Does anyone else feel that progress on the smart phone and laptop front has just been gimmicky in the past few years.
In other words cramming more memory, pixels and speed is just more of the same. Nothing earth shattering from the major players in the last 3 years.
There have been developments here and there, but nobody cared. Waterproof phones? Cool. Faster charging? Shrug. Modular projectors? Neat, I guess. Removable cameras? Ok. Exploding batteries? Now suddenly everyone’s excited.
Almost all technology plateaus for a while. It isn’t just a smooth innovation curve for anything including smartphones, laptops, airliners, cars or even mundane things like lightbulbs. We all get unrealistic expectations living through waves of disruptive innovation but that isn’t sustainable as a medium-term trend but, rest assured, there will be other major breakthroughs in the near future. I can’t tell you what those will be or else I would be writing checks rather than posting here but it will come.
My best guess is that Virtual Reality will finally hit the mainstream once the kinks are worked out. There have been many notable failures in fully developing it but the potential market is huge. Just being able to “tour” almost anywhere virtually is easily monetized. There are probably many gaming and social networking possibilities as well that we can’t even begin to anticipate. That will require a lot more computing power than most people have right now if it takes off when the kinks are worked out.
The other probable growth area in just about every sector is Artificial Intelligence. Some of it already exists already and Amazon has done an outstanding job with its Echo (Alexa) line to make it very consumer friendly and easily updatable. However, they have taken a different approach. You don’t need a powerful computer to run it. All you need is fancy speaker that can tap into the power of their massive Cloud infrastructure. We will probably see that approach being used for many applications as well because a smartphone can never be as powerful as a massive data center full of interconnected, powerful servers. That means that you could see the return of “dumb” devices that are still incredibly powerful because they offload the real work to remote supercomputers.
So have we come a full circle.
The computers of the 80s were dumb devices that were connected to main frames. Then the PC revolution started. Now are we going back to the computers of the 80s or is it not that simple.
We certainly aren’t going back to the computers of the 80’s. Cloud computing is a completely different model with a potential capacity many orders of magnitude higher than anything that was available to anyone, even large government agencies, back then.
The only similarity is that the bulk of the computing power is remote rather than local and shared among many people (potentially many millions in some Cloud computing uses). Google already does this to some extent with their Chromebooks. The “laptop” itself isn’t doing much computing on its own and doesn’t store much locally. It’s main purpose is to give the end user an interface (keyboard, screen, Wi-Fi etc) to Google’s servers where the applications and files are stored.
I am not saying that all computing is going to end up that way but it is the general trend. I work in mega-corp IT and we are putting everything possible on the internal corporate cloud and the Amazon cloud as quickly as possible. Even critical applications are run on remote cloud servers now. Microsoft Office 365 is also cloud based and we are moving almost everyone to that as well.
There will always be a place for some local applications especially for computing intensive uses like video editing but it is cheaper and easier to manage most common tasks if they are on central servers rather than scattered around on countless individual machines.
Back in the 50s, Isaac Asimov wrote about a universal computer called MultiVAX. Businesses and then individuals had dumb terminals that linked back to MultiVAX’s base. "Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough"
A pair of drunk computer engineers asked it “How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?” The reply was “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
Trillions of years later, as the universe entered the last stage of existence it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy…
*"But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer – by demonstration – would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light----"*
I hope to god they have. I’m tired of my kids and grandkids wasting their money on the latest gimmick promoted by those bastards.
But, there is no limit to juvenile gullibility for a shiny-bright object… Time will tell if they find it “worth it”.
No, you’ll see some impressive innovation in the personal assistant AI aspects at least as the Internet of Things penetrates further and more personal data is consolidated into providers’ cloud services and stuff feds the Big Data beast.
This may be a bad thing.
Moving this to IMHO from General Questions.
samclem, moderator.
I certainly hope smartphones haven’t plateaued. I’m still waiting for a manufacturer to come out with one I would actually want.
Let’s go over the key components:
Processing power (CPU): Quite a bit of room for an increase. It’s a typical lack-of-foresight thing for me. A doubling in power would be quite useful to me but much more than that the cost/improvement ratio gets bad. But in a few years I’ll want another doubling and the cost will have fallen. So who knows how much more powerful we’re going to really want.
Memory (RAM): Strangely limited. I’m really surprised by people accepting this. Esp. since they are falling into a marketing trap: “Oh, you want more memory. Well, that’s going to really cost you. (Um, just don’t ask how much is actually costs us.)” Some Android maker is going to start making 16GB base phones and things will change.
Storage (SSD): Ditto memory and then some. Even 64GB is nothing when you’re shelling out $400+ bucks.
Screen resolution: The one thing we are definitely hitting a limit. Improvements in screens will be strength, lower power usage, refresh rates, etc.
Data speeds. The limits on these are mostly out of the hands of the phone makers. Wireless sucks compared to Ethernet. But many people seem happy with their crappy streaming video resolution and that is the most common high bandwidth demand.
Camera: Another thing that’s near it’s practical limit. In terms of resolution anyway. But improvements in speed, illumination range, etc. are still possible. But again people seem happy with the crappy blurry pics and vids they are taking now so not much of a push.
Battery. Now this is the big one. We might see major improvements in smaller size, bigger charge, faster charging and longer lifespan. … Or we may not. “Experts” disagree. If there is a major breakthrough with batteries, then our expectations from phones might change dramatically.
I was just talking about this the other day, and while I doubt we’ve plateaued, I think the onslaught of new, catchy features seems to have slowed down.
I’m sad to say that I was one of those people that was always counting down the time until I was eligible for my next upgrade, because a phone just came out with some new feature that I just couldn’t live without! Now? There’s no reason for me to give up my old phone. None of the new ones seem to offer anything new that my three-year-old Droid Turbo doesn’t already do. The best feature Verizon seems to offer is a phone I can hook up a speaker or projector to. Not really impressed enough with that to shell out the ridiculous amount of money they want for a new phone.
And an I just bitch about that for a minute? Verizon switched to the “no contract” deal a few years ago, which was fine. No more free phones with a new contract, but they offered a payment plan for your new phone, with the monthly charge countered by a credit for the same amount on your bill. (I swear I’m not imagining that, although Verizon recently told me that that wasn’t how the Verizon Edge plan worked.) Now, my daughter wants to upgrade, and her new phone will cost me (gasp!) $700. Really? I’d gladly take the contract option at this point, rather than having to sell a kidney to get a damn phone.
Thanks, Verizon.