I'm afraid you may have missed the point that Apple makes with creating "walled gardens" with their products, and also what it means that Motorola is releasing

I'm afraid you may have missed the point that Apple makes with creating "walled gardens" with their products, and also what it means that Motorola is releasing a phone with modularity. Apple provides its customers focus. Rather than worrying about how they can modify their machine to improve performance and functionality, Apple's customers can be fairly confident that their machine will be reasonably fast, feature rich, relatively safe, and aesthetically pleasing while sacrificing a higher monetary cost and faith that the previously mentioned qualities will be fulfilled. You are very right that modularity on a mobile phone is going to involve sacrifices due to space constraints, and this is what we will see with the Ara. Interestingly though, while almost all mobile phones I've been exposed to in the past, this one will have swappable options. Basically I think this is saying that mobile phone technology is at the point where we can make some of the sacrifices but still end up with a useful device with options. It will be really cool to see how this plays out and if 3rd party add-ons will cause Motorola to pull back with this offering. I'd like to point out that you highlight the benefits of modularity as improvements for speed, power consumption, size, and cost, but the use case you give is that you are writing an article on this custom machine that you've built. What else does your custome-made computer let you do that you couldn't do otherwise? And why do you think that the majority of consumers don't go down the custom route? On a side note, I feel that I have to refer this article from the Harvard Law Review. It is a bit of a philosophical discussion on the "generative" aspect of computers compared to other devices/appliances. It's headlined "The Generative Internet" by Jonathan L. Zittrain. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_Generative%20Internet.pdf?sequence=1 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_...