New Cash Registers Are Sexy, But What’s Beneath the Counter Matters More

Anointed the next Steve Jobs by some admirers, Twitter inventor and Square CEO Jack Dorsey is one of the few people who can get the Silicon Valley press corps to roll out of bed early to hear what he has to say. Unlike Jobs, Dorsey spoke from a table at Blue Bottle Coffee near Square’s San Francisco headquarters, not the stage of the convention center down the street. Also unlike Jobs, he didn’t announce a product that at first glance seemed ready to detonate our digital lives and rearrange the pieces in a fundamentally new way.

Instead, Dorsey unveiled a cash register stand.

Which, as banal as that sounds, turns out to be kind of a big deal. Certainly it’s the most elegant cash register stand ever made (though I’m also partial to the wooden, Dorsey-commissioned IntraStand). The Square Stand cradles an iPad running Square’s register app. A credit card reader is built into the base. The stand can also connect to a receipt printer and a cash drawer. Based on appearances and apparent usability, it’s the coolest cash register available. And at $299 off the shelf, it’s a seemingly dead-simple, far cheaper out-of-the-box way for a small business to start taking payments—just add internet.

More importantly, the Square Stand reflects Dorsey’s fixation on reinventing technologies most of us consider mundane. In Dorsey’s Apple-esque design philosophy, the best technology is technology that gets out of the way, that becomes so commonplace that it drops beneath our notice–think electrical sockets and traffic lights. The more transparently usable a technology is, the more it disappears into its use rather than taking up space as an object of attention itself – the better the design.