Integrated mobilities: Toward a critical hardware approach to mobile media

This article introduces a critical hardware approach to mobile media and communication, focusing on the role of iPhone chipsets. While advanced semiconductors have long been recognized as driving innovation in mobile devices, their specific affordances, arrangements, and politics of composition have received limited critical attention. We begin by examining how hardware, such as integrated circuits and other microelectronics, have factored into mobile media and communication studies, and media studies more broadly, and explain how the dominant understanding of them in terms of facilitating compact device packaging, although powerfully true, is insufficient for understanding the range of critical aspects relevant to device hardware. Next, we introduce a framework for analyzing circuit integrations that can serve as a critical framework for understanding the technical design and operations of smartphones and other mobile media. With this background in hand, we then turn to a comparative analysis of the hardware of three generations of iPhones: the original iPhone, iPhone 5, and iPhone 12.