It is such a demeaning thought. A smartphone that has been able to do nothing more than pick up calls and take photos for nearly 20 years now, is on a new race. To get folded. A dumb expensive brick that it already is, today's so called smart-phones are the epitome of anti-innovation and waste of Earth's resources. A company today chooses to advertise its camera compared to its own from last year; and call it innovation. Obviously, siring five thousand talented staff from around the world means at least one line of improvement deserves to come out in the camera department. The same in the processor. But is this innovation? Innovation stopped on the day smartphone was made public. To give it a little credit: today's cameras take better pictures, but other that that, it's nothing. It has become a a slab, a brick!
And now companies are on a new race to fold this brick. What could be more humourous and pathetic at the same time? Wasting so much of Earth's resources plus so many talented people engaged in anti-innovation work! It's amazing how low people can decide to fall to! Later generations will definitely look back and regret that we could have done so much more with this much of resources.
Tech companies should not waste time and resources trying to fold the smartphone brick—a pursuit that is environmentally taxing and intellectually unworthy of their potential:
1. Folding the Brick Solves Nothing
The smartphone, in its current rectangular form, is not the problem. Its rigidity is not a limitation of function, but a neutral design born of practical use: easy to hold, simple to make, stable to operate. Folding it doesn’t solve any real problem—it merely attempts to force novelty into a saturated market. It’s a distraction masquerading as innovation. The value it adds is aesthetic at best, fragile at worst.
2. A Colossal Drain on Time, Talent, and Purpose
Billions of dollars, thousands of engineers, and vast quantities of creative energy are now directed toward perfecting a crease in glass. This is not progress. This is theater. That energy could have gone into advancing robotics, AI for healthcare, carbon capture, public infrastructure, or durable tech for the underserved. Instead, our brightest minds are told to make something bend that never needed to.
3. Environmental Cost for Minimal Gain
Foldable phones demand more rare earth metals, more complex components, and more fragile materials—doubling the repair complexity and halving the longevity. These devices age poorly and break easily, adding to a growing e-waste crisis that already chokes landfills and poisons ecosystems. For what? So the phone can collapse like a book we never close?
4. A Symbol of Tech’s Lost Direction
The obsession with folding phones is a metaphor for how shallow innovation has become—chasing spectacle over substance, curve over character. Once, tech companies aimed for audacity: putting a man on the moon, curing disease, connecting continents. Now, they celebrate a hinge. Somewhere along the way, the mission turned inward, and the industry started feeding on itself.
5. What Could Have Been
Imagine if that same R&D budget went into modular phones that lasted 10 years. Imagine repairable devices, or systems that served the developing world, or tools that bridged the disabled with the digital. Folding the brick is a low-return path that fails both the planet and the people. It is a missed opportunity—painful not because it was attempted, but because it was chosen over better things.
A fold in glass is not a step forward. It’s a step inward, into the kind of technological vanity that future generations may look back on with quiet disbelief. We could have done so much more.
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