When Gadgets Dissolve Into Features

Cameras, GPS units, music players, voice recorders — one by one, the smartphone folded them into app icons. This chapter traces the convergence pattern that turned standalone gadgets into software features, and asks what it means for any hardware maker whose product might be next.

The slogan ‘There’s an App for that’ did a great job in communicating the emergent understanding that the smartphone was in fact the only device we needed, virtually obliterating specialized devices we all used to carry, use, and buy: keyboard, pointing device, stylus, camera, compass, GPS, wallet are needed no more, as they are all metaphorically folded into the metal and glass rectangular objects we call smartphones.

Look at the figure below. Chances are, many of the readers have never held or bought such a relic. Digital point‑and‑shoot cameras rose rapidly in the late 1990s and 2000s by making photography cheap, instant, and pocketable for the mass market, but they declined just as quickly once smartphones offered “good enough” cameras that people always carried anyway. In fact, shipments collapsed from 121 million digital cameras worldwide In 2010 to just 9 million—a 93% decline driven almost entirely by smartphone adoption.