There were only 9 years between the 1998 Comdex and the iPhone release in 2007. Of the 23 years we have had iPhones for 14 years... Time perception is sometimes strange.
I think people forget how quickly computers (especially in efficiency!) improved from just 2000-2005 and again from 2005-2010.
Everything has leveled out a bit until recently. I think we'll see another 5 year growth spurt once stacked designs become common end of 2022ish. Though TSV vs EMIB is a whole other argument/ball of wax.
You can say that again. I'm typing this on a desktop PC powered by a Xeon that is approaching 10 years old and I don't have any complaints. The cost of upgrading it over the years has been modest.
In comparison I have a Nexus 5 that is about the same age and getting modern Android on it is a pain, the processor really struggles and the physical device itself has seen much better days.
"""Luckily""" for me I do mostly standard-definition encodes and can get a sustained ~11FPS with my own ICC-built x265 binaries and my own custom "SD" encoder tuning. Every time I encode an HD video I wonder why I haven't replaced this system yet. Then I look at component prices and remember why.
Kids today with their insanely high IOPS! They don't know the pain!
Go back nine years today and things don't feel that different from now. People still buy Skyrim.
Someday we're going to wonder how anyone managed to navigate or buy things in shops without realtime vision markup.
Big open world is good, if you can manage to fill the big open world with stuff. But procedural generation is annoying and repetitive, but at the same time handcrafting a world is time and labor intensive. See: Cyberpunk 2077
... so to speak.
It was only a couple years between the 1998 Comdex and when I got my first wifi PalmOS device with a color screen. At some point my handheld devices acquired the ability to connect directly to a cellular network, which was nice, and then became really nice with the iPhone. But I don't think that was ever a planned feature for the WebPad in the first place.
The form factor is perhaps more interesting. We did have to wait 12 years until Apple legitimized the idea of a device along these lines that doesn't fit in a pocket.
"Form factor" can be a slippery notion. The genius of the iPad design, I think, is that it _couldn't_ be mistaken for an educational device. It actually looked like it belonged in a leather folio next to some important papers, not in your kids' school bag.
The upshot of this is that there's more time between now and the IBM PC than there is between the IBM PC and ENIAC. (18K vacuum tunes, filled a room, and and was programmed via physical rewiring, at least initlally.)
> Time perception is sometimes strange.
Agreed.