Agreed. If we look at PCs I think we can conclude the vast majority of them were bought, rather than put together with separate parts by consumers. And that's an extremely modular system. I built all my own computers since I was a kid and while I've been tech-savvy, I'm very far from a hardcore tech guy especially when younger. It was just so easy, installing most things is as easy as plugging a charger in a socket or screwing some bolts in. Yet, while you could easily save several hundred dollars by doing it and build it to your liking, a minority of consumers did in the past 15 years.

This notion that we'd all suddenly want to do that for phones seems to me perhaps a little bit unfounded.

Especially when you consider that there was 0 engineering involved in building your own custom computer from different parts (unless you took a deep dive into custom cooling rigs or mini towers). i.e. you generally bought a mid sized tower and put in your parts. Space was barely a concern and there weren't any space related tradeoffs.

On mobile devices however, space is everything. Bigger screen? Won't fit in the pocket, or it'll be too heavy, and it'll draw more power. Bigger battery? Less space for the CPU or storage, or a camera module.

Not only are companies (with this being their core competency) generally better equipped to make these decisions, but they're also much better equipped to minimize the tradeoffs. They can engineer a camera module and a bigger battery, not just by engineering a better camera/battery module separately, but by engineering them to fit into a smaller space together. All the soldering-type stuff I like to complain about has, beyond business reasons, genuine engineering reasons, too.

Add to that the fact that smartphones aren't quite a fashion statement (in the way that creating a modular smartphone would be like choosing what clothes to wear), but are in a way a reputational statement (in that people do like thin, slick looking phones), I don't see how modular phones can really take off, with few people caring that you can customize them for fashion, and most people preferring the non-modular phone that's as thin and slick as you can get, because it's all soldered on and sitting in a unibody.

And none of this is unique. We tend to prefer the completely designed experience. We don't want to buy separate pieces and construct our own chair or table or our cars.

Modularity feels like creating pages from different books and turning it into a story. You don't get the same cohesion. Or going to the golden corral and ordering pasta, a steak, sushi and pie. It doesn't make a good meal no matter how good the individual pieces. A properly designed course around a set of ingredients or a theme is always better, especially when curated by professionals.

Does that mean we don't want choice or can't handle it? No. I just think that we find modularity, in a very loose sense of the word, in the product offering. All the different phone manufacturers ARE the modularisation and personalisation of the smartphone. Hell Samsung alone has put out 200 phones.

Many vendors do, and quite a few of them experiment. e.g. the phablet was a big experiment that saw a market demand. We've seen battery powerhouses. We've seen tiny-bezel phones with a large chin. We've seen phones with an insane amount of megapixels on the camera, phones built for selfies, phones with a curved display, phones that integrate with digital covers etc.

So the choice is really there.

In the end I think the flagship products are so well designed that the need for tradeoffs will diminish. In some ways we're already there. Phones have a good enough camera for everything except professional work. Phones come with storage we see on laptops. We've cheapish 'unlimited' data plans. We see insane resolution screens. We see all day battery life.

In short, when I buy a flagship phone, I don't really think 'damn wish I could switch out the iPhone camera for more storage, could do it if only my phone were modular'. Battery is still a big point of improvement for me, a tradeoff, but that's about it. It feels by the time Ara could pick up steam, the tradeoffs, like battery, are likely so small (ever more efficient chips, mostly) we probably won't have a big enough demand for different phone configs for different times, enough that we're willing to pay extra for the different extra units, and bear the reduced performance and form factor that a modular system offers over a single fully designed experience.

At the end of the day phones are becoming able to do everything, and the personalisation of the phone is all in the software (apps, themes, content), the choice of phone (again, lots of experimentation and catering to niche markets by vendors) and things like cases. I don't really see modularity becoming a big part of that.

That having been said, I love that I've been using my PC for 7 years, switching components every now and then. It's a pleasure. It'd be awesome to see how far modular phones could go. It might be one of those things that somehow just works so well and sticks, even if it's not the best system on paper, like say tcp/ip. Looking forward to ara going live for consumers this year.