I watched the Apple keynote on Tuesday from a corner table at Ovation, laptop propped on two library books, which is a deeply unserious way to consume a product launch and the only way I have ever done it.
The phones came out. The cameras got better the way cameras get better now, incrementally and with a chart. And then came the Air, and the entire room of the internet stopped to talk about how thin it was.
Not what it does. How thick it is.
I have nothing against a thin phone. I have something against thinness as the headline, because thinness is what a hardware brand reaches for once the meaningful improvements have already been spent.
Dimensions are what you lead with when you have run out of consequences.
Here is the part that gets lost. Thinness worked once, spectacularly. In 2008 a laptop came out of a manila envelope on a stage and the gesture landed because the category was genuinely heavy, and every person watching had hauled one through an airport. The Razr worked for the same reason. Phones were bricks, and then one was not. The attribute was doing real narrative labor because it displaced a memory people were holding in their hands.
The second time, there is no memory left to displace. Nobody in 2025 is straining under the weight of their phone. So the number stays a number, and a number is not a story, and a launch built on a number gets four days of coverage and then quiet.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, agency side and client side both. The spec sheet thins out, and someone says we should lead with the craft. Craft is a real thing. Craft is also the last honest word available before you start describing the packaging.
The brands that never end up here are the ones whose story was never a measurement in the first place. Patagonia does not need a thinner jacket. Liquid Death does not need a lighter can. Salt & Straw does not need a colder freezer. They built the reason to care somewhere other than the product's dimensions, so when the product plateaus, and every product eventually plateaus, the story keeps doing its job.
Dimensions are what you lead with when you have run out of consequences.
So ask what your brand would say if the specs stopped moving for three years. If the honest answer is a comparative adjective, thinner, lighter, faster, brighter, you have a problem no materials engineer is going to solve for you.
Barnaby sat on the keyboard through the camera segment. Truffles slept in a shoebox, which is not thin, and suits her fine.