Future Tech Thoughts
Well, firstly, I just want to say, ASUS made a phone with a notch and, as predicted, an Apple fan site automatically took this to mean that Apple was right.
We KNOW when Apple does something visibly different that SOMEONE will copy it. It DOES NOT make Apple "right".
But, that isn't really what this post is about. At least, not entirely.
In terms of computing I'd say we're entering the "post obsolescence era". About 10+ years ago the pace of computer development rapidly slowed. But, smart phones were there to pick up the slack. They added size and battery life to the performance question and gave computing a new direction to advance in. Since then, traditional PCs haven't really disappeared. People just no longer buy new ones any more until they need them.
When I was in high school, affluent households might have a laptop per family member and a desktop or two on top of that. These days, there might be a family computer or two. A tablet or two, and then pretty much everyone has a phone.
But, smartphones are heading in the same direction. I mean, we have 6GB phones right now. That is 2GB more than the recommended to run Windows. We have 8 core processors with at least some cores well past the 2GHz limit. And the OSs are already more lightweight than something like Windows. Put simply... the OSes run buttery smooth. The apps run buttery smooth. And, that performance and those specs are starting to trickle into mid-range phones. Soon, only the budget phones will offer a sub-par experience and that experience will still be far better than it used to be.
While I would certainly argue that neither GPU nor CPU performance are anywhere near on par with what is possible on traditional PCs, the pace of development is slowing down. And, likewise, sales growth is slowing. More and more people are holding on to phones longer and/or buying refurb units. The story is going the same way PCs went.
Honestly, if I were into buying refurb anything, I'd have bought a refurbished Pixel XL over my current Pixel 2. And probably saved a boat load doing it, and not really noticed. 2 years from now when I'm effectively finally behind I could buy a refurbished Pixel 3 or whatever they name the next device. I could leapfrog through refurb units and never be far enough behind to care.
By all accounts either AR or IoT or smart speakers/assistants seem to be the next wave. But, this actually causes a problem. None of those place a huge demand on hardware. Wearables and IoT generally rely on something else (a hub or a smartphone) to be the brains, and given the small screens (or total absence) they generally need an external device to manage them anyway. So, no biggie there. ARs biggest technical hurdles lie elsewhere and smart assistants store their brains largely in the cloud.
There will continue to be incremental changes in hardware. While the pace of change is certainly slower, we definitely see new and improved PC hardware and we will continue to do so. The same is true of smartphones. But, at the moment, it looks like the smartphone craze will die down before there is something as technologically competitive to replace it.
And I think this will have a profound impact on how products change going forward. Firstly, I think the iPhone X notch is an example of where we are going. The notch exists not because it makes the device tangibly better. It simply makes it different. But, I think that will be the point going forward. Today, when a new phone is released with better specs than all of the competition... it remains that way for months, or weeks or even shorter. And with the leaps getting smaller, companies are needing something other than specs to differentiate.
If you have a Galaxy S8, the Galaxy S9 doesn't really bump up the specs enough for you to care. There is no guarantee that the Galaxy 10 (or whatever) will either. A bunch of people will upgrade simply because it is better. But more and more people are opting to stay back. And what is interesting to me is that the new S9 looks basically identical to the S8. What this tells me is that where Apple went with notch, Samsung has decided that their bezels are small enough and that the wrap around screen is their selling feature. They're not looking to lure with upgrades. They're hoping their design will slowly win more and more people over.
Pixel on the other hand launched with Pixel Visual Core. A dedicated image processing chip. This allows the phone itself and apps on the phone to leverage machine learning to improve the pictures taken. When you consider that the biggest change in the S9 is an improved camera, you can see how, if this pans out for Google, that this sort of tactic might play to its advantage in the long run. A phone with an ever improving camera. Google might try and apply dedicated chips and/or machine learning to other aspects of their phones and hope to lure away from the competition in that way.
We KNOW when Apple does something visibly different that SOMEONE will copy it. It DOES NOT make Apple "right".
But, that isn't really what this post is about. At least, not entirely.
In terms of computing I'd say we're entering the "post obsolescence era". About 10+ years ago the pace of computer development rapidly slowed. But, smart phones were there to pick up the slack. They added size and battery life to the performance question and gave computing a new direction to advance in. Since then, traditional PCs haven't really disappeared. People just no longer buy new ones any more until they need them.
When I was in high school, affluent households might have a laptop per family member and a desktop or two on top of that. These days, there might be a family computer or two. A tablet or two, and then pretty much everyone has a phone.
But, smartphones are heading in the same direction. I mean, we have 6GB phones right now. That is 2GB more than the recommended to run Windows. We have 8 core processors with at least some cores well past the 2GHz limit. And the OSs are already more lightweight than something like Windows. Put simply... the OSes run buttery smooth. The apps run buttery smooth. And, that performance and those specs are starting to trickle into mid-range phones. Soon, only the budget phones will offer a sub-par experience and that experience will still be far better than it used to be.
While I would certainly argue that neither GPU nor CPU performance are anywhere near on par with what is possible on traditional PCs, the pace of development is slowing down. And, likewise, sales growth is slowing. More and more people are holding on to phones longer and/or buying refurb units. The story is going the same way PCs went.
Honestly, if I were into buying refurb anything, I'd have bought a refurbished Pixel XL over my current Pixel 2. And probably saved a boat load doing it, and not really noticed. 2 years from now when I'm effectively finally behind I could buy a refurbished Pixel 3 or whatever they name the next device. I could leapfrog through refurb units and never be far enough behind to care.
By all accounts either AR or IoT or smart speakers/assistants seem to be the next wave. But, this actually causes a problem. None of those place a huge demand on hardware. Wearables and IoT generally rely on something else (a hub or a smartphone) to be the brains, and given the small screens (or total absence) they generally need an external device to manage them anyway. So, no biggie there. ARs biggest technical hurdles lie elsewhere and smart assistants store their brains largely in the cloud.
There will continue to be incremental changes in hardware. While the pace of change is certainly slower, we definitely see new and improved PC hardware and we will continue to do so. The same is true of smartphones. But, at the moment, it looks like the smartphone craze will die down before there is something as technologically competitive to replace it.
And I think this will have a profound impact on how products change going forward. Firstly, I think the iPhone X notch is an example of where we are going. The notch exists not because it makes the device tangibly better. It simply makes it different. But, I think that will be the point going forward. Today, when a new phone is released with better specs than all of the competition... it remains that way for months, or weeks or even shorter. And with the leaps getting smaller, companies are needing something other than specs to differentiate.
If you have a Galaxy S8, the Galaxy S9 doesn't really bump up the specs enough for you to care. There is no guarantee that the Galaxy 10 (or whatever) will either. A bunch of people will upgrade simply because it is better. But more and more people are opting to stay back. And what is interesting to me is that the new S9 looks basically identical to the S8. What this tells me is that where Apple went with notch, Samsung has decided that their bezels are small enough and that the wrap around screen is their selling feature. They're not looking to lure with upgrades. They're hoping their design will slowly win more and more people over.
Pixel on the other hand launched with Pixel Visual Core. A dedicated image processing chip. This allows the phone itself and apps on the phone to leverage machine learning to improve the pictures taken. When you consider that the biggest change in the S9 is an improved camera, you can see how, if this pans out for Google, that this sort of tactic might play to its advantage in the long run. A phone with an ever improving camera. Google might try and apply dedicated chips and/or machine learning to other aspects of their phones and hope to lure away from the competition in that way.
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