In late December, the 21st to be exact, my friends Amos and Clara called me 17 times. On December 22 it was eight times. The calls were short—sometimes only 30 to 45 seconds, and they usually arrived when I was doing something important: working, grocery shopping, napping. “Hi Anna,” one or both of them would say. “Hi!” I’d respond. Sometimes I worried that I sounded too eager, or like I was just sitting around waiting for their call. Sometimes I felt a little pathetic.
If anyone else called me that often I’d block their number. But Amos is 6 years old, and Clara is 9, and what happened is that on December 20, for Hanukkah, the siblings got the gift of a newly released, extremely old-school kids’ phone. And for the next week or so, the two of them couldn’t stop calling. And I, for one, couldn’t stop picking up.
Called the Tin Can, the phone came out last April and has since sold more than 100,000 units without much paid advertising. It’s basically a “dumb phone” that makes and receives calls over a Wi-Fi network—a landline without the line. It has no screen, not even a tiny one to show who’s calling; its surface has only buttons, a receiver, and a speaker. The product is marketed to parents who want to encourage their children to communicate without giving them access to web browsers and social media. (One user on X suggested, jokingly, that children start writing chain letters next.)
The standard Tin Can, which comes in four colorways and costs $100, looks like a candy-colored soup can. A “retro” model called The Flashback appears nearly identical to an old-school cradle phone and also retails at $100. Calls between Tin Cans are free, but the company charges $10 a month for users to call outside the Tin Can network. Parents get to set the rules—they add numbers to an approved caller list, and only calls to and from those numbers go through, and only in preset time frames, say, between 8 am and 8 pm. Parents can also monitor call logs. Call it spying with the implied consent of the spied upon; an electronic surveillance state in miniature.
Some parents have tried to solve the problem of intrusive screens by buying their kids smartwatches; others opt for typical dumb phones. But these products are more about letting adults keep tabs on where their kids are at any given moment. The Tin Can is more about getting kids to focus on using their voices to communicate.
And that’s about it. Tin Cans don’t show you missed calls or support text messaging. In an era in which most everyone is being nudged toward addictive, screen-based, endless-scroll engagement, giving kids the opportunity to get lost in conversation can seem incredibly appealing to parents.