LOOKING GOOD!

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog231 - 06/10/2013

The reception of Apple's iPhone 5c and 5s models nudges me to revisit a previous theme of this column: the almost obsessive-compulsive way that looks have come to dominate the world of electronic gadgets. Most of the Apple faithful were aghast at the horrid plasticness of the iPhone 5c: totemic phones, just like Gollum's "precious", need to be shiny and metallic. Let's forget that quality plastic is a far more practical material for phones, less dentable and scratchable, as demonstrated by the fact that virtually all iPhone owners immediately cover up their precious with a plastic case.

I'm not a phone fan anyway, but I am a keen, Flickr-bothering photographer, and I can see the same process at work in the field of cameras. Pocketable compact cameras have improved astonishingly over recent years, with 20x or even 30x zoom lenses and 18+ megapixel sensors, so that unless you're a professional sports or wildlife photographer, and if you mostly put your pics online and don't make large paper prints, they can pretty well replace an entry-level DSLR. Problem is they don't look good, or rather they don't make *you* look good, that is, like a professional. The camera manufacturers' marketing departments soon spotted this vulnerability, and a new breed of retro-styled camera is now flooding onto the market.

Made to look as far as possible like 1930s Leicas, some of these cameras feature interchangeable lenses while others have full-frame sensors and fixed focal-length (that is, non-zoom) lenses: what they tend to share are price tags that push up toward £1000, at a time when seriously capable compacts cost below £250. The founding moment of this trend was probably Olympus's 2009 ad campaign for its retro-styled E-P1 model, under the slogan "Don't be a tourist". There you have the rationale stated barely: this is no longer about how convenient or capable the device is, but how it makes you look to other people. Gadgets as badges of status, symbols that can distinguish you from the rest of the crowd.

This is becoming a matter of life and death for the electronics industry. Camera manufacturers were facing a dramatic sales drop for compact, point-and-shoot cameras, as most young people prefer to use their ever-more-capable mobile phones as cameras. There's a flourishing industry in add-on lenses and imaging apps for the iPhone, while Instagram completely displaces Flickr for the iPhone generation, and none of this generates any revenue for Canon or Nikon. Commanding a premium price for these retro cameras that make people look like professionals could become a life-saver.

It goes without saying that this domination of the aesthetic has been the rule in other consumer sectors for many years, in the case of the garment industry for centuries. Luxury cars nowadays are all capable of broadly similar performance, so high that it can't possibly be unleashed on public roads, only on Top Gear. Hence they are chosen mostly on looks, the prestige of their brandname and a reassuringly huge price tag. And I won't even try to analyse the women's handbag sector, where some devices can cost even more than a Leica M9 (and they don't even take pictures).

I've always been a modernist in the field of design, a believer in Louis Sullivan's dictum that "form ever follows function", a lover of everything spare, elegant and mass-produced. I ride a Vespa PX125, I play a Fender Stratocaster and I own a Parker 51 that I pick up around once every five years to discover that the ink has dried up. The electronics industry is of course the ultimate expression of such modernism: the economics of the silicon foundry depend on huge production runs, while VLSI chip layouts are beautiful examples of spare necessity, with every wire routed rationally. There's therefore a sort of irony, but also an inevitability, about the way that laptops, tablets, phones, cameras and other devices built using such chips are becoming subject to fashion in much the same way as clothes.

The irony exists in the fact that it's computer-aided design and 3D-printing that will make it increasingly possible for us to have various different cosmetic outer shells, in small production runs, masking the same set of internal silicon "organs". Love it or loathe it, the iPhone 5c with its handbag-matching colours is a step along that road. But were I working for Microsoft or Dell or Sony, which thank God I'm not, my every waking thought right now would be devoted to discovering how to make laptops and ultrabooks look *less* like tablets or coloured sweeties and more like things that a professional might take into the jungle or a war zone (HINT: just painting the case khaki won't do it...)