Everything has limits. Hard, physical limits that cannot be tricked, bought or negotiated around. No-one feels this more than electronics engineers, who play with the smallest building blocks in the universe as they endlessly hurtle the human race ever faster forward.
But there comes a point where there are no deeper subatomics to plunder. Where smaller is quite simply impossible. But Moore must be obeyed. Moore, who for generations has held sway, paternal and god-like, over our machines, and through them, our works, our economies, our societies, ourselves. The law cannot be broken now. It is unthinkable. It would be as if the sun failed to rise.
When you cannot change your product, you change your customers. It was hardly new – farmers, after all, had been doing it to us for millennia with ever-cheaper nutrition. When you cannot make your phones smaller, you make the hands that hold them larger.
It turns out the human body is a lot like a piece of consumer electronics, when you get right down to it; it has a processor, electrical pathways, energy storage, heat regulation systems, a variety of inputs and outputs… the transition proved less difficult than imagined.
Those with exacting specifications had plenty of models to choose from; always a careful balance of compromises – the thinner they are, the hotter they ran. The more powerful, the larger. There was a direct correlation between power & expense; the question of how much memory you needed, how much stamina, just what, exactly, did you want to use your body for?
Apple made the sleekest models, of course; elegant, smooth, perfect examples of intelligent design. And the most popular, naturally. It turns out the need for a face of your own is easily sublimated when someone offers you a beautiful one.
Dispatches from the wilds of Spenceria 