I’m very happy to have written a piece for Vox on how smartphone R&D made possible many other hardware innovations, like drones, VR headsets, and the hoverboard. A big part of the piece focuses on how Shenzhen, which makes most of the world’s smartphones, has become a high-tech manufacturing hub. Read the whole piece here:

www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/4/13498504/shenzhen-smartphone-innovation-capital

It’s obvious when you think about it, but almost every piece of new hardware to come out in recent years owes a debt to smartphones. Excellent cameras, batteries, low-power processors, wifi devices, etc. are being put together in new ways to create products like drones, “smart” devices, and even something like the hoverboard. And they can be put together in many existing products, like cars and satellites, to make them do more. The “hardware renaissance” currently under way isn’t happening only because of the Internet or Maker Faires or because people rediscovered a love for gadgets; it’s mostly because smartphone R&D has made a lot of chips really good and cheap.

(The handy summary of this phenomenon is called “the peace dividends of the smartphone wars,” a phrase that’s not my own. Instead it comes from Chris Anderson, who coined it in a Foreign Policy piece, in a passage that focuses on drone developments.)

There’s a point about Shenzhen that did not make it past final editing: The city has been designated by the central government to be the center of one of three mega urban clusters.  It leads the Pearl River cluster of Shenzhen-Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Dongguan. The other two clusters are Beijing-Tianjin and Shanghai-Nanjing-Suzhou-Hangzhou; the government wants to cultivate these three places to be urban areas of over 50 million people each. (Adam Minter wrote an excellent piece about it here.) It’s a good sign that the central government designated Shenzhen to be the leader of that cluster, and that it didn’t give designate more historically or politically important cities like Chongqing or Wuhan.

Read “How smartphones made Shenzhen China’s innovation capital.”

Thanks to Sam Gerstenzang and Ju Huang for reading an early draft.