People Are Paying $59 to Make Their Phones Worse. The Reason Why Speaks Volumes About the Tech World Right Now

The industry spent decades engineering effort out of everything. Now a wave of premium products is putting it back.

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In late 2023, two computer science graduates in Germantown, Wisconsin started selling a gray square about the size of a teabag. Called the Brick, it was 3D-printed in a basement. Tap your phone against it, and the apps you’ve chosen become blocked until you tap it again. The product works because of where you leave it. Stick the Brick to your fridge, and opening Instagram now involves standing up, walking to the kitchen, and holding your phone against the device—by which point you’ve usually remembered that you didn’t actually want to.

TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz built a $59 accessory whose entire purpose is to make a $1,000 smartphone do less. Within months of launching, they’d sold around 2,000 units, each one printed at home. By this January, Business Insider was describing........

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