Hard to believe it's been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we've come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways
I'm a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don't want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.
Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we're not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn't caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don't have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That's at least a decade away
Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn't very widespread. We're again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance
Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It's so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they're just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that's copyrighted, but claim it's for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn't make any sense and just looks like they're going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty...
It just seems like there's a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don't see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?
What’s happening is that support from VC money is drying up. Tech companies have for a long time survived on the promise that they will eventually be much more profitable in the future. It doesn’t matter if it’s not profitable today. They will be in the future.
Now we’re in a period where there’s more pressure on tech companies to be profitable today. That’s why they’re going for such anti consumer behaviors. They want to make more with less.
I’m not sure if there’s a bubble bursting. It could just be a plateau.
I agree. Smartphones, for example, have hardly changed at all over the last ten years, but you don't see Apple and Samsung going out of business.
I understand you don’t appreciate where we’ve come from and how fast, can’t see the year to years changes, but the iPhone is just a little over ten years old. Do you really not see huge changes between an early iPhone and today’s?
On the contrary, I absolutely appreciate it. I was about 15 when mobile phones first became a thing that everyone owned, so I've lived through the entire progression from when they were something only a well to do businessman would have all the way through to today. The first iPhone was 2007, 17 years ago btw.
When mobile phones became popular, each new generation of phones saw HUGE improvements and innovation. However, the last ten years has pretty much just been slight improvements to screen/camera/memory/CPU. Form wise and functionally, they're very similar to the phone of ten years ago.
I understand that some technophiles will always be able to justify why the new iPhone is worth £1600 and if that's what they want to spend their money on then good for them, but I personally think that they are kidding themselves. Today you can get a brilliant phone for £300 or even less.
I’d never justify that urge to spend ridiculous money updating every year to the latest and greatest, but people tend to under appreciate the massive improvements from accumulated incremental improvements.
OLED screen on my iPhone X was revolutionary (and I’m sure Android had it first), as just one example, and now most phones are. Personally I find ultrawideband and “find my” very innovative and well implemented. Or if that’s too small a change, how about the entire revolution of Apple designing their own SoC for every new model. There’s emergency satellite texting, fall/crash detection, even Apple mostly solving phone theft is innovative (even if you don’t like their approach)
When we see steady improvements, humans tend to under-appreciate how it adds up
I'm not going to argue that there has been no progress, just that it's not on the same scale.
Look at the difference between phones from 2004 to 2014, then from 2014 to 2024 and surely you'd have to agree. We're looking at huge leaps in tech and innovation Vs much smaller incremental improvements.
And I'd once again like to state that this is not a complaint, just a point of view showing that astonishing amounts of technological innovation are not necessarily required to keep companies in business.
Samsung is damn near the point of going bankrupt. Samsung saw a 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter 2023
In more recent news;
BBC News - Samsung profits jump by more than 900% on chips https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68738046
Damn that's wild. Any business that has that drastic of spikes of profit and loss cannot possibly be sustainable. I can't see how it could be. Look at the automobile giants in the USA. All it took was one major economic event to bankrupt them, and they got bailed out which should've never happened. It's bullshit.
Memory chips have had an utterly fickle market ever since there's been memory chips, companies in that business are still in that business because they learned how to deal with the swings. If micron can survive (and they will) then so will Samsung whose memory chip business has the whole conglomerate to fall back onto.
Yh, I'm not for bailing out companies that are "too big to fail", I see it as socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, but that's a separate debate.
Tech stocks were a interesting case as they bloated far beyond their actual value during COVID, what happened in 2023 was probably somewhat of a renormalization and now they're back to business as usual. There will always be peaks and valleys, but I'd be very surprised to see tech stocks fail in the long term.
And it would be so easy to make a big splash in the market by having a phone where the camera doesn't protrude out of the back.
To be fair, some phones already have that but they have much lower spec cameras/lenses, so it's currently a trade off.
If a flag ship phone were to find away to implement a flush top spec camera, it would still only be an incremental improvement rather than a great new technology or a substantial innovation.