re: Tesla Phone
It started with a global pandemic.
For two years an overabundance of futuristic thinking has pooled into the collective stream of consciousness. I guess sitting idle through the pandemic gave a lot of people extra bandwidth to come up with pretty amazing ideas.
Already, we have witnessed so much creativity to come out of the Corona Age.
One of the more fascinating futuristic ideas/rumors from the past few months has been surrounding what feels like an inevitable release of a smartphone from Tesla. Several “leaked” mockups have already made the rounds through pseudo-journalism. There is even a codename: Model Pi. And yes, there is hype.
The “What If…” of it all, of what might be, is fascinating.
Don’t get me wrong. Futurism is something I love to delve into. Rumors about the next evolution of touchscreen tech were exactly what I needed to fuel my escapist mind. My current companion side piece, an iPhone, seems almost like an extension of myself at this point. I feel lost without it. I’m not really that excited to use it when I have to.
I’m not the only one.
Today, there are apps and seminars on how to use your phone less and less.
We got the future we deserved, not the one we wanted.
Hopefully, change is in the air.
For far too long have we been subject to the slight-reimagining of the exact same phones we suckered into last year. We need the next level. Something to get us excited about the future. (No, I’m not talking to you Meta. Sit down already.)
We need Sir, ahem, Future Sir Elon Musk to lead the charge. He’s already leading us to the moon and to mars, or to Vegas in an underground vacuum tunnel, whichever comes first. Yes, love him or hate him, he must surely the man to get us to the future. Right?
Can you see how I trip into this rabbit hole way too easily?
Apple left us wanting one more thing.
I feel almost as if there’s a hole in the collective heart of consumerism.
A large wanting demand for a keynote-worthy must-have piece of tech.
Something that looks sexy too, since we’ll most likely brandish ourselves and succumb to the tribalism that comes with device ownership. This probably happens when you don’t read and sign that 40 page terms and conditions of usage.
Apple created this need.
That corporation mastercrafted world newsworthy events simply to reveal their next offering to the Temple of Consumerism. Products that people had to have, that they simply could not live without whether or not they could afford it.
People would do incredible feats to attend the events in person while the rest of us would crash streaming servers to watch the late Steve Jobs perform his magic live.
This was followed by corporate handlers providing exclusive access to hype-men, also known as bloggers, to preview the unreleased technology. This was so they could spit bars about the flawless (they signed NDAs preventing them to say otherwise) device of the moment.
The rest of us would harken to this call of the many pied pipers, aka influencers, stuck in Apple’s hype-pumping trance.
So we’d all get in line. Literally.
All so we could say we were unique and special enough, for a blip of time, to be known as being one of the very first to shell thousands of dollars for technology that soon everybody would also have.
We were Starbellies.
That is our history.
That Future has Passed.
Lately we have NOT been watching live product release events.
Or standing in lines.
Or paying money we don’t have to be first.
We haven’t had any new smartphone technology in a long while.
I mean truly new technology.
We’ve seen gimmicks. Folding screens. Screens on the front and back of the device. Speakers. Magnets. Projectors. Bigger Cameras. More cameras. Biggers screens. Brighter screens. Hot pocket processors. 5-Fucking-G. Smiling poop emojis that move to your face.
Yes, manufactures have done a good job expanding current technology. But none of it has truly been revolutionary or new. We have yet to witness another killer app that we want to sleep in a tent outside of a big box store for.
Enter Ser Elon. (I mean Future Ser.)
At this point we’re still futurism speculators.
We all think we know what we want. Isn’t it obvious?
We want the robot car company to implant a screen in our eyeballs, a synthetic midi processor onto our eardrum, and Jarvis into our brain stem.
But we’ll compromise and take a phone that does pretty much all that.
That’s what we want, right?
Unfortunately, speculation does not always yield results. This is especially true about the future. Rarely do futurists get it right (there are notable exceptions though.)
And that’s the current case today.
Tesla Phone rumors were debunked by Elon himself.
It’s almost disappointing, a let down. We wanted it so badly.
Isn’t that enough?
The want for a Tesla Smartphone is still there. The masses are still calling for it. I would not be surprised to see one in the future.
Not because Mr. Musk delivers everything his audience demands, but because it seems like the next evolution phase of the Tesla/Musk brand.
Elon has a long history of consumer product releases, both Zany and practical, beyond vehicles.
They include surfboards, whistles, tequila, flame throwers and s3xy satin shorts.
His car company manufactures consumer products (which could categorically be reduced to: vehicles, batteries and solar panels). What a lot of folks don’t realize is that Tesla is also very heavy into software and AI engineering.
It is not a far-reach to imagine that “TeslaOS”, their linux based Software for cars and their servers, could go mobile in the future.
It requires some heavy processing capabilities, but we know that’s just a matter of time to get that much processing into a mobile chip.
What makes speculating about the Tesla Phone so much fun is the rumors of what features would make a project worthwhile for the brand:
1 Connect to StarLink. This would be massive. A true consumer-level satellite phone. I have a son in Alaska who would benefit from this directly. And Starlink is testing Alaska coverage starting next year!
2Built In Solar charging. This feature seems gimmicky and unneeded at this stage of smartphone technology. But given Tesla’s prime operative to utilize renewable energy whenever possible (remember, they merged with Solar City and produce solar panels too), I feel this would probably be a feature. It probably wouldn’t work as well as we’d want given the small footprint on the back of the phone. But solar charging would be on brand with the company. Even if it only supplied enough juice to get a text out when needed.
3 Neuralink interface. This feature is tricky. Neuralink has many different definitions right now. The ultimate goal of the organization is create a direct interface to your brain, most likely by a chip implant. This is too scary for a lot of people to think about. It’s also unproven and a few decades away from being an acceptable idea for mass adoption. However, I would not be surprised if Neuralink tipped their toes into the consumer market with wearables like watches and rings. All of it providing bio-feedback going to your own private health database. All of which would interface seemlessly with your Tesla phone.
4 Seamless Tesla Integration. Again, a no brainer. This extends the brand and allows you to interface with your vehicles and powerwalls. Unlock, summon, remember where you parked. Monitor, find out how/when to optimize your solar charging and powerwall usage. All the stuff that Apps do today, but it would be native at the OS level on your phone.
One More Thing.
I would be amiss to write up my thoughts about the Tesla Phone without adding my own speculation. This is what I enjoy. A bit too much.
These are futuristic features that I want to see, but also feel would make the most sense for the Tesla/Musk brands.
Here are my ideas, feel free to call them predictions:
1 — Native Web3 Integration.
It’s not doubt that Elon is a fan of decentralized autonomy (in the aspect that decentralization means anti-government). He has a long history of hyping crypto projects and utilized them as payment systems. With the future of crypto being Web3, DAOs and NFTs, layers beyond just payment schemes, future phones will need to adapt quickly to making it motley foolishly easy to work with blockchain technology.
We’d see the world’s first dApp store on a phone. This could get crazy.
2 — Photo and Media Storage via IPFS.
This is more-or-less an extension of Web3 idea above. IPFS is a decentralized storage protocol via blockchain technology. Instead of paying Apple, Google, or Dropbox for gigs of data storage yearly, which jeopardizes your photos being lost forever should your payment method ever change or get declined, you simply pay fractions of a cent to store a photo on web3 blockchains permanently.
I’m still exploring this technology, but I understand there are methods to manage encryption, speed of access, and even length of storage.
Your keys, your photos.
Having this at a native level on a phone’s OS seems inevitable.
3 — Jarvis.
In the movie Iron Man, the main character is a billionaire genius inventor who creates and propels ideas that have dramatic impact on humanity. Sound familiar?
This may or may not be widely known, but the character of Tony Stark was actually modeled very closely after the real-life Elon Musk. Although there were other influences, and the desire to stay as close as possible to the comic book version of Tony Stark, the director of the film spent a lot of time in study with our own modern day billionaire inventor. While the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands that vision of what a billionaire inventor is capable of way beyond what would be feasible in the real world, the character-study in the first Iron Man movie is pretty interesting to witness.
As Iron Man, Tony Stark needed a little bit of help. So he created a sidekick in artificial intelligence form. That sidekick was Jarvis.
Apple has Siri. Amazon has Alexa. Microsoft has Cortana. It would be amazing to see Jarvis brought to life, with the actual original actor’s voice (because, why not?), as an everyday sidekick to the average man.
Jarvis, where is my car? Send it home please.
It would be interesting to see what capabilities Tesla would bake into Jarvis.
4 — Eyewear
Expanding beyond the wearables of watches and rings, I believe eyewear is the next evolution in wearables that will be adopted mainstream. Facebook/Meta already has a collaboration with Ray-ban. Snapchat released their version of spectacles. Google had it’s original Google Glass (which is expecting a second iteration soon). This is happening.
While this is the market trend, I don’t think “following” other players in the market would be the reason why Tesla would release smart glasses. They have a few major reasons that would make even more sense then their competitors to release eyewear.
For one, their A.I. is highly visual. All their vehicles rely on an array of cameras to receive input and make decisions. Visual A.I. is in Tesla’s DNA. Having a phone in your pocket isn’t really the best way to get input from a camera. But something on your face that is on all the time would be the right interface to take full advantage of the code that already exists.
Secondly, if the phone did have a Neuralink interface as speculated by many before me, then the Neuralink OS would need additional input and output methodologies. Glasses would provide this bridge. There are many bio metrics that can be read near the face. Temperature, breath, heart rate, etc. A heads-up display on the lense of the glass as well as bone-conducting sound processor for audio feedback would be how you’d receive the information.
The Future of Smartphones
When technology becomes laggard, there is opportunity for new market players to take over and become the defacto standard. We’ve all seen what has happened to Nokia, and then Motorola (still king of the flip), and then Blackberry. But even before phones we had market dominance by US Robotics and then Palm.
We’re at the cusp now. Apple and Samsung own the smartphone market. While both are trying to jam more gimmicky technology into same damn phones, they are leaving the door open for a massive overtaking if another company actually releases the next evolution of smartphone technology.
Don’t say this is unlikely. We all thought the same thing when Blackberry owned the world.
Will Tesla Phone Happen?
The question of whether or not we’ll see a Tesla Phone brought to market is a fun one to ask. Many claim, via inside sources, that the company is working on something.
We know that Elon hates being limited by other companies. App stores like Apple and Google Play impose such limits on what Tesla can or can’t do with their smartphone apps. By releasing their own phone, and one that is specifically web3 native, they let the make their own choices and let market decide and regulate the rest.
So will we see a Tesla Phone? While it is fun to ask, only one man knows that answer. Don’t hold your breath for anything soon, but if and when it makes sense for Tesla, then and then only would we see this market entry.
