Dumbphones in 2024
Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:
Two years ago, they both tried Apple’s Screen Time restriction
tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to
trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices. They’d heard
about so-called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and
whistles — a high-resolution screen, an app store, a video camera — that made smartphones so addictive. But they found the process
of acquiring one hard to navigate. “The information on it was kind
of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of people who know the most
about dumbphones spend the least time online,” Krigbaum said. A
certain irony presented itself: figuring out a way to be less
online required aggressive online digging.
The couple — Stults is twenty-nine, and Krigbaum is twenty-five — saw a business opportunity. “If somebody could condense it and
simplify it to the best options, maybe more people would make the
switch,” Krigbaum said. In late 2022, they launched an e-commerce
company, Dumbwireless, to sell phones, data plans, and accessories
for people who want to reduce time spent on their screens.
Chayka’s story ran under the bold headline “The Dumbphone Boom Is Real”, which is incongruously clickbait-y for The New Yorker:
Stults takes business calls on his personal cell, and on one
recent morning the first call came at 5 a.m. (As the lead on
customer service, he has to use a smartphone — go figure.) They
pack each order by hand, sometimes with handwritten notes. They
have not yet quit their day jobs, which are in the service
industry, but Dumbwireless sold more than seventy thousand
dollars’ worth of products last month, ten times more than in
March, 2023. Krigbaum and Stults noticed an acceleration in sales
last October, which they speculate may have had something to do
with the onslaught of holiday-shopping season. Some of their
popular phone offerings include the Light Phone, an e-ink device
with almost no apps; the Nokia 2780, a traditional flip phone; and
the Punkt., a calculator-ish Swiss device that looks like
something designed for Neo to carry in “The Matrix” (which, to be
fair, is a movie of the dumbphone era).
$70K/month in sales is legit, but far from a boom.
The two things that get me when I ponder, even for a moment, carrying a dumbphone: audio (podcasts/music) and camera. Pre-iPhone I’d leave the house with both a phone and an iPod, and sometimes a camera too. I actually just bought a new pocket-sized camera last year, but it seems ludicrous to even consider carrying a dedicated device just for audio, and with music streaming, people expect their portable audio player to have always-available networking. Also: AirPods. I’m not going back to wired earbuds, especially in the winter.
★
Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:
Two years ago, they both tried Apple’s Screen Time restriction
tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to
trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices. They’d heard
about so-called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and
whistles — a high-resolution screen, an app store, a video camera — that made smartphones so addictive. But they found the process
of acquiring one hard to navigate. “The information on it was kind
of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of people who know the most
about dumbphones spend the least time online,” Krigbaum said. A
certain irony presented itself: figuring out a way to be less
online required aggressive online digging.
The couple — Stults is twenty-nine, and Krigbaum is twenty-five — saw a business opportunity. “If somebody could condense it and
simplify it to the best options, maybe more people would make the
switch,” Krigbaum said. In late 2022, they launched an e-commerce
company, Dumbwireless, to sell phones, data plans, and accessories
for people who want to reduce time spent on their screens.
Chayka’s story ran under the bold headline “The Dumbphone Boom Is Real”, which is incongruously clickbait-y for The New Yorker:
Stults takes business calls on his personal cell, and on one
recent morning the first call came at 5 a.m. (As the lead on
customer service, he has to use a smartphone — go figure.) They
pack each order by hand, sometimes with handwritten notes. They
have not yet quit their day jobs, which are in the service
industry, but Dumbwireless sold more than seventy thousand
dollars’ worth of products last month, ten times more than in
March, 2023. Krigbaum and Stults noticed an acceleration in sales
last October, which they speculate may have had something to do
with the onslaught of holiday-shopping season. Some of their
popular phone offerings include the Light Phone, an e-ink device
with almost no apps; the Nokia 2780, a traditional flip phone; and
the Punkt., a calculator-ish Swiss device that looks like
something designed for Neo to carry in “The Matrix” (which, to be
fair, is a movie of the dumbphone era).
$70K/month in sales is legit, but far from a boom.
The two things that get me when I ponder, even for a moment, carrying a dumbphone: audio (podcasts/music) and camera. Pre-iPhone I’d leave the house with both a phone and an iPod, and sometimes a camera too. I actually just bought a new pocket-sized camera last year, but it seems ludicrous to even consider carrying a dedicated device just for audio, and with music streaming, people expect their portable audio player to have always-available networking. Also: AirPods. I’m not going back to wired earbuds, especially in the winter.