By now, you might have heard of Phonebloks , a modular smartphone design concept that is taking the Internet by storm. Created by Dutch designer Dave Hakkens, Phonebloks proposes a better smartphone that is made up of Lego-like modular components be upgraded individually. According to Hakkens, such a system would decrease electronic waste and cost consumers less money on smartphone upgrades over time.

At best, most of us have a dim understanding of what is going on inside of our smartphones, but the Phonebloks concept breaks out each separate function of our smartphones into its own module. There’s something intensely satisfying about this approach: is this not the way we secretly wish all technology worked? And don’t we all wish that when a new iPhone comes along that we could simply upgrade the modules that matter, like picking pimentoes out of a sandwich and replacing them with olives?

It’s a shame, then, that Phonebloks is a pipe dream, a concept by its creator’s own admission is not even achieveable within the next 10 years. “Making Phonebloks a reality is probably impossible with current technologies,” Hakkens told Co.Design in an email, but didn’t elaborate further. However, it’s easy to extrapolate why.

Phonebloks’ core concept is that every technology in your smartphone should be capable of being broken out and upgraded as an independent module, similar to the way a PC motherboard works. You should be able to upgrade your display independently of the CPU, independently of the graphics, independently of the RAM, independently of the Bluetooth, and so on. That’s a nice idea, but it ignores a bunch of practical problems.

Within your smartphone, data whizzes between components at speeds that are nearly impossible to imagine. Every milimeter’s distance between these components comes with a speed penalty attached, which is why smartphones tend to put as many components as possible on a single chip. Consider, for example, the iPhone 5S’s A7 processor, which has the iPhone’s CPU, graphics and RAM clustered together in a sandwich-like wafer.

Breaking this trinity up to allow for modular upgrades wouldn’t just make the device run slower, though. It would make your iPhone consume more power and triple its physical footprint. The result would be a bulkier device, or a device with less room for other components (such as a bigger battery). Even if you could live with that, though, Phonebloks would require expensive sockets so that the CPU, graphics, RAM, storage and modem could communicate with one another at high speed.





So even at first glance, we can see that a Phonebloks smartphone would be bigger, slower, and more expensive than a regular smartphone. But maybe it’s worth it if we’re not throwing away our smartphones quite as often because they’ve become obsolete, right? Unfortunately, no. One of the little illusions the Phonebloks concept pulls off so well is that it fools us into thinking we’re seeing a simpler way of designing a smartphone. It’s sleight of hand. The reality is that the Phonebloks design is a more complex way of building a smartphone, and there’s a lot of things that can go wrong.