While cool for the top 5% wealthiest people, I'd be more interested in tech for the other 95% that will actually be affordable.
Quite a bit of the technology used there seems destined to get more affordable as it's getting more widely adopted.
And yeah, insane prices at the start funds development for everyone else, I remember when the first 4K screens came out and they where exotic, now they are just normal.
Same thing happened with phones and hell computers, I was the first kid I knew with a computer back in the 80s and we where not wealthy, that think cost more than my dad made in a week, an actual IBM PC was unattainable til I was I was 10.
Now I have hilariously more powerful single board computers shoved in a drawer because I can’t find the time to do anything with them.
Minecraft has never been demanding resource wise, I'm sure early versions had serious performance issues but running it on a cheapo laptop has always been totally reasonable - it's quite accessible (it was written in java even!)
But for hardware, it's almost always some expensive thing first. The internet was once very expensive to access, cell phones were initially very expensive, DVD players were initially very expensive, computers in general, etc.
Software seems less like technology and more like writing. The distribution cost, once the systems are in place, is marginal. The technology part is creating the systems that enable the software.
More seriously, I disagree about software being less important because there have been very real innovations for tooling accomplished in software alone. Email is a pretty classic example - but a more modern one might be Google Cardboard which can turn your smart phone into a rather underwhelming VR headset. There are plenty of hardware alternatives but the same basic functionality was accomplished on generalized hardware.
Additionally, all this technology is only really possible due to other technology - we don't discount a new shiny computer just because it's just a dumb oddly shaped box if you can't supply it with electricity - but the costs to develop software are generally lower than hardware so I think it's fair to have a general notion that hardware is more innovative - it's just that you're conflating two different variables - cost and medium.
Maybe we could agree on email as a technology. Maybe. I think it's a stretch. I hope we could both agree that the nth email client isn't technology though. It's not adding a new capability to humanity which is how I tend to think about technology. Refrigerator - keep stuff cold. Electricity - power to operate machines and light. Computers - organize, access, modify information. etc. New JavaScript library or new game... Not so much technology.
Additionally Zoom isn't a novel technology, it isn't even particularly interesting technically when compared to other video conferencing solutions - but over the past year it's been incredibly important to a number of people.
I think the OC slightly missed the mark in mentioning "important technologies" instead of something closer to "technologically innovative" technologies or, more accurately (but less interesting of a statement) "expensive to develop technologies". Things that are expensive to develop generally aren't cheap to begin with, while things that are cheap to develop need to be cheap to compete with other market entrants and clones. Additionally hardware (a limiting factor on cost for a lot of technology) tends to get cheaper over time and that rate of change is accelerated by a large market of interest (leading to more folks deciding to try and iterate new designs).
No, Linux differed from Minix in utterly fundamental ways outlined in the correspondence between Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tenenbaum.
And basically anything Nintendo pushes as a console gimmick. It's not that the tech immediately goes from research to broadly accessible, but rather that they tend to take old tech that no one saw as having profitable consumer applications and find one for it. In that way, as far as consumers are concerned, it goes from unknown to widely-used without making a stopover in early-adapter purgatory.
And I see that Nintendo has apparently sold an extremely impressive number of consoles (https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/11/nintendo_has_now_s...). But even if everyone only bought one console each, that's only about 10% of world population.
This may be a little unfair, but I do wonder if there isn't a tendency to consider a technology to be widely available when it becomes available to you and the folks farther back in the line don't count or aren't relevant.
In any case, you said "important," not "widely available," and yes, Nintendo's products are hugely important. Many of today's technological advancements can be traced back to their proving that a given use case for a primitive version of a given technology was viable.
I will also note that my original comment was in response to someone who is "more interested in tech for the other 95%".
So, 12 years (back then) after the iPhone, it's reached a lot more than 5% of the world.