Single-function devices in the world of the everything machine

What we lost when everything became a phone, and when the phone became everything.

In 2001, I took a train from Providence to Detroit. What should have been a 12-hour journey stretched into 34 when we got caught in a Buffalo blizzard. As the train sat buried in rapidly accumulating snow, bathrooms failed, food ran out, and passengers struggled to cope with their containment.

I had taken along my minidisc player and just three discs, assuming I’d spend most of the trip sleeping. With nothing else to do but stay put in my seat, I got to know those three albums very, very well.

I’ve maintained a relationship with them with format fluidity. Over the course of my life, I’ve had copies of them on cassette tape, originals on compact disc, more copies on MiniDisc, purchased (and pirated) .mp3, .wav, and .flac files, and access through a dozen different streaming services. Regardless of how I listen to them, I am still transported back to that snow-bound train. After nearly twenty-five years, I have come to assume that this effect would be permanent. But I never expected it to intensify — in a sudden feeling of full return to the body of my youth — like it did when I dug out my old MiniDisc player, recharged its battery, and pressed play on the very same discs I held back in 2001. The momentary flash of being back on that train, of the raw exhilaration of the cold and of being alone in it, of reinhabiting a young mind still reeling from what was formative, culture-wide shock on September 11th — it all came back. This was truly a blast from the past.

In some ways, I am simply describing true nostalgia. I had a sense of return, and a mix of pleasure and pain. But unlike other times, when simply replaying some music would trigger recall, this was as if the physical object — the player loaded with the right disc — contained the original moment, and turning it on and pressing play released it back into my mind.

To the Everything Machine and back

When Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, he presented it as three essential devices in one: “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.” The audience cheered at each revelation. Of course they did — who wouldn’t want to carry one device instead of three? For a citizen of the early aughts, a single, “everything machine” was the dream. The consolidation seemed like an obvious win for convenience, for progress, for the future itself.

Nearly twenty years later, we can see that this convergence did more than just empty our pockets of multiple devices. It fundamentally transformed our relationship with technology and information. Today’s iPhone isn’t just a unified tool for known purposes; it has become Marshall McLuhan’s medium-as-message, reshaping not just how we do things but what we choose to do and think about, what we know and want to know, what we believe and are. I doubt even Steve Jobs, a man capable of grandiosity to the extreme, could have imagined the epistemological and ontological effects of the iPhone.

This realization has been progressive. Books, films, music, and a near constant conversation have been the public reckoning with the everything machine. We grapple with our newly acquired digital addiction in as many ways as it manifests. We do everything we can to counter the everything machine.

One thing I have done, mostly out of curiosity, is to go back to the single-function devices I have accumulated over the years. Some of them have been put away, turned-off for longer than they were ever out an don. Simply turning them back on has been illuminating. Each one has reactivated a memory. Each one has reminded me of what it was like to use it for the first time, back at the time at which it was the latest and greatest — when it hinted at a world to come as much as it achieved something its present required.

What started as a backward-looking survey of sorts — sifting through a catalog of dusty devices and once-murky memories — revealed something unexpected: Not only did these older, limited devices create a different kind of relationship with technology, catalyzing imagination rather than just consuming attention, there is still a place for them today.

For context, here’s a list of the more interesting devices I have in what is a small, personal museum of technology:

A partial catalog of my personal device library

Device	Media	Year
Nintendo GameBoy	Video Game Console	1989
Qualcomm QCP-860	Mobile Phone	1999
Sony CMT CP11	Desktop Audio System	2000
Sony MXD-D40	CD/MiniDisc Deck	2001
Apple iPod 1st Generation	mp3 Player	2001
Handspring Visor	PDA	2001
Cybiko Classic	PDA	2001
Tascam MD-350	MiniDisc Player/Recorder	2001
Sony MZ-B10	Portable MiniDisc Player/Recorder	2002
Siemens C55	Mobile Phone	2002
Sony CLIÉ PEG-SJ22	PDA	2003
BlackBerry Quark	Smartphone	2003
Canon PowerShot A70	Digital Camera	2003
Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-N920	Portable MiniDisc Player/Recorder	2004
Sony DCR-HC36	MiniDV Camcorder	2006
OLPC XO	Laptop Computer	2007
Sony NWZ-S615F	Digital Media Player	2007
Sony NWZ-A815	Digital Media Player	2007
Sony NWZ-A726	Digital Media Player	2008
Cambridge Audio CXC	Compact Disc Transport	2015
Sony NW-E394	Digital Media Player	2016
Sony NW-A105	Digital Media Player	2019
Yoto Player 1st Generation	Audio Player	2020
Yoto Mini	Audio Player	2021
Cambridge Audio CXA81	Integrated Amplifier	2020

Limitation heightens creation

When I pick up one of these old devices, I find myself thinking “how can I use this?” The limitation becomes an invitation to creativity. The friction of working within constraints engages my mind in a way that unlimited possibility does not. Contrast this with a modern smartphone, where the dominant thought is often “how do I avoid getting distracted by this?” The absence of limitation becomes its own kind of constraint — a constant battle against abundance and ubiquity.

There is a common critique that returning to single-purpose devices is an affectation — a needless pretense in a world that has justifiably left it behind — a performance, not a true preference. This may be. But it is not necessarily so. It may be easy to scoff at a writer’s preference for a typewriter when a computer is obviously easier to use. But if it is a better experience for the writer, who can argue with that? After all, in a world of as many options as we have, ease is not the only measure of value; there are as many measures as there are choices. Subjective experience might as well take the lead.

There is also a common worry that returning to single-purpose devices is risky — that their media is somehow more fragile than cloud-hosted digital content. But I’ve found the opposite to be true. I returned to Blu-Ray when favorite shows vanished from streaming services. I started recording voices and broadcasts to MiniDisc when I realized how many digital files I’d lost between phone upgrades. My old MiniDiscs still work perfectly, my miniDV tapes still play, my GameBoy cartridges still save games. It’s not the media that’s fragile, it’s the platform. And sometimes, the platform wasn’t fragile, the market was. MiniDisc is, again, a great example of this. The discs were more portable, robust, and more easily recordable than larger Compact Discs and the players were smaller and more fully-featured. But they ran right into mp3 players in the marketplace. The average consumer valued high capacity and convenience over audio quality and recording features. But guess which devices still work just as they did back then with less effort? The MiniDisc players. Most mp3 players that aren’t also phones require a much greater effort to use today because of their dependence upon another computer and software that hasn’t been maintained. And, unlike most devices made today, older devices are much more easily repaired and modified. Of my list above, not a single device failed to do what it was created to do.

Besides comprising a museum of personal choices, these devices are a fascinating timeline of interface design. Each one represents a unique experiment in human-computer interaction, often feeling alien compared to today’s homogeneous landscape of austere, glass-fronted rectangles. Re-exploring them reminds me that just because an idea was left behind doesn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. Their diversity of approaches to simple problems suggests paths not taken, possibilities still worth considering.

That the interface is physical, and in some cases, also graphical, makes for a unique combination of efficiency and sensory pleasure. Analog enthusiasts, particularly in the high-fi space, will opine on things like “knob-feel,” and they have a point. When a button, switch, or knob has been created to meet our hands and afford us fine-tuning control over something buried within a circuitboard, it creates an experience totally unlike tapping a symbol projected onto glass. It’s not that one is objectively better than another — and context obviously matters here - but no haptic engine has replicated what a switch wired with intention can do for a fingertip. Today’s smartphone reviewer’s will mention button “clickiness,” but if that’s what gets you excited, I encourage you to flip a GameBoy’s switch again and feel the click that precedes the Nintendo chime; eject a MiniDisc and feel the spring-loaded mechanisms vibration agains the palm of your hand; drag the first iPod’s clickwheel with your thumb in a way that turned a low-fi text list of titles into something with weight. Physicality is what makes a device an extension of a body.

Function is what makes a device an extension of a mind. And single-function devices, I believe, do this better. By doing less, of course, they can only be so distracting. Compared to an everything machine and the permanent state of cognitive fracture they’ve created, this is something we should look back upon with more than a bit of nostalgia. We still have something to learn from a device that is intentionally limited and can fully embody that limitation.

But the single-function device doesn’t just do less; it creates a different kind of mental space. A GameBoy can only play games, but this limitation means you’re fully present with what you’re doing. A miniDV camcorder might be less convenient than a smartphone for capturing video, but its dedicated purpose makes you think more intentionally about what you’re recording and why. For many contemporary enthusiasts, the limitations of old media create artifacts and effects that are now aesthetically desirable: they want the lower resolution, the glitchiness, and the blurring of old camcorders in the same way that modern digital camera users apply software-driven film emulation recipes to synthesize the effects once produced by developing physical film. The limitation heightens the creation.

Each device a doorway

These devices remind us that technological progress isn’t always linear. Sometimes what we gain in convenience, we lose in engagement. The friction of switching between different devices might have been — and remains — inefficient, but it created natural boundaries between different modes of activity. Each device was a doorway to a specific kind of experience, rather than a portal to endless possibility.

Modern devices have their place. When it comes to remaining in communication, I wouldn’t trade my current smartphone for the phone I used twenty years ago. As critical as I am of the everything machine, I’m inclined to work on building better personal use habits than I am to replace it with a worse experience of the features I use. But there is also room for rediscovering old devices and maintaining relationships with technologies that do less. I actually prefer playing movies and music on physical media than through a streaming interface; I would jump at the chance to reimagine my smartphone with fewer features and a more analog interface.

Limitations expand our experience by engaging our imagination. Unlimited options arrest our imagination by capturing us in the experience of choice. One, I firmly believe, is necessary for creativity, while the other is its opiate. Generally speaking, we don’t need more features. We need more focus. Anyone working in interaction and product design can learn from rediscovering how older devices engaged the mind and body to create an experience far more expansive than their function.

The future of computing, I hope, is one that will integrate the concept of intentional limitation. I think our minds and memories will depend upon it.

Christopher Butler, June 24, 2025  
Filed under: Essays