Cell phones are a huge change. And as smartphones show, this is only the beginning. The iPhone isn’t even the Model T of the next generation of small networkable computers. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with cheap, tiny, ubiquitous sensors, inputs, displays, processors, memory, and wireless networking. And we haven’t even started to think about the social implications of all this.
A portable phone. Or a walkie talkie with unlimited range.
While it’s amazing technology, it’s not that revolutionary a step.
Well, there are amazing things happening with software, and if you combine that with cheap, flexible screens and super cheap microprocessors, huge changes are afoot. Still, I’d trade it all in for a hoverboard.
Yes, and a car is just a horseless carriage.
Look, McFly, predicting hoverboards by 2010 was silly. Because if you have gravity-control technology miniaturized enough and cheap enough to shove into a kid’s toy, well, it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary that would be. Tossing in antigravity devices to show “it’s the future!” is just lazy thinking, because such things are not just not on the horizon, antigravity doesn’t even belong in the same sentence as the horizon.
And a hoverboard is a “wheelless skateboard”.
Of course, there is a different significance to the adjectives “horseless”, “wheelless” and “portable”, and I’m saying the last of these is by far the most trivial.
As for the wider point about tech: I’m not about to argue that there won’t be amazing technology in the next few years, because my opinion is the opposite, and this thread is part of that.
But no, I’m not overwhelmed by many of the devices we’ve seen in the last few years.
20 years ago when I was a boy, mobile phones already existed and there were also glorified calculators that had personal organiser functionality.
While few could have foreseen how popular and powerful phones and smart devices would become, it wouldn’t have been a tremendous surprise either.
So as a child, I was conditioned to expect amazing, revolutionary new technology, but instead the most talked about devices are just a steady progression.
Cellphones are revolutionary. Not in the US, where we went from a good landline system to cellphones, but in the third world. There they went from villages with no communications at all to cellphones. It is like they are leaping from the 19th century to the 21st in one jump. They buy refurbished cellphones for a few dollars and people who can’t afford that have a sim card and borrow someone elses phone.
We who live in the West don’t realized what kind of impact cheap satellite dishes and electric bikes and better agriculture and vaccines have in the third world.
Actually, indie bands did take over the world. OK, not true independent indie bands, but your second tier acts that have always existed are now selling as much as some of the bigger bands.
And we don’t listen to the same shitty music and we pay much cheaper prices for it. The number of “albums” (whether they be CD or digital) sold has stayed about the same since the MP3 revolution. But the number of bands selling a million copies or more of an album has gone way down. Ergo, people are buying music from more bands than they did before. Indie bands take over the world.
And music is a lot cheaper than it used to be. Albums on the iTunes Store or Amazon are much cheaper than a comparable CD would have bene five years ago. And even CDs are cheaper nowadays with many labels joining the RIAA’s “$10 MSRP” campaign to make the CD still viable. It has done wonders for my public library’s music collection.
ETA: While I think the hype over fabbers is a little overblown, they’ll probably have a similar ripple effect on cheap plastic shit.