One of my all-time favourite pieces on satirical site The Onion took dead aim at the increasingly ridiculous men's grooming industry. It's title? Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades.
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me... and became even funnier when Gillette released a six blade razor only months after The Onion's piece was published. And now, years later, it's giving me flashbacks, thanks to this piece on Thurrott.com:
Nokia’s Next Android Flagship Features Five CamerasI shit you not, they even have pictures. And a promotional video, which has inexplicably been shot entirely in portrait mode. And claims, like:
The company’s Nokia 9 PureView handset will feature a penta-lens setup with ZEISS optics on the back. The “revolutionary” five-camera setup will, of course, allow for better quality pictures.Of course, it will.
Look, I get it. The smartphone market has suddenly hit the sales plateau of all mature technologies. Pretty much everyone in the developed world who wants a smartphone, already has one, and even people who might be tempted into an upgrade have finally figured out that the most recent high-end smartphone offerings aren't offering much of anything for consumers beyond bloated pricing. Apple is cutting production targets and marking down some of their most recent iPhone models due to slow sales. It's tough out there for the best of them, and Nokia's days of being the best of them disappeared from view in the rear view mirrors of the industry years ago. A really good camera is one of the only remaining selling points that can actually differentiate one overpriced phone from the next.
But one of the best high-end smartphone cameras in the business is the single-lens implementation on Google's Pixel 3 phones, which outperform multiple-lens setups using nothing more than a single sensor and some clever software. Two-lens solutions look downright quaint (i.e. cheap) by comparison, while producing no appreciable gain in image quality. Three- and four- lens phones were already starting to look desperate.
And it's into that environment that Nokia has just basically said, Fuck it all, we're going to five cameras. It's ridiculous, in an Onion sort of way. That this is the opening salvo of a new year from the increasingly challenging and competitive world of smartphone hardware... well, let's just say that it doesn't bode well for the rest of the year. For them, anyway; I expect to be thoroughly entertained.
Five cameras. Mwahahahahahaha!