I can play a videogame at home and have a crystal clear conversation with someone in Australia.
There’s no distinction between watching a half-hour YouTube video and a tv show. I watch them on the same screen.
Travel stuff…I think some of this was covered in another thread a while back but anyway…I know some of this is more “how things have changed” than “what a brave new world in which we live” but here we go.
The near total lack of paper to travel and book things. My aiplane ticket is on my phone. Every hotel I stay at has some kind of online booking function and I just show up with a QR code. Tickets for attractions are booked and I show a QR code at the entrance. I remember my parents getting thick books from the CAA listing hotels and motels, and I guess calling them to book rooms when planning a vacation. Does the auto club even print thos books any more?
And flatscreen TVs in virtually every hotel room. I stayed at a place in Dublin in 2014 that still had an actual non-flat TV in the room, but I think that was the last one. Even B&Bs have flat or even smart TVs now. Growing up, anything beyond a huge metal and glass box taking up a corner of the room was considered luxury. I was just on Trivago looking at some eastern european city, and in every room photo… And they all get actual shows. I remember a time before even cable was widespread in average family hotels and we were reliant on rabbit ears for a few local stations.Had I been shown pretty much any of this as a kid it would have blown my mind.
Yea, I am more amazed at what hasn’t changed. I still drive a car with a gasoline engine. I still live in a regular ol’ house. I still do manual chores.
I know a lot of places have changed over the past decades due to new construction, but am always pleasantly surprised when a place remains relatively untouched. Case in point: a few months ago I visited a marina on Lake Erie where I spent many summers as a teen in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I was amazed - and delighted - that so little had changed. The workers were lifting boats using the big hoist rig, just as they did when I was a teen. All docks were the same. The store was the same.
Taking this to the next level, my cell-enabled tablet (the size of a STTNG PADD) let’s me call / talk / text / search information anywhere in the world (with few limits other than cost) AND holds, at last count, 296 books. When I used to go on long vacations with my folks as a tween/teen, I carried a duffle bag of books to read, and it was heavy! And I’d still run out! AND I’d have to find a place to read where there was enough light which was hard when everyone else went to sleep!
Now, it’s lit, it has the capacity, and if I finish a book I can just click on a new one and have it immediately! And it’ll last (with lights) 10 hours easy, and more or less indefinitely anyplace I can plug in (car, airport, home) or at least twice that with a spare battery that’s the size of a pack of cigarettes! And may I also mention, at the same time I can just stream days worth of music of the internal storage on the same device to my in-ear headphones for the same amount of time with minimal pauses to charge from the tiny carrying case?
I was looking at a classic Route 66 hotel in Gallup. They quote “All guest rooms have been faithfully refurbished just as they were when John Wayne, Rita Hayworth and Kirk Douglas took up residence here.” Rotary phones, sure, but I didn’t know they had 47 inch flat screen tvs in those days!
Or to put it another way, today’s computers would have been considered supercomputers in the 1980s.
But what really boggles my mind is that most of us carry computing devices around with us in our pockets that have what would have been considered supercomputer level computing power 40 years ago. And at that rate, when I’m an old man 40 years from now, that smartphone I have in my pocket will be considered some piece of quaint, old fashioned tech. Can you imagine the latest iPhone sitting on the shelf in an antique store in 2065? Maybe by then we’ll all be using quantum computers.
It’s very interesting to see how this thread is developing, with boggle-ment coming not only from new things we have now, but also old things that have disappeared, and things we thought we’d have by now, but don’t. Keep 'em coming!
Meanwhile, I thought of a new one. 
I’ve spent a lot of time in Viet Nam. The first time I went there in 1993, my wife and her brother had to arrange things with their relatives through regular mail – about a five week turnaround between sending a letter and getting a reply. The Internet was barely available here then and not there at all, and very few people in Viet Nam even had telephones. Now I teach a weekly English lesson to two Vietnamese high school kids via a Zoom video call. The only remaining issue is I have to wake up early and they have to stay up late, but I know the flat-earthers are working hard to fix that!
No. There have been nearly two and a half billion iPhones made in the last 15 years. Our phones will just be old junk that someone forgot to dump in a landfill.
It boggles my mind that in 2025 the trains are a fucking mess and I’m still driving a gas car. Or even a car at all.
Eh, you’d be surprised. I’ve seen things like 1970s era stereos for sale at antique stores before. So I could see an iPhone that’s still around 40 years from now might be an interesting novelty to someone. Ok, I will grant you the battery is pretty much guaranteed to be dead by then and replacements will be impossible to find, whereas you can still plug in an old stereo and play records on it today.
Alright, I amend my statement. Imagine the latest iPhone in a museum 100 years from now.
based on a recommendation here, our family (w/ 3 teenage girls) installed Life360 on our celphones. It shows realtime location data of all in you circle.
It still boggles my mind, that I could tune in, see my oldest girl on her vacation walking through a country some 10,000km away, give here a free call and say “turn left into the next street and you will be at the place that is world famous for their salmon bagles (or Lennon was shot or somesuch)”
rationally I completely understand the mechanics/electronics, but emotionally it really boggles my mind - there is a little bit of being there, involved.
Just like when my wife is on the way home and I see her on the map and know in 5 sec. she will slow down b/c of this speedbump 3 blocks away …
I remember when I was able to download the Star Wars Special Edition trailer. It was around 10MB, 360x240 resolution, and took all night. That was amazing to me, that I could access things like that and it was mine to re-watch as often as I wanted.
Now I can download an entire movie in 2K HD in minutes, and it’s easily dismissed as nothing all that special.
I am also amazed at how many games are available to me on Steam, when I used to only have the limited selection that was on the shelves at a store an hour’s travel away. Usually only GTA or The Sims.
It took me a few years to get used to walking into places like Best Buy and not seeing any computer games on the shelves.
Oh, dont worry. In just six days things will change. 
Oh gawd yes.
Yes, that is good news- the bad news is that burner phones make it so the phone companies want more and more area codes.
I remember reading the Bill Gates book The Road Ahead in 1995. I don’t remember much about the book but I do remember him talking about how when he walks through his house the lights turn on. I think maybe he had music he could turn on via his voice too. I thought it was a fantastic idea.
Now this technology is available for anyone who can afford a router, a fairly cheap appliance and one of many cheap bulbs or plugs. Alexa begs me at least monthly to let her turn my lights on when I walk into a room (I decline, but I do let her turn them on when I ask).
Actually now that I think of it I’m kind of surprised that Microsoft didn’t go hard on the IOT stuff earlier than Amazon and Google did. Hmm.
Anyway, I friggin’ love that I can live like Bill Gates now! Boggles the mind!
I’m amazed by video phone calls. They were a science fiction idea for so long I never thought they’d really work comfortably, because eyelines don’t properly line up, but here we are.
This reminds me of another. The fact that I have a working Dick Tracy watch. I mean, my smartwatch has both a mic and speaker, so I can take/make phone calls from it (technically, since I didn’t spring for a data line for the watch itself, it relays from my phone, but I could if I spent the $$$).
Or watch a Youtube video (on a tiny screen and slighly tinny speaker), read an ebook (slowly and with eyestrain ) or check enough medical sensors to outfit a Star Trek TOS Biobed (okay, not quite, but damn, sleep information, blood oxygen, heart rate, exercise, etc).
What boggles the mind is that there was almost no difference in human life from BC 6000 to fairly recently, but then a colossal difference between even just 1900 and 2025 alone.
On a similar note, I was at a tram stop yesterday and saw a vehicule whose number was 2013. That made think about the year and realize that it was already 12 years ago.
When I was a kid, the year 2000 was the mind-bogglingly far future, let alone 2013. Now, 2013 has come and gone, and is the increasingly distant past.
But…
… I looked at the cars zipping past the bus stop and the buildings around, and thought that, in many respects, life hadn’t really changed that much since I was a kid.
The first half of the 20th century was defined quite distinctively from decade to decade. The 1920s were different to the 1910s. The 1960s were different to the 1950s. But from 1980 to now, each decade has been a lot more homogeneous with the edges more blurry. Certainly the technology has evolved, but it’s mostly the same thing only faster or more robust, it’s rarely a distinctive defining feature of a decade. Even fashions and haircuts have barely changed.