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Comment by raghavtoshniwal | Hacker News Reader

> Historically that’s never been the case

We overestimate how old history is here. There is a case to be made about how we've enjoyed exponential growth in cosumer technology over the last few decades but that could slow down on a few fronts. For ex- display resolution has reached "good enough" fidelity for a while.

I certainly hope you're right and we find cool, novel use cases but I wouldn't be certain. I personally have not thought about bandwidth for a few years now. Meanwhile I remember the speed bumps being exciting earlier. Diminishing utility is real.

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> display resolution has reached "good enough" fidelity

Ehhh it was only a couple of years ago that 4K became affordable at 120hz. I would absolutely buy a 5K display if one with decent input lag and no DP compression existed.

I still think about throughput and bandwidth from time to time. In my case, I am mobile enough to encounter the fast but high latency case and fast, but only in little bursts, too few to gloss over, cases. There is room for more here, and it might lead to something new, that scales.

That said, I do agree with you.

In my view, what the carriers do matters more.

They are still wanting to gatekeep to a much higher degree than they currently are.

Nothing pays like creating problems and then selling solutions does. Massive consolidation opens the door for the threat of artificial value to walk right through and into our wallets.

Take the truisms in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822400

That quality vs choice problem can be made to go away for what could be called a nominal charge each month. Think all the ugly FastPass was for Disney, applied to our mobile experiences. It's very ripe fruit, sadly.

You can go 100 years and see this, from telephone lines that were only local, to digital switched and dedicated lines, to satellite coverage, and all of the applications as we’ve gone from wired dial up internet to being able to FaceTime in the middle of the street. The same thing has happened with TV and it’s bandwidth increases on airwaves from just a few channels, black and white to color, cable, satellite, and now streaming online in 4K, soon 6K and even 8K… let alone in VR. The history isn’t so new.

I would not take your bet the world is good enough and innovation is dead. That’s been a wrong bet for thousands of years. Every time a new discovery or technological advancement is made, new use cases come that then fuel the next one… from the Bronze Age to stainless steel and fiberglass, medicinal herbs to antibiotics and mRNA vaccines, writing systems to tablets, paper to the printing press and now this comment on HN.

> has reached "good enough"

That was said about fullhd and even hd-ready. Fast forward to now and, no, it is not good enough anymore. Same about TN displays, same about 60Hz, same about 300 nits of brightness.

Or as another closer example: awful upload rates were good enough when one only needed consumption, but now with home office work upload is also important

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