Guess What's the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years | Hacker News Reader

Guess What's the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years

theatlantic.com

76 pointsukdm47 comments

And the cool thing is that a smartphone now serves the function of all of these gadgets. It's a music player, video player, camcorder, digital camera, answering machine, and so on. Internet TV replaces the need for satellite TV and a cellphone camera + email replaces the need for a FAX machine. It's astonishing how few appliances you need aside from a smartphone.

But it does a poor job replacing the boombox. You need some other device or attachment to really share that sound.

It already does a pretty good job at annoying me in the bus with other people's dance/rap "music"

Certainly, if you don't personally enjoy it then it doesn't qualify as music.

it could be my favourite tune, hearing it in a bus via a maxed out phone speaker from someone 5 rows behind will hardly be considered music

Then take your hearing aid out.

That's a feature. Artistry was a failing industry in the era of the boombox; friends and family would steal the hard work -- performances -- of artists in the streets of our nations. Handheld devices have come a long way of protecting the consumer, from the likes of the MPAA, and the artists, from those of us stealing their live performances.

the new breed of smartphones with their tiny mono speakers on the back do a poor job at it.

a lot of old style smartphones from nokia had such unheard today feature as builtin stereo speakers. but I've even seen low-range handsets used as boomboxes in the developing world.

Plus, one looks rather moronic carrying his smartphone on top of a shoulder and walking n a funky style :P

If you take another look at the figure, the highest correlating factor isn't whether the "gadget" (by which they mean consumer technology, not any specific device) is for "consumption of entertainment" or "communication or production of media", as the text of the article suggests. It's simply how complicated the technology is--dare I say, how innovative the technology is--and the reason is simple: the more innovative the technology, the longer it took from first being "on the market" to becoming mature enough to be widely adopted.

(How does one count length of time "on the market", anyway? What counts as the first cell phone "on the market"?)

So what this is really saying is: the more advanced the technology, the longer it takes for the technology to go from early-adopter to mass market.

Also, more advanced technology is going to be much more expensive when it first hits market than simpler refinements on existing technology.

The boom box was a significant price reduction from the standard hi-fi setup of the 70s. Cell phones, on the other hand, were prohibitively expensive for many years after their initial introduction.

It depends on what considers to be a boombox.

A strong case could be made for the Panasonic Dynamite 8-track player from the early/mid 1970's.

[http://lh6.ggpht.com/-6pUpoW8QOVY/TyVslmmS4gI/AAAAAAAAI2k/HP...]

I don't recall seventy percent adoption of boomboxes in 1982.

I think I get your point but I don't think it entirely matches the graph. Is an answering machine more technologically advanced than a portable CD player?

Edit: What I'm really trying to get at is that there are so many factors that go into adoption. Trying to sum it up by how 'advanced' the tech may be is a gross oversimplification

The GP said complicated, not advanced. A CD player is much less complicated for the "VCR clock has flashed 12:00 for the last four years" crowd than an answering machine.

Please re-read his last sentence.

Also, this doesn't really affect my point. Complicated, advanced, cheap, fashionable, etc are all valid factors in how/why things get adopted. Picking out one of them, on the basis of a graph, oversimplifies things.

Depends how you define "fastest". In this case it's "percentage of households after 7 years". I think if we shortened the definition (arbitrarily) to 1 year we would get very different results (yet keep the same headline).

In 1 year it would be probably just the cheapest one, new stuff is usually quite expensive. 7 years is enough to become an affordable comodity.

Also, it's 7 years after first introduction to market. There are lots of products which spent a long time going nowhere and then suddenly exploded once they became sufficiently refined.

Such as the iPod? Or are you thinking of a different example?

Actually I might be way off with the iPod...

The first example which came to mind was the internet. After that, smart phones.

The internet came on the market in 1982, 7 years later it was still pretty much only in universities.

If you count 1992 - when com connection was really allowed and the web was invented it probably still wasn't in all that many homes 7 years later. 1999 was still dial-up for me and I was a Caltech grad student!

No, the graph shows markets for entire product categories. Individual products might have faster initial growth (because previous iterations for that market would be ignored), on the other hand they are fast to be discontinued.

Actually I might be way off with the iPod...

Naw, you're pretty much spot on. It took a few refinements to get traction, and that all happened about two years after it launched.

The 3rd gen iPod came out in early 2003, and was the first one with USB support and the familiar dock connector that we all take for granted today. At the same time the iTunes Music Store launched as well.

Then in fall 2003 Apple released iTunes for Windows. That and USB support means millions of potential customers who couldn't have used an iPod otherwise before. Then, checkmate: they brought out the iPod Mini in 2004. Not only did it look cool, it was priced at a point where all sorts other folks could get in, and they could finally use it on their Windows PCs.

Color television would be my pick for that category. If you go by time of first commercial introduction, it had no uptake really: it came out in 1953, but expensive units with little programming available sold poorly in the 1950s. But once it started catching on around 1965, the transition was really fast, with nearly everyone having one by 1970. If you went by 7-year period with the biggest percentage delta, I think it would be in the running.

The iPod doesn't really count because it's a portable digital media player, not a product category on it's own. The first portable digital media players hit the market in 1997, but the first iPod reached the market in 2001.

That was my thought -- the personal computer and mobile phone have definitely outsold the boombox over the span of the last fifty years, but it took both technologies about two decades to mature to the point where they were a fit for the mass market.

A better title for this article would be 'Which new gadget had the fastest uptake during the past fifty years?'

I think the title is misleading. It's not so much about the fasted adopted gadget but rather fastest adopted consumer technology.

Gadget connotes a single device --like a Kinect, iPhone or Garmin GPS.

It's worth noting that all five of the fastest-adopted technologies were for the consumption of entertainment not communication or production of media.

IMHO, that's the biggest takeaway from this article.

Definitely fits the 90:9:1 theory of consumption : curation : creation. I wonder to what extent the startup community or entrepreneurs in general represent an abnormal distribution of that ratio...

The things on the left side of the graph were relatively inexpensive consumer devices while the things on the right were generally more expensive.

The author's surprise that the color tv or cell phone weren't more quickly adopted seems ignorant of price considerations. Color televisions and cell phones were very expensive when they were introduced.

When you consider all the D batteries I had to buy for my boom box, it was pretty expensive ;)

My Panasonic took 8 of those

Seriously, the boombox was relatively low cost of entry, and the distributed stand-alone nature of the device. You didn't need connections, signal strength &c. Just some music.

Correlates with Kodak box camera in the 19th/20th century?

I think this is apples to oranges comparison due to differences in prices. Early cell phones cost much more than boom boxes or CD players and they carried a monthly fee with them.

Yeah, that. CD players were highly desired but very expensive in the early days. Boom boxes came in and were probably cheaper than a decent hi-fi.

I was guessing that's the walkman (in any form), was close.

It's interesting to compare this to the rate of adoption for the land line telephone: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnZb5H7...

This new technology took decades to reach mass use, from the time it was introduced on the market.

A direct requirement for new infrastructure deployment to make use of a new technology is always going to reduce the rate of uptake.

The top 5 things on the list all require pretty much just a factory and a large number of trucks to get value out to the consumers quickly. Plus customers themselves were providing amplification in the value being delivered on those trucks by producing their own mixtapes and VHS recordings to swap with friends all the time.

That's an excellent point. Cell phone networks and color television content took a long time to develop. They weren't useful to very many consumers when first introduced, so the market rate was naturally very slow.

If they're going to break out stereo color tv from color tv then why not break out "superphone" from smartphone (which isn't even listed)? Not even 5 years from the iphone debut adpotion rates are pretty high.

One wonders exactly what constitutes a 'boombox'. Would my bakelite wireless count? Or must the device have a fade-sporting b-boy attached to it's base to qualify?

no, your bakelite radio would not count, as a boombox is understood to include a tape or cd player - few radio stations adapted to the new musical styles quickly enough for the street.

My guess was the keyless entry remote, which I expect is now very close to 100% penetration in the US. I wonder if that was one considered for the chart.

I'm in the 0%! But in all seriousness, I think the problem here is that these were actually introduced back in the early 80s on high-end cars. So it took a lot longer than 7 years to become widely adopted.

It's definitely not 100%. Probably over 50%, but my car and many others I know of do not have it.

This strikes me as utterly implausible, since the most likely way to get one of these is to get a new car, something that seems to happen on about a 10-year cycle based on the latest data.

..that's the power of MUSIC!

Suprised the fleshlight wasn't on that list

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