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Comment by VladVladikoff | Hacker News Reader

It’s wild how antique the iPhone interface design looks. It’s not THAT old.

It's 19 years since the iPhone came out, that's almost two decades. 19 years before the iPhone was 1988. Things from 1988 definitely seemed dated in 2007. In fact I think style/aesthetics change is now getting slower and slower. Anything within the last 10 years looks like it could have been made today, since the image resolution / quality doesn't significantly change in such an obvious way. Throughout the 90s and 00s, it felt like things were constantly changing year to year. Totally different mindblowing graphics in games in each release, new OS features, digital cameras, cell phones (at all), then color screens on dumbphones, PDA, smartphone etc. etc., any Internet at all, then broadband etc. It subjectively felt much more rapid than today. The only exception is AI today, but even that is a different feel.

The rate at which AI is accelerating seems the same as other big inventions.

Some examples:

- Tim invented the WWW in 1989, but I'd took until around 2000 (10 years) to go to the web we now know with Streaming and Social Media.

- The first big mobile success (Nokia 3310) was in 2000, the 'end-stage' phone (iPhone 5 or something) was also 10 years later.

- Google Deepdream was in 2016, to "Will Smith eating spaghetti" in 2023, to now AI generated video literally unrecognisable from real.

I think we will be seeing some 'end-stage' AI in the next 5 years too, where the rate of improvements will sharply drop.

Robotics will probably be next? First company that can create an all purpose robot.

My point was more about how dated something feels, how much it esthetically feels like a different dusty era.

>AI generated video literally unrecognisable from real.

What?? Not even close

You may be thinking of video you saw generated last month.

I think the tells of AI video are becoming more subtle, similar to language. It's no longer so much that the visuals are categorically impossible, such as mangled hands or impossible geometric arrangements of objects, but you can still see style and composition that is more frequent in AI video (but could be possible in a real video as well in principle).

Such as higher production quality, too beautiful people, a kind of stock photo sheen, etc. Of course if you use special LoRAs or prompts and input images, it's possible to leave the stock footage style, but most people don't bother with it, just like most people use stock ChatGPT in its default voice with its favorite trope-filled cadence etc.

It looked old when it was fresh already.

When it comes to iPhones, iPhone 4 and iOS 7 were the first ones that looked modern and pleasant (don't confuse aesthetics with UX though).

It seems our fingers have gotten thinner, or more skillful at tapping at relatively tinier buttons now. Look at how huge those buttons are.

I am aware screen size has increased tremendously, even then I think the buttons were still quite huge compared to the size of today's tappable links.

> It seems our fingers have gotten thinner

Of course not. It's actually way simpler: smartphones became taller and heavier and you no longer can use it with one hand anymore even if you are 2m tall man. So the main mode of interaction changed to a two-hand mode and one-hand is relegated for the doom scrolling, selfies and quick replies.

Hell, my Moto has a special one-handed mode!

>> Use one-handed mode

>> Want to use one thumb to navigate your phone? Turn on One-handed mode.

>> This mode is only available if you're using Gesture navigation.

https://en-us.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1...

Trivia game: try to guess to which smartphone these dimensions belongs to:

    115.2 mm   58.6 mm   9.3  mm  137 g
    130.7 mm   68.9 mm   8.99 mm  145 g
    146.7 mm   71.5 mm   7.4  mm  162 g
    163.0    × 77.6    × 8.25 mm  227 g

Just curious: why your otherwise neatly formatted table uses a different format for the last row?

This question should be addressed to Wikipedia from where I copied the data.

As an aside - I am a slightly under 2m tall man and I still use my phone with one hand. I still use a 7” tablet with one hand as well.

The models detecting touch has become better and the touch grid has become both higher resolution and more reliable.

Being able to detect the middle-point of a fat finger wasn't a 1.0 feature

Yeah in comparison OSX Mountain Lion or Windows 8 look basically the same as the modern desktop OSes, while mobile releases from that era look totally different. I suppose it had only been 5 years since the release of the iPhone so there was still a lot of experimentation

It looks better with actual buttons that are easy to read and tap.

iOS 7 really changed the game on the iOS aesthetic. We probably would've had more refined skeuomorphism had that re-design not been as aggressive as it was.

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