Quite why this bloke has a regular column about technology is unknown:
But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold, detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the 2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental improvements. What was so special about that model? Mostly this: it had a front-facing camera, which opened up the world of selfies, video chat, social media and all the other accoutrements of our networked world. But from then on, it was just incremental changes and price rises all the way.
And this is true not just for iPhones but for smartphones, generally.
And:
Development of ChatGPT and its ilk will plateau, just like it did for smartphones, and then what are we left with? More ho-hum consumer tech
Err, yes?
This is what happens to all technologies. We have a new one, it’s pretty ropey but it just about works. The first 5 to 10 generations make it really work. Then it plateaus.
And?
That’s just the way all techs work. The airplane hsan’t got much, if any, faster since the 1960s. And? We’ve also had the internet, smartphones, Facebook and all sorts of lovely stuff since then. One the new tech is “good enough” it’s “Let’s look for the new new tech” time.
So we perfect the moldboard plough – time to get to work on that new copper smelting tech then. This is just how it works!
Whoopee! You’ve discovered the Richard Murphy of Tech! Is he a Professor at an exalted university? Because, if he is, it won’t be exalted in a week or so…
‘ho hum consumer tech’. ? Think that marks him up as cretin in the subtitle . Consumer tech is phenomenal , mind bendingly unbelievable achievements . It’s like sneering at ‘land fill android’, tech we’d have thought was impossible 30 years ago.
“Consumer tech is phenomenal , mind bendingly unbelievable achievements.”
My sports watch is just amazing. It is a bit wasted since I had to give up triathlons and just concentrate on swimming but the fact that it has GPS built in that can give you a detailed map of your cycle or running route is pretty incredible in my view.
Technology plateaus, but it does cheaper and more use it.
Nothing to do with plateaus
It’s built in obsolescence, and Apple products are notorious for it
‘smart’ phones have been good enough for most purposes for over a decade
This is the Guardian pop up grifting for a donation from me
This is what we’re up against
Congratulations on being one of our top readers globally – you’ve read 422 articles in the last year
The rich and powerful trying to stop us publishing stories; lobby groups determined to undermine climate science; and bad actors spreading disinformation online. But we have you.
“But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold, detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the 2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental improvements. What was so special about that model? Mostly this: it had a front-facing camera, which opened up the world of selfies, video chat, social media and all the other accoutrements of our networked world. But from then on, it was just incremental changes and price rises all the way.”
The thing is, the phone market doesn’t have price rises. If you want what an iPhone did 5 years ago, you go and buy a Moto G. It’s similar in specifications. The Moto G also has 5G. That’s a £100 phone vs a phone that cost £700.
That’s where the real improvement has happened with phones for the world in the past 5 years: £100 smartphones used to be pretty shit, and they aren’t now. Thanks to people buying the latest smartphone, a lot of investment goes into the stuff that goes into them, which trickles down to the low end. God bless those Veblen consumers and rubes!
I mean, why did this guy get 1TB? Does a professor of understanding in tech know how much video or documents that is? That’s like 20 hours of 4K video.
Another one incapable of understanding the difference between needs and wants, nor the difference between the objective and subjective, nor the different needs and wants of different individuals.
Everyone should need and want what he needs and wants, and he should be in charge to make sure that’s all they get.
The base instincts of those two twin, ugly sisters, Socialism and Fascism.
The laptop I bought last year has about 2x more performance than the previous one, a GPU at least twice as powerful and cost about half as much. You can get a 50 inch TV for 300 quid. A (very basic admittedly) Microwave for under 90 quid.
You can do a lot more for a lot less money across most of consumer tech. What is this guy on about?
@Stonyground
I find nothing whatever amazing about your sportswatch. I’ve been using GPS devices for the past 20 years. It has a clock function? So did my Casio.
“I mean, why did this guy get 1TB? Does a professor of understanding in tech know how much video or documents that is? That’s like 20 hours of 4K video.”
He’ll be one of these cunts who video documents his life-style & shares it with his contact list via Whatapp. Whereupon it gets instantly deleted by the recipient. Because if you don’t do that, you’re own phone memory fills up with their garbage.
It’s the same eco-fuckwittery as powers JSO/XR etc – they want to freeze the progress we have made to date in order to save Gaia. Don’t need more functionality that an old iPhone, so let’s not rape the earth for more resources.
Twat should be made to live in a hovel eating turnips if he wants to turn back time.
“A (very basic admittedly) Microwave for under 90 quid.”
We get them free by inheriting them. Similarly we’ve never had to pay for a colour TV; they’ve all (meaning both) been gifts.
As for Mr Twat: “insane amounts of corporate investment (with no clear idea of what the returns on that investment will be)”. Well, that’s capitalism for you. If you want a degree of certainty about returns on investment opt for socialism. At least you’ll know that the returns will be negative.
And on a technical point: I’ve never met any mathematician who has banged on about sigmoidal curves. But biologists do all the time: first exponential growth (in, say, a bacterial population), then the curve has an inflection point, etc.
A (very basic admittedly) Microwave for under 90 quid.
That sounds like mine. It has a countdown timer, I put cold food in, set it for the correct amount of time, and the food comes out hot. What enhancements would another £100 buy me?
‘That sounds like mine. It has a countdown timer, I put cold food in, set it for the correct amount of time, and the food comes out hot. What enhancements would another £100 buy me?’
An unintelligible control panel.
” ‘That sounds like mine. It has a countdown timer, I put cold food in, set it for the correct amount of time, and the food comes out hot. What enhancements would another £100 buy me?’
An unintelligible control panel. ”
An unintelligible control panel that isn’t backlit
An internal light that fails after a fortnight
A beeping noise that is used for everything
Internal surafces that are impossible to clean
Pendant time!
“The airplane hsan’t got much, if any, faster since the 1960s”
True – but that’s less about technology, and more about incentives. There is no engineering reason that a Concorde 2 doesn’t exist – that’s a combination of politics and economics.
Planes have improved in other ways. This twitter thread was interesting:
https://x.com/Jordan_W_Taylor/status/1817188579476390336
Author of the original article is still being a cretin though…
@BiK
Exactly. Aircraft are actually slower than they were in the 1960s but their fuel burn is down something like 80% and the accident/fatality rates are down even more.
Smartphones
To unlock the iPhone 4, you had to type in a pin code. Touch ID with a fingerprint scanner built into the home button appeared 3 years later in the iPhone 5S, and Face ID with lidar mapping so that you can unlock your phone just by looking at it appeared 4 years after that in the iPhone X. And these features have got faster and more accurate over time as well. Apple Pay appeared in the iPhone 6, 4 years after the 4 was released.
If the writer actually tried using an iPhone 4 for a while, he would probably change his tune. And the complaint that they’re getting ever more expensive is a load of rubbish, too. The US off-contract price of a base 16GB iPhone 4 at launch was $649 (I couldn’t find the UK figure), the US off-contract price of the just-released base 64GB iPhone SE4 is $429, so inflation-adjusted we’re talking about half the price. Obviously there are Androids that do the same job for even less, but comparing apples to apples here.
My understanding is that the fuel efficiency of aircraft increased because of the switch from turbojet to turbofan, and the latter work best at about 50mph slower than the former, so that jet aircraft are marginally slower than they were (not counting Concorde, as half a dozen aircraft don’t really count). I understand that modern jets are quieter too, so wins all round. For most journeys, 50mph reduction in speed when cruising is insignificant, especially when considering take off, landing, getting to and from cruising altitude, and, of course, what happens in airports!
@Excavator Man
Kinda… The majority of the fuel efficiency gains are thanks to the engines, but there’s quite a bit in aerodynamics (esp. wing design — by retrofitting winglets to their 737NGs, Ryanair reduced fleet fuel burn by 4%), control optimisation and mass savings that all add up.
Turbojets are inefficient at any speed, but can go fast, hence why most military jets (and Concorde) use/d them. Turbofans cannot go supersonic, but that’s largely irrelevant because they have a peak efficiency speed which is largely a function of the bypass ratio. Effectively each successive generation of jet engine has a larger bypass ratio, so the engine will have a peak-efficiency air speed. High bypass engines are physically larger, hence the issues with the 737 Max needing the engines mounted in front of the wing instead of underneath it because they didn’t fit, and the resulting differences in dynamic characteristics by moving the centres of thrust and mass forward that they tried to fudge in software in order to keep a common type-rating against the older 737s.
The trouble is that the aircraft’s wings will have been designed with the original engines in mind, and they will also have an optimal cruising speed, so upon a re-engining there will be a disparity between the airframe and the engines’ optimal speeds, necessitating a compromise between the two for the system as a whole.
Re-engining something like a 747 that was designed with very-low-bypass turbofans in mind is almost pointless because the wing configuration is set up for high-speed cruising — all the non-Concorde transatlantic airliner speed records are 747s — so putting engines on that have great efficiency at a speed way lower than the airframe is optimised for would lead to negligible savings.