Plug-and-play modularity, a la Project Ara
Google’s modular smartphone made me hopeful for a future where smartphones weren’t contributing to the massive piles of e-waste sequestered from immediate human view. Project Ara let you easily swap out modules from an “endoskeleton” so that you could upgrade the camera, processor, or whatever else. Unfortunately, those tiles cost way too much to produce for a phone that didn’t yet have mainstream appeal, and Google ultimately killed the project in 2016.
We now have a version of the modular phone with the Fairphone, but it requires a bit of a tinkerer’s touch to change components comfortably.
