A flagship of 2015, like the Samsung Galaxy S6, is a medium-low specs phone of today (3GB RAM, 32GB storage), but with smaller screen. For most people that only use social media and messaging, it’s perfectly serviceable.
They’re physically bigger, higher resolution and thinner (but you can’t easilly replace the battery when it inevitably dies) and the number of cameras went up from 1 to 3.
The difference between a phone from 10 years ago and one from 20 years ago is the difference between the 6th generation of the Apple iPhone and the Motorola Razr (a non-smart flip-phone) both lauded phones at their time.
The same massive deceleration in the speed of improvement compared to the period from the 80 up to the 2010s seems to have happenned all over Tech: my generation (Gen X) saw the appearance of consumer computing (Spectrum, Amiga, the original Mac back in the 80s) which accelerated to massive adoption amongs consumers and informatization of companies with the PC at the same time as mobile phones became mass market (the 90s), then the Internet and the digitalization of consumer technology with things like Digital Cameras (end of the 90s and the 00s), then mobile networked computing in the form of smart phones and tablets (late 00s and 10s).
What exactly is the great life-changing technological breakthrough of the late 2010s and the 2020s? The only one I can think of is the weaponization of Social Networks for mass manipulation, which is hardly an improvement.
I think you would notice a big difference from a 10 year old phone.
A flagship of 2015, like the Samsung Galaxy S6, is a medium-low specs phone of today (3GB RAM, 32GB storage), but with smaller screen. For most people that only use social media and messaging, it’s perfectly serviceable.
They’re physically bigger, higher resolution and thinner (but you can’t easilly replace the battery when it inevitably dies) and the number of cameras went up from 1 to 3.
The difference between a phone from 10 years ago and one from 20 years ago is the difference between the 6th generation of the Apple iPhone and the Motorola Razr (a non-smart flip-phone) both lauded phones at their time.
The same massive deceleration in the speed of improvement compared to the period from the 80 up to the 2010s seems to have happenned all over Tech: my generation (Gen X) saw the appearance of consumer computing (Spectrum, Amiga, the original Mac back in the 80s) which accelerated to massive adoption amongs consumers and informatization of companies with the PC at the same time as mobile phones became mass market (the 90s), then the Internet and the digitalization of consumer technology with things like Digital Cameras (end of the 90s and the 00s), then mobile networked computing in the form of smart phones and tablets (late 00s and 10s).
What exactly is the great life-changing technological breakthrough of the late 2010s and the 2020s? The only one I can think of is the weaponization of Social Networks for mass manipulation, which is hardly an improvement.