Like a flock of migrating birds, smartphone makers tend to move from one new trend to the next in groups. One moment, you have an aluminum iPhone 6S with a headphone jack and no notch, and the next, you’re watching the phone market become overrun with iPhone X clones that omit the jack, embrace the notch, and ditch the metal. The last major name still standing by aluminum as its construction material of choice was Google, and that laggard behavior was corrected yesterday with the launch of the all-glass Pixel 3 and 3 XL. Now, the aluminum flagship phone is well and truly dead.
The very first aluminum smartphones to make their way onto the market came almost a decade ago. They were the HTC Legend and Nokia N8 in 2010. HTC was especially…
Like a flock of migrating birds, smartphone makers tend to move from one new trend to the next in groups. One moment, you have an aluminum iPhone 6S with a headphone jack and no notch, and the next, you’re watching the phone market become overrun with iPhone X clones that omit the jack, embrace the notch, and ditch the metal. The last major name still standing by aluminum as its construction material of choice was Google, and that laggard behavior was corrected yesterday with the launch of the all-glass Pixel 3 and 3 XL. Now, the aluminum flagship phone is well and truly dead.
The very first aluminum smartphones to make their way onto the market came almost a decade ago. They were the HTC Legend and Nokia N8 in 2010. HTC was especially…
Carmakers are a weird bunch. On one hand, they’re willing to give their designers free rein and millions of dollars to explore distant-future concepts, but then their production vehicles toe a narrow, unadventurous design line. Attending the Paris Motor Show this week, I see this dichotomy everywhere around me. Renault’s EZ-Ultimo self-driving limo is parked a few feet away from a fleet of anonymous-looking SUVs. Audi’s attention-grabbing PB18 E-tron supercar is flanked by uniformly forgettable autos. And Peugeot’s gorgeous e-Legend Concept is a drop of design flair and aggression amid a sea of visual predictability. I came to Paris looking for the future of electric car design, but all I’ve been able to find are a few lovely fantasies…
Carmakers are a weird bunch. On one hand, they’re willing to give their designers free rein and millions of dollars to explore distant-future concepts, but then their production vehicles toe a narrow, unadventurous design line. Attending the Paris Motor Show this week, I see this dichotomy everywhere around me. Renault’s EZ-Ultimo self-driving limo is parked a few feet away from a fleet of anonymous-looking SUVs. Audi’s attention-grabbing PB18 E-tron supercar is flanked by uniformly forgettable autos. And Peugeot’s gorgeous e-Legend Concept is a drop of design flair and aggression amid a sea of visual predictability. I came to Paris looking for the future of electric car design, but all I’ve been able to find are a few lovely fantasies…