The makers of the NoPhone did not hold a keynote press conference today to announce the latest product in their signature line. While no one is speculating about what features the next NoPhone will not have, some new details emerged to no acclaim. Soon, the NoPhone will do less than ever.
The NoPhone Zero, a downgrade to the original NoPhone released last September, will feature no additional features—no rose-gold case, no 4K video camera, no Force Touch capabilities. In fact, the NoPhone Zero barely resembles a phone at all. Like the NoPhone, the next-gen NoPhone Zero isn’t a phone at all. Unlike the NoPhone, however, the NoPhone Zero doesn’t even feature plastic molding in the shape of the iPhone’s camera or buttons.
There will be no NoPhone collaboration with Hermès (there is no NoWatch). The NoPhone Zero will not have the power to track the heartbeat of a pregnant woman’s fetus (apparently an Apple feature). The only thing a pregnant woman can do with a NoPhone Zero is pay more attention to the world around her.
While Apple revealed the iPad Pro—“the biggest news in iPad since the iPad”—the NoPhone company did not announce a new product called the NoTablet. But a leaked image of a NoTablet appeared to indicate that it had no useful features—no Pencil stylus, not so much as a screen, even. With a NoTablet, users will be forced to do anything else other than lose their lives to a computer.
The company did not announce any changes to the NoPhone Selfie, which is merely a piece of plastic with a flimsy mirror attached to it. So the person who orders a NoPhone Selfie will still need to seek validation from some other source than the diminished returns offered by impersonal and increasingly corporatized social-media platforms.
The NoPhone Zero isn’t even a real not-product yet. The company has launched a Kickstarter in the hopes of giving users the option to supplement or replace their absorbing, revolutionary smartphones with entirely pointless plastic rectangles. As of this writing, the campaign has mustered $77 toward its $500 goal, which is to give them far less to do with a device—and far more to do in the world.