The hubs and I were having a discussion about Apple continually releasing new iPhones without any actual innovation. That lead us to a few questions, that I, of course, said, Well, I'll ask Mastodon about it! So here goes:
Have we reached as far with Phone Technology, as it exists as a rectangle piece of hardware in your pocket, as we can?
Is the future in software?
What about a better version of Google Glass?
Are we heading towards implants?
Please don't mention anything with a see through screen, literally no one wants other people to see what they are doing on their phone! LOL
@RickiTarr After 5000 years we have perfected communication technology that allows you to contact people all over the earth instantaneously or access great swaths of the collected knowledge of humanity or just kill time on the toilet, and packaged it elegantly into the same ergonomic form as a Sumerian clay tablet. I don't know how much we're going to be able to improve on that.
Except maybe inventing batteries that don't suck, but that is clearly an impossible fantasy.
@theropologist
Apple’s trying to do their version of Google Glass. I just had cataract surgery. I think it won’t be long before it’ll be possible to get programmable Inter-Ocular lenses implanted in one’s eyes. The tricky part might be the UI/UX. How do you run it? Gestural control? Wave your hands around and twitch your fingers like an ASL interpreter? Or just capture the nerve impulses that would drive that and map them to various tasks/commands? That might work.
@RickiTarr don't know who said the genius of Jobs was to turn tech into fashion.
mobile tech has had only a handful of impactful innovations in the last 10 years. the biggest: turning phones into full fledged computers... that you do not have root access to.
SMARTPHONE is a bullshit term invented to gaslight consumers about the fact they have full-fledged computers in their pockets.
if you had root access, you'd control your own computer-as-phone -- and like PCs, wouldn't buy one as often.
@blogdiva@RickiTarr looking at Apple thru the fashion lens is real instructive.
The remarkable thing is that they've been able to stay on the leading edge of tech fashion for so long. Really pretty impressive.
@colo_lee@blogdiva I saw a commercial a few months back and the whole commercial was about getting a yellow iPhone, so yes, phone as accessory is where to focus seems to be right now
Do you one more: The gun industry took a lesson from Apple and made their products much much more about accessorizing. They did the same thing with the AR that Jobs did to cellphones. It caused a huge culture shift towards firearms, almost exactly the same way Jobs caused a culture shift towards technology.
@colo_lee@RickiTarr@blogdiva Yes, phone technology has been largely captured by those waging “the war against general-purpose computing” (as I think Cory Doctorow calls it).
@Itty53@blogdiva Remember when building PC's was such a thing and lots of companies popped up selling parts and customizable bits. Plus 3-D printing tech would make this fun, phone building!!
@moondog548@RickiTarr@Itty53 but it's not the same. radio shacks were everywhere. i have to travel miles now to get to a microcenter and newegg only exists online for me (though at one point they were a store here in manhattan). it just doesn't scratch that tinkerer/maker itch the same way.
@moondog548@RickiTarr@Itty53 longass time ago in the aughts. i think the store started here and then moved online. it was on what would be Broadway between 34th & 33rd street but it's a part of that street that is closed to traffic. would have been diagonal from Macy's on 34th.
@grumpasaurus@moondog548@RickiTarr@Itty53 I MISS THEM AND THEIR CRAZY ASS CEO SO FUCKING MUCH!!!! seriously, buying electronics in NYC has sucked since they went out of business.
@blogdiva@moondog548@RickiTarr@Itty53 I remember going to canal street watching people who couldnt speak either of each other's languages haggle over a crt tv
entrepreneurs always think in terms of the communities they will build around their products and services. capitalists only think in terms of their cashing out at the highest margin.
you destroy communities when you destroy businesses to take them "online only" to maximize profits.
that's why capitalism sucks; but not real entrepreneurship.
Google's Project Ara made it the farthest ~ basically beta testing in PR. But there were too many technical hurdles and cats to herd that it never got enough gas.
@blogdiva@RickiTarr I was late to smartphones because I wanted to own my own device, which means root access. And I run LineageOS (and I have to say, even for reasonably experienced me, it's not a trivial process getting it onto my current phone). For me it's worth it, especially as I have no Google Privacy Invasion Services. Not for everyone.
@RogerBW@blogdiva@RickiTarr This is what pushed me toward Graphene. I have their hardware (one of the new Google Pixel Tablets) running Graphene with no Google services installed on it at all. The Play store is an option, but it installs in a sandbox, as well, but I haven’t really found a need for it. Switching out the phone as soon as I can get my carrier to support it!
@jhavok
> You can root an android and jailbreak iOS
You can, in some cases, with the right knowledge and tools. But why do we have to? If we own the device, why don't we have full admin access out of the box? Like with a PinePhone or Librem 5.
Sure, you'd probably want to put a tickbox with a warning in the settings to turn it on. So noobs don't brick their devices. But there's no reason for it to require hacking your own device with third-party tools.
@strypey@blogdiva@RickiTarr To tell, the truth, I think having root be a little hard is actually a good idea. I had to learn a bunch of stuff before I could do it. Learning that stuff gave me enough knowledge that I was in less danger of ruining my devices. The big thing is that the information to do it should be available from trustworthy sources.
@strypey@blogdiva@RickiTarr I don't consider a tickbox in the settings to be a significant learning curve is all. Apple makes getting root way too hard, from my understanding (I don't play with iOS), but Android just makes you learn a little bit about the guts.
@jhavok
> Like I said, having a bit of a learning curve keeps users safer. And ticking a box is not a sufficient learning g curve
Sorry, I'm with you now. Wasn't reading in context.
This seems a bit like helicopter helpdesk to me. Your kid won't climb a tree they can't cope with. If anything, they need encourage to climb trees they can cope with.
Similarly, a tickbox with a scary warning is enough to put off a lot of people who can cope with root.
@jhavok
As technology professionals, we make a living out of other people's lack of technical knowledge and confidence. Most of the time that's fair and beneficial.
But we always need to be mindful of that fact, and push back against even the slightest temptation to normalise people being confused and intimidated by the technology they use. A lot of this is caused by lack of HX (Human eXperience) design, not lack of ability.
@RickiTarr Would be nice if they focused on durability and longevity! Had an LG flip phone that lasted 8 years, could’ve been longer but Verizon stopped supporting messaging. Next was an iPhone SE that lasted 4 years before the screen died. Currently have SE2, it’s about 3 years old, no problems so far, hopefully will last much longer :-)
@7sleepersmusic I washed a flip phone once and it still worked lol. I've gotten rid of several phones because I dropped them wrong, and several because they just stopped updating.
@RickiTarr Some responses are blasé about data collection, and I get it! It’s hard to avoid!
But it’s worth remembering that data collection isn’t about individuals, it’s a money-making and surveillance ecosystem. It played a role in Trump’s victory in the US. It plays a role in shaping public opinion.
As for implants, they have tremendous promise but we need the ethics to support their use. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073634/brain-implant-removed-against-her-will/
@RickiTarr We've had 3D images and videos for decades - but you had to wear special glasses. I think holographic screens that display 3D images and videos - without special glasses (just viewing at a certain angle, like pre-chip credit cards) are coming soon.
The thing I want is a digital assistant that feels like hanging out with a person. Like, I can see and talk to and interact with them. Other people can see and interact with them only if I allow them to. Like, for example, I can ask it to navigate for me, and it'll do it fluently like a person does. "Okay, you want to turn up here [pointing and gesturing]". I can ask it reference questions and it'll talk to me like someone knowledgeable on the subject.
@RickiTarr The biggest impediments to doing something different are batteries and screen technology. Right now the smartphone is the best design with the technological constraints we have. Even folding phones all uniformly suck because the screen technology is not sufficiently reliable.
Something like Google Glass might end up being the next smartphone, but not until technology catches up. Apple's Vision Pro is probably the 1.0 version of that, but it's going to be long before that's viable.
@jayreding@RickiTarr Folds means connection through folds means a device lifetime even shorter than the battery. Colour me cynical, but the engineering effort needed to overcome that seems pretty huge compared for something that's basically a gimmick.
@RickiTarr thinner, more flexibility, maybe a phone we can roll up and stuff in our shirt pocket like a pen?
Personally, I'd love to see a phone made with far less materials. I had a pretty big box of ewaste that I'd collected over the course of 15 years that I just tore down and sent for recycling, but I'm not optimistic that any of it actually went anywhere except a landfill.
I can't remember the name of the book, but a science fiction novel had a computer that was just a medallion on a necklace. It projected a hologram of a keyboard and a screen when the central 'jewel' was rotated.
The owner said it was mostly obsolete, but he kept it for sentimental reasons.
@RickiTarr I just ... want manufacturers to realise that actually, the touchscreen era was a mistake, and buttons are functional and beautiful.
As for what will actually happen in the future? Best not to even think about that, because whatever I cunjure up, the next fad will manage to be worse.
@RickiTarr Some technologies advance and then mature. Moore's Law isn't achieving nearly the same yearly advances as it was 20 years ago. As far as Apple are concerned I don't use Apple products, but the same kind of "innovation" has to occur as in the fashion industry to maintain sales. Some more genuine advances will involve cloud leverage of AI and less flaky UI design, by making better use of the base processing technology that already exists.
@copsewood@RickiTarr We might see the end of rapid technological progress in the next few decades, maybe even the beginning of a fallback to more primitive technologies, because our entire global economy is absolutely unsustainable and eating the future for today's profits. I believe we will collapse to a much simpler society with very simple technology eventually, but I hope I won't be alive to see it happen.
The sheer complexity of our technology comes with a steep price, and the only sane course of action would be to design complex technological artifacts to be as robust and lasting as possible, to be easy to repair and upgrade, and not to see how far we can push the technology but to find a state that is good enough, and keep it that way. But in order to do that, we would have to do away with silly things like capitalism.
I've long thought we need to design for resilience, in preference to performance and productivity, and this is nowhere more true than in post industrial economies.
Capitalism devours itself in the ways you understand, without any tension, evaluation and effective criticism arising from a competing model. Another firewalled form of money with a different tax base is needed to sustain smaller scale more community based economics. I've spent much time and energy over a few decades on the prototyping, development and promotion of a more benign currency and tax model.
That said, this needs to start somehow, and this requires starting where we're now at, which is the only possible place if very far from the better place, which would be to have started this 30 years ago, which is what many of us tried and got some useful experience doing.
Here's the most recent design iteration. It's still applicable with minor tweaks.
In a #ScienceFiction story I once came up with, people wore contact lenses that acted like projectors/computer screens/VR glasses. They would wear nail polish or rings (for folks who preferred more easily removable tech) that would sense finger movements, so the user could type or manipulate the virtual world (as seen in their contact lenses). Sound and music were from earrings and jewelry around the neck (some people used bone-conduction sound in necklaces).
The contact lenses would be worn all the time, so you didn't have to take them on and off like VR goggles, and also allowed the user to see the real world-- they could be prescription, if the user needed contacts to see 20/20 anyway.
Admittedly, the ideas are #SciFi. But SciFi has often predicted future reality. I can see people wanting to use tech this way.
@RickiTarr
I used to compare it with restaurants.
You have fancy one and some other very roots.
Some restaurants charge you an insane amount of cash for meals which look like just almost the same at yours dinner’s joint.
Some change their menu each season and some other has the same “carte” for the last 30 years.
@RickiTarr I think discussions too often centre on what tech can do, rather than what average humans (not early adopters, tech co fanboys etc) want to do.
The huge success of the smartphone, and to an extent wearable tech, is that they allow us to do online stuff whilst going about our lives: talking, eating, watching tv etc.
I don't believe any new tech will take off in the mainstream if it inhibits the average human's offline life. Which puts a huge limit on VR and a sizeable one on AR.
@RickiTarr Mind you, and I've said this before, a lot of these new VR/AR techs have spectacular potential to improve the lives of disabled people who have limited or no ability to operate tech with their hands.
But, rather than trying to create that benefit, it's all aimed at rich folk who want to show off their latest toy. Such is capitalism.
@RT_Alt@RickiTarr I agree but also think there is an argument that people will avoid change even if it would improve their life (their "want" is for a measurably more difficult life because it is familiar). The flipside being, of course, that so far we've managed to use efficiency gains to make people do more work instead of giving people more time to be not working.
@RickiTarr Every time we think we've reached "the end" or a "plateau", something comes along that kicks over the tables.
I'm just not expecting it to come from Apple or Google. They, or another big dog, may end up OWNING it, but the guys who think they're already on top of the mountain rarely look for a bigger mountain.
When I was a kid, I said "Once we have a pager that can receive email, we're done! We do not need any new technology after that."
We of course got new technology after that. Did we need it? I'm actually going to say yes, the subsequently-developed communication technology has had a positive effect. But I could be wrong.
@RickiTarr never been a member of the cult of Steve, but as an android user I'm looking forward to better folding hardware and eventually bendable hardware.
Software will always trail hardware, when the game or app comes along that pushes hardware that will be a problem because that's the problem desktops and laptops have.
@RickiTarr Why is Google making new models every year? Samsung as well? Why is the TV I bought 3 months ago replaced with a new one? Why are there 2024 model cars when it’s still 2023.
Are any of these products really innovative over the previous? No. And the vast majority of people don’t need a new insert item here every year. It’s just consumerism. A way to make money.
The one good thing about Apples phones are that the software support for them tend to last a lot longer than most companies do, and their updates do not have to be blessed by the carriers in the same way as some other makers.
The real innovation happens at the software level for the most part. Hardware leaps are much less common.
Nothing is built to last anymore. Last year we replaced our toaster. Why? Well the last one we had was made, according to the label, in East Germany. Let that sink in.
I also find it interesting that you said “why is Apple continually releasing new iPhones” and not phone makers in general. Is it because of a little bias being an android user? Or is it because you expect Apple to innovate more than Android makers?
Just curious.
@AirlockDoc@RickiTarr The market itself relies on a constant inflow of cash, which cannot happen if most people already own your product. CEOs are kept around only if they can make owners money year after year. So many of the structures of business contribute to the mindset that you must be in constant motion. Progress at all other cost.
It would be nice for one of these companies to start implementing an electronics recycling program and leading in those areas. They stick to easy money.
@RickiTarr Current smartphones derived from PC's. The PC remains. It's probably a more fragmented market. Implants probably aren't a universal sell. Maybe lens implants for displays. Should be resistance to brain. VR makes some ill & VR headsets are absurd. Google Glass is a possibility, as is turning tethered watches into full phones. And some may still want phones b/c they can be more powerful due to more real estate to work with, as PC's are to phones. I don't envision a single winner yet.
@stevesplace@RickiTarr Arguably Palm Pilot and contemporary devices, but otherwise I agree.
My first "smart phone" ca 2000 had email, contact list, calendar, web browser, etc. The main detractors were effectively lack of syncing between devices, and the radios at the time were talk or web, not both. Nearly literally a phone module jammed into a Palm Pilot (the nearly is the manufacturer was Handspring and it's complicated)
@RickiTarr it feels weird to bet against progress but we note that the ideals of "convergence" from back in the day have largely been achieved, at least to the extent that for-profit hardware and OS vendors actually want them to be (ie. phones don't work as desktop replacements - well, normal people's phones don't)
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