“Impossibly small” is how the ads describe Apple’s new iPod nano. That’s apt: At something approaching credit card size, it does seem impossibly small to hold 1,000 songs. It’s also irresistibly sleek and sensuous, a gift that likely found its way under many a Christmas tree.
Small is always the hot trend for electronics. The mantra: Get small, then get smaller. The first cell phones more than a decade ago had to be lugged in huge, heavy carriers. Now you can struggle to fish one out of a deep purse or pocket. Similarly, the first laptops were bulky and unwieldy compared to today’s.
Digital cameras now are reaching the vanishing point, disappearing into the human palm so that those with fingers larger than a Lilliputian’s may have trouble pressing the buttons.
We love small gadgets because they’re easy to tote. Smaller–and thinner–is cooler. We wonder, however, how far this trend can go. With some of these incredible shrinking devices, it’s reaching the point that an average to larger-sized American, with average to larger-sized hands, feels like Gulliver when trying to use these gadgets. Fingers start to feel like bratwursts, and you need a magnifying glass to decipher what that tiny button is supposed to do.
It’s easy to be smitten by a slender profile. We’ve found, however, that you must test the product by hefting it, trying to poke the buttons accurately, and gauge whether the device is just too darn small for human operation. Regrettably, many are the gadgets we’ve been drawn to, only to find that they are so small or thin that they are difficult to handle with anything approaching aplomb. And, in an honest appraisal of the tendency to misplace things, you may conclude that such a device won’t last long in your–or particularly your teenager’s–possession.
Donald Norman, who teaches design at Northwestern University, said going granular is not always good. “The way the consumer industry works, as far as I can tell, no one ever thinks about these things beforehand. They make it smaller and smaller until people complain.”
It would be tempting to say that evolution favors the small over the large. Besides the aforementioned electronics, we have Exhibit A of the animal world: dinosaurs. Very big and very extinct. Or Exhibit B: The discovery a few years ago of the fossil remains of a 1,500-pound rodent that looked a lot like a guinea pig. The current model is quite a bit smaller.
To those steeped in dinosaur lore and tales of wooly mammoths and dragonflies with 2-foot wingspans, it would seem that everything was bigger in prehistoric days, only to shrink to puny modern-day sizes–or become extinct–for reasons unknown. But that is a common misconception, said Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.
“You can’t generalize,” he said, noting that horses are larger than they were centuries ago.
Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist, devoted his career to puncturing the myth that evolution has direction, either big to small or stupid to smart. “The lesson learned is that evolution is opportunistic, rather than progressive,” Coyne said. “Niches are filled. Things get brainier or dumber, bigger or smaller, and it’s hard to predict where things will go.”
Still, we predict that in electronics, things will get smaller still. And we’ll get dumber.
