first iPhone to have GPS and it was released alongside the App Store. By the time 3GS came out, it finally felt like this was what a smartphone really ought to be: have access to 3rd party developer applications which can integrate the phone’s native features making it have a natural synergy between software and hardware. The iPhone 5 is a work of art from a form basis, but the 3GS was the first phone to really push Apple’s domino into smartphone dominance.
Being inside a Tesla Model X for the first time was an experience. The falcon wings opening gloriously, the large display at the center console with a futuristic interface unlike anything I’ve seen before, the smoothness of the ride. It wasn’t perfect: it was raining and water went in the car a lot when the doors were open. The interior felt lackluster in comparison to everything else. But seeing it on Autopilot in the highway that felt like it was gliding on pavement was something else. All of a sudden, the future in Minority Report where all cars were self-driving felt like it was inevitably near and not something that was still a century away. We’re still waiting for that future, but it’s only a matter of time.
There’s a common pattern to these devices:
they’re used everyday,
they’re a glimpse into what the future can be, and
there’s a harmony with the hardware & the software.
Seeing the demo of Meta Orion glasses, I felt that same feeling. Obviously I haven’t seen or used one in person but instantly I wanted to see all the videos for it. It’s not close to being ready in the market and that may still be a few years away, but I love the bet (which is now more than a decade-long) that Zuck is taking on with it. It’s both strategic but also fits well with their ethos:
Form factor still matters.
Maybe Google Glasses were onto something even if they were really really, but they looked utterly geeky and there was no real application for it. Meta’s bet is that being able to wear glasses everyday as if they’re just a part of one’s natural way of life is the real differentiator. They leverage their Ray Ban partnership and understand that to make something mass market, it ought to feel cool, just like the 3210, the iPhone, and the Model X. Granted it still looks on the thick side, but nowhere close to any other AR device. And time will only make these smaller thanks to Moore’s Law. Making the compute unit external is genius so as to not put everything on the device itself allowing it to still be what it actually is: a pair of glasses.
They can be used everyday by everyone.
This is what the Vision Pro and Snap Spectacles are missing. Fantastic devices with fantastic technology. And they can very well also be used everyday—except they’re not designed to be ubiquitous. The Orion feels like it can seamlessly blend in someone’s life, not something to take you out of it. It was genius the move the compute out of the device itself. Sure you may still need to carry it around, but it’s so much better than having all of that on your actual head.
If there’s something Meta knows how to do, it’s create products that are used everyday, multiple times a day, and maybe most importantly, be able to use it with others. Meta does not do any single purpose products—everything is designed to use and keep you in the network.
It’s about hardware and software.
Really cool to see Meta work on something ambitious in hardware the same time they’re investing heavily in Llama, their family of large language models. Zuck has been very outspoken about being overly reliant on the smartphone manufacturer (and they’ve even attempted creating one of their own). It’s clear they want to move away from this and set their own fate. While imperfect, seeing the AR glasses work with AI by suggesting a smoothie to make based on the ingredients one is looking at is pretty amazing. You can extrapolate how useful this can be, with applications we’ve never even thought of before because it’s a totally new interface. Here, eye tracking and body movement interpreted by electromyography is how you navigate.
Just like the hardware I mentioned above that got me really excited the first time I saw them, the Meta Orion meets the same criteria: they can be used everyday, they’re a glimpse into what the future can be, and they promise harmony of hardware & software perhaps in a way we’ve never seen before.
So what’s next?
As a designer, this gets me hyped because it means there are just new worlds to design. The past two decades have been mostly designing towards flat surfaces relegated to scrolling functions and buttons, both physical and in the graphical user interface. AR presents something that’s totally paradigm shifting. There may still be buttons in that future, but what is the “computer” like when vision, audio, movement are seamless? What is it like when you’re interacting with super fast AI in real-time whose response to you is also via vision, audio, and movement?
Our worlds are about to change. If we thought the PC, the Internet, and the smartphone were game-changing, we’re entering an era when the speed of advancement in these technologies will be eclipsed. We’ll have the bandwidth, the network, the processing power, and eventually the hardware all working in unison to do things we never even thought before.
As with big rebrands go, the internet is packed with opinions especially basic ones that hyperfocus strictly on the wordmark. But what these tweet-length hot takes miss is that a brand is never just about the mark but the entire application of the identity. It may even achieve exactly what it’s doing with its attempt at simplicity (or complexity).
The internet is not wrong, though, there is nothing distinctive or particularly unique about the new wordmark but this is the most sophisticated PayPal has ever looked and as it attempts to become an even more consumer-friendly brand and establish the same kind of dominance on users’ phone’s wallets, this new, almost fashion-industry-level of simplicity and straightforwardness is not a bad way to go. Once you scroll down to the one or two images with the new wordmark emblazoned on a credit card, it actually looks… cool. This particular combination of letters, “PayPal”, has been begging for this treatment for years… it’s three letters each word, both with uppercase “P”s, both with “a”s as the second letter, both with straight lines in the third letter… it just makes sense to go this route and I personally think it looks great.
This is exactly how I feel about it. It’s the cleanest and most approachable the brand has looked since its inception. It’s a testament to the business that they’ve amassed over 400 million merchants and buyers on their platform over the last 25 years without a consumer-friendly brand. And now they finally have that.
Over five years, Mr. Ive and Mr. Newson hired architects, graphic designers, writers and a cinematic special effects developer who work across three areas: work for the love of it, which they do without pay; work for clients, which includes Airbnb and Ferrari; and work for themselves, which includes the building renovation.
The independent design studio model has been declining for years, either by getting bought up by big consultancies (1, 2) and private companies (3, 4) or closing up shop for good. The industry change has been well-chronicled. But it’s great that two of the most prominent designers of the past three decades in Jony Ive and Marc Newson are building something of their
own and really making design the center of the company in Lovefrom.
They attract clients that truly value design (Moncler, Ferrari, Airbnb), can charge a premium for their design firepower (one client reportedly pays $200M annually), and are multidisciplinary ranging from industrial design (the two founders’ bread & butter), to fashion, to software.
Obviously, not every design studio can command this type of clientele and premium. They’re two of the most successful and well-known designers of all time. But in Lovefrom, they found their niche as widespread and ambitious they might be and that’s good for design as a practice and an industry. If anything, I love it as a philosophical exercise: they’re saying “we’re going to design products with design front-and-center, we’re only going to work with clients who already value design and trust our design expertise, and we will design things for us, starting with our company.”
How can we know what we want? Perhaps this starts with who we already are.
And who we are is a deep question in itself, but at a surface level, it’s perhaps a combination of our innate character, our personal philosophy, what we’ve done in the past simply because we like doing it for ourselves and not for any sense of gain or recognition or even perceived outcome by someone else.
Of course, one can argue that these aren’t really what make us who we are, to which I’d say it’s a starting point. After all, the examination of these things and the questioning of their authenticity and their source is valuable in itself. We can easily go through life never or rarely evaluating these, believing that it was ours all along. But what really teaches us is lived experience, specifically, pain and struggle.
It’s the pain and struggle that molds us and alters our trajectory. This is not to make life solely about our pasts, but it’s what we worked hard to become and what we earned to have that we truly value.
So perhaps what we want is not really what society tells us to want. Maybe it’s deeply personal, unique to us even. The boring answers to this are the ones that everyone else wants: more money, a nice place to live, material things that signify status. But what is it that you really want? As if your existence depends upon it? That if you were to only have these things in life and nothing more, you’d sacrifice everything else that you have? Something that you’d give up the things that you only kind of want, for what you must have?
In short, what is it that you’re willing to struggle for and not just desire? What is worth the pain in order to earn something for yourself? What are the things you yearn for that are solely for you—not for someone else’s recognition, but for your own self-respect, self-esteem, and self-worth?
Ultimately, it’s not about how someone else judges your life when you pass. People might think about your external accomplishments and possessions. This is easy to see because success and wealth are the things that everyone else wants. These are also the things that people can see for themselves. But only you would really know if you’ve identified what you really wanted, if you went after what you wanted, and how you went about going after it.
It’s worth asking every now and then. Hold it close to the chest. And go after it. I’ll leave you with this quote:
”Attack this day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.“
It costs absolutely nothing to show a bit of kindness to someone, and yet its value is immeasurable.
You just never know how much something—no matter how small—can mean to someone. It might make them feel good for a moment, it might be the piece of humanity they really needed during a tough time, it might make them want to be kind to others, who might ripple out acts of kindness to many more.
We think accomplishing grandiose things are pre-requisites to change the world. But we can start with kindness. If we’re default kind—not because we need anything in return—but because we believe in its capacity for collective healing, we can change the world.
One of the follies of man is he will ultimately and without doubt be destroyed and led to his downfall by his ego if left unchecked.
The uncontrollable pursuit of power, of attention, of anything outside him, to get a modicum of respectability, to feel an ounce of acceptance, of a moment of “love” he couldn’t quite give himself—will wreck him if he doesn’t understand that while there is a feeling of freedom and pride in attaining the goal, the true objective is to never need it in the first place.
It can be a powerful source but you must not let it consume you. You are the master of the ship no matter how strong the waves or how fruitful the island. The real treasure…is you.
There’s this image in our head of who we’re supposed to be. Things we’re supposed to have, the kind of partner we’re supposed to be with, the job we’re supposed to do, things we’re supposed to achieve by supposed age.
Where did these come from? Did you consciously create these desires? Did you intentionally commit to them?
This image of who we’re supposed to be is robbing us of the only thing we need to be more of: ourselves.
When you define what you want for you and follow your own compass, your soul will know the difference.
Happiness is not some ethereal thing we only get to have once in a while. As if happiness is in short supply, and we must earn it through suffering or some special circumstance.
Happiness is available all the time. It’s not something we deserve or don’t deserve. It’s there for us whenever we choose to feel it. It’s not a destination or some perpetual state we suddenly achieve when everything in our life is perfect.
We can be happy whenever we wish. When we take a pause to be grateful for anything, we practice happiness.
