New Tech is Boring

In my childhood music was first heard from radio, then bought on c-cassette, or recorded from the radio into a c-casette. Movies had to be seen first in the movie theaters and/or then waiting for approx of 6 months to be able to purchase it on VHS so you can watch it again at home. TV-series, well that was so different - only way was to watch once a week new episode from TV at fixed time. Of course you could record the episodes and watch later, but only two episodes per VHS was little rough.

I was born on 1989, and our first PC was bought ten years later 1999. Our first video game console was SNES - Nintendo 8Bit, then Sega Megadrive, PS1, XBOX, PS2. At some point we were able to actually play games on our PC(not on the -99 one though).

Music moved on a CD-ROM and CD players were needed to listen those. Portable CD players was a thing, then there was minidisc(Walkman?), and later MP3 players. Before MP3 format and players came, there was huge revolution on internet and piratism, you were able to download music from the internet and burn that on CD. Movies moved to DVD format, and there was also some format war on that before DVD won the battle.

Computers came popular, every year more memory, more storage, faster CPU:s and GPU:s. Internet speed grew every year.

My first mobile phone was actually NMT and just after that came GSM phones. Mobile phones were biggish, I remember when SMS came popular, it wasn't cheap, but it was something new and exciting. Then the Worm game appeared to mobile phones, followed by other games and applications. Polyphonic ring tones, and colored screens! Mobile phone sizes went also absurdly small in some point. On the other hand there was Communicators with qwerty keyboard for advanced users. Nokia launched couple of gaming phones too.

Well, that was a nostalgic trip, phew!

Nowadays: the boring

Speed of tech development has been extremely fast phased for couple of last decades. But now, it actually has been rather boring for a quite long time. Let me explain..

Phones are boring

Before, you upgraded to a new phone every year, because there actually was something new and exciting: it was faster, better, longer battery life, better camera, faster connections etc. How about now? All the phones has at least two cameras, 4G/WiFi/Bluetooth, colored screen, more apps than you would ever need, speed.. don't get me started about the speed factor on phones. We are nowadays talking about CPU on friging phones?! and of course it needs more than 1-2 cores. Ah yeah, there is also more RAM in your pocket than my childhood computers had.

Computers are boring

How about computers? What actually interesting has happened there in last few years. One of the biggest improvements I can remember was during 2010 or so when SSD hard drives arriwed - you were able to give a new life to older computers by just changing old HDD to new and shiny SSD. After that, what? Yeah, faster CPUs, more cores per CPU, but it hasn't changed that much during the last years.

RAM. Yes, more RAM, faster RAM. Yay.

Storage. 1TB..18TB HDDs, 1TB...8TB SSDs, more speed more space for your files. Would be nice if we would still download everything via torrents and cloud storage isn't a thing.

GPU. Okay, it has been nice to see how PC gaming is a thing now, and E-Sports is somewhat popular and people can even have a career on PC gaming. But still, huge leaps on GPUs(for gaming) hasnt happened for a while. Of course crypto miners and AI researchers are happy now, but its a different target group.

Software is boring

There are a lot, and I mean A LOT of free and actually decent software for pretty much anything you need to do on your computer, even for working purposes. No urge to update for the latest version and pay for the upgrade.

Media is boring: Movies and Music ruined

The joy of purchasing CD:s and DVD boxes has been ruined. Just consume your media through monthly paid streaming services. Before, I mean again in my childhood, on a friday night my parents went to get pizza for us and rented a movie - yep, there was movie rentals. When they came we started right a way watching the film and enjoy our pizzas. Nowadays, you order food to your home and after the delivery you spend first 15-30 minutes browsing your streaming service and trying to figure out what to watch. Enjoy that cold pizza.

Not so boring things

Cryptocurrencies, VR/AR, laptops so fast you don't need a desktop machine anymore - you can even play games with these things!(sorry apple users, not you), AI, ChatGPT, Dall-E, stable diffusion.

There is a good list of interesting tech happening currently, but it's interestingly and mostly software level development.

In my opinion most interesting hardware development has been Apple's M1/M2 architecture on CPUs. That has been a huge leap in so many levels.

Old man yelling at clouds

Maybe, just maybe, there has been some development on personal level too. I'm not that interested about all new shiny things than what I was before. Perhaps my focus has shifted on the other things in life. Currently I am writing this with Apple iMac from 2011 - upgraded to match 2015 years version, my phone is iPhone 11 and I have been using it for 3 years or so. I haven't upgraded my TV for 4 years. And eventhough I have been some level of Apple fanboy who hated everything related to Microsoft and Windows, I have now been using windows machine as my main pc for over a half a year and I'm kinda liking it - well now starting a mac feels like vacation ;)

This one had more emotions involved and maybe there was a hint of ranting included, but a lot have changed and I personally feel that in many areas the speed has considerably slowed down and many of the improvements in tech hasn't been that useful for me.

I'm glad things has gone forward, and it's also surprising how long way we have come in such a short time period.