In the wake of this week's launch of the preposterous Solarin phone, I got to thinking about the strained relationship between luxury and personal electronics. When was the last time a piece of technology was introduced that was truly luxurious, exclusive in its functionality and capabilities rather than just its unaffordable materials? The answer might be the Tesla electric car, but it too is now rapidly descending in price, trickling down into mass affordability like every other piece of technology tends to. It's as consistent a phenomenon as gravity itself.
Being a luxury is a relative, context-dependent quality. Water and shade are luxuries in the desert, bananas are luxuries in Siberia, and time is a luxury to most adults. The...
via The Verge
