Little Printer

» see bergcloud.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

little printer belonged to the design-blog internet, the part i read but did not buy into. around 2011 and 2012 there was a whole corner of the web that treated small connected objects as the next real thing, and this was its poster child, passed around on the same sites where people admired typography and swiss product photos. it never showed up on a desk i knew. it shipped from london at a price that made it a treat, and it solved a problem that felt made up in the best way, which is why the people who loved it really loved it.

berg, a london design studio, first showed the thing in late 2011 and shipped it in 2012. it was a thermal receipt printer roughly the size of your palm, with a face that gave it an expression, and it lived on a shelf until, on a schedule you set, it woke up and printed a tiny personal newspaper. your weather in the morning and a note someone had sent you overnight, curled out on a strip of receipt paper you could tear off and pocket.

it launched with real names attached, from the guardian to foursquare feeding it content, and it got the kind of press a small studio dreams about. what it did not get was a business that paid for itself.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the trick that made it charming was also the trap. the printer itself was almost dumb, a little box that mostly knew how to print. all the intelligence, the schedules and the content feeds that fed it, lived in berg's cloud, and the printer phoned home to fetch its next page. that split let the object stay simple and cheap, and it meant the object could not work alone for one second.

~ what got buried with it ~

in september 2014 berg announced it had not found a sustainable business in connected products and was winding down. the little printer service was given until 31 march 2015, and on that date the cloud switched off. every device still on a shelf went quiet at once, not because it broke, but because the far end of the line was gone. berg later open-sourced a minimal version of the server, and years afterward a few fans built new backends to bring dead units back, which is a kinder ending than most connected gadgets get. the lesson it left is blunt. if the object needs someone else's server to breathe, it is only ever borrowing its life.

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