In late 2023, two laptop science graduates in Germantown, Wisconsin, began selling a gray square concerning the dimension of a teabag. Called the Brick, it was 3D-printed in a basement. Faucet your phone towards it, and the apps you’ve chosen grow to be blocked till you faucet it once more. The product works due to the place you allow it. Stick the Brick to your fridge, and opening Instagram now entails standing up, strolling to the kitchen, and holding your telephone towards the gadget—by which level you’ve often remembered that you just didn’t really wish to.
TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz constructed a $59 accent whose complete function is to make a $1,000 smartphone do much less. Inside months of launching, they’d sold around 2,000 units, every one printed at residence. By this January, Business Insider was describing “Bricking” your telephone as the new Dry January, and The Wall Street Journal had reported a spike in digital detox resolutions. The New York Times, in the meantime, predicted on the final day of 2025 that stripped-down telephones would grow to be a standing image.
Driver, the co-founder, described the mechanism plainly: the additional second of effort provides customers an opportunity to resolve whether or not they actually wish to open an app or whether or not they’d rather stay present. That framing would have been heresy in any Silicon Valley product assessment for the previous 20 years. Eradicating moments of determination is exactly what the business was constructed to do.
A product that removes functionality needs to be a curiosity. It’s turning into a class. Bloom, constructed by two faculty college students in 2024, sells a $39 stainless-steel card that does the identical job on the price range finish. On the different sits Norma, a European entrant that machines the concept right into a weighted disc of stable stainless-steel for round $70, with no battery and no subscription, marketed within the vocabulary of a luxurious object slightly than a gadget. When a product kind is barely three years outdated and already has a premium tier, one thing greater than a fad is underway.
Many years spent sanding every little thing down
For many years, shopper know-how competed on a single axis: shrinking the gap between wanting one thing and having it. Amazon patented one-click ordering in 1999. Uber eliminated the telephone name for a taxi. Spotify eliminated the music buy. Apple Pay eliminated the pockets from the pockets of the plenty. Netflix eliminated the choice to maintain watching. The present wave of AI assistants removes the hassle of writing the e-mail in any respect. Comfort was the product, and each redesign, onboarding move, and A/B check pushed in the identical path. Which makes the counter-movement onerous to dismiss.
The Light Phone III, a intentionally restricted handset with no browser and no social feeds, sells for $699, a value co-founder Kaiwei Tang defends as a small funding to get hours of your consideration again. Punkt, the Swiss maker of minimalist telephones, shifts around 50,000 units a year at as much as $299. ReMarkable, the Norwegian firm whose e-paper pill can’t present you a notification, reached revenue of over $300 million by 2022.
Every is a brand new product constructed round deliberate limitation, and the limitation is what clients are paying for. Some purchase it as self-control, a barrier wedged between impulse and motion. Some purchase it as focus, fewer choices in alternate for extra consideration. And a few purchase it as proof of dedication. Superhuman understood this sooner than most. Rahul Vohra spent years rationing entry to a $30-a-month electronic mail shopper whereas Gmail sat there, free. By 2019, the waitlist had swollen past 180,000 names, development was capped at roughly 100 new customers every week, and each applicant confronted a compulsory 30-minute onboarding name earlier than being granted the privilege of paying. Traders went on to worth the corporate at $825 million, and in the present day, after an acquisition by Grammarly, Superhuman has more than 40 million daily users (myself included). The queue functioned as the best marketing Superhuman ever ran as a result of a product it’s a must to look forward to should be price ready for.
Behavioral economics has a reputation for a part of this. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely confirmed that individuals who assembled flat-pack containers or folded origami valued their very own clumsy creations as extremely as consultants’ work, an impact that held even for individuals with no real interest in DIY. They referred to as it the Ikea impact. Labor, invested efficiently, raises how a lot we worth the consequence. The businesses above have merely turned that discovering right into a pricing technique. Effort modifications habits, and it modifications valuation with it.
AI raises the value of restraint
That is the place the pattern stops being a quirk and turns into a strategic query. AI is collapsing the price of producing practically every little thing digital. Textual content, pictures, music, video, and code can all now be generated in seconds, which makes abundance the baseline situation of the web. And the issues abundance can’t manufacture—consideration, dedication, and restraint—grow to be the scarce items.
It’s the similar instinct currently pushing software companies into shipping physical objects: When the digital model of a factor prices nothing to supply, worth migrates to no matter nonetheless prices one thing. The constraint sellers have been early to a logic that AI will now speed up for everybody else. Each mannequin launch that makes content material cheaper makes a Brick, a waitlist, or a file assortment barely extra invaluable by comparability.
None of this implies the subsequent decade belongs to typewriters. The successful merchandise received’t essentially be analog and even low-tech. Brick’s clients nonetheless personal iPhones; that’s the complete premise. Shoppers aren’t rebelling towards know-how. Somewhat, they’re rebelling towards comfort taken to its logical excessive, the place each impulse is frictionless and each second is optimized for engagement.
For many years, know-how competed by giving individuals extra: extra pace, extra entry, extra content material, and extra comfort. AI is accelerating that pattern to its logical conclusion, making abundance successfully free. The result’s that shortage is turning into invaluable once more. Not synthetic shortage, however chosen shortage. A product that limits your choices. A service that asks on your time. A tool that creates distance between impulse and motion.
Brick, Superhuman, reMarkable, and the Gentle Cellphone appear to be very completely different merchandise. In apply, they’re all promoting variations of the identical factor: a constraint. A purpose to decelerate. A barrier between impulse and motion. Worth created not by what a product permits, however by what it prevents.
For years, friction was a bug. The fastest-growing corners of shopper {hardware} say it’s turning into a function. The last word luxurious in an age of infinite abundance might not be extra functionality, however the deliberate energy to say no.
Someplace in Wisconsin, the proof is caught to a fridge.
—Connor Jewiss
This text originally appeared on Quick Firm’s sister web site, Inc.com.
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