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This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection past columns.
I’ll ask a deliberately provocative question: What if smartphones are so successful and useful that they hinder innovation?
Technologists are now imagining what the next big thing might be. But the smartphone may never be anything but the first and perhaps last mass market and globally transformative computer.
I may seem like a 19th-century futurist who couldn’t imagine that horses would be replaced by cars. But let me tell you that the smartphone phenomenon can never be duplicated.
First, when people in tech envision the future, they implicitly bet that smartphones will replace the center of our digital lives by less obvious things – not slabs that take us out of our world, but nearly indistinguishable technologies. the air we breathe.
Virtual reality glasses are a big nuisance now, but bet, technologies like VR or computers. can “learn” like humans it will eventually blur the line between online and real life, between human and computer, to the point of erasing. That’s the vision behind it “meta universe” a broad vision that virtual human interactions will be as complex as the real thing.
Maybe you think more immersive and human technologies sound interesting, or maybe they just seem like woo-woo dreams of idiots. (Or maybe a little of both.) Either way, technologists must prove to us that the future they envision is more attractive and useful than the digital life we have thanks to the magic supercomputers in our pockets.
The challenge of any new technology is that smartphones get to a point where it’s hard to imagine alternatives. In a sales boom that lasted nearly a decade, the devices went from a novelty for wealthy nerds to the only computer owned by billions of people worldwide. Smartphones have come to such a point that no need to pay too much attention to them. (Yes, that includes gradually updated iPhone models which Apple mentioned on Tuesday.)
The appeal of these devices in our lives and in the imagination of technologists is so strong that any new technology now has to exist almost in opposition to the smartphone.
When my colleague Mike Isaac tried Facebook’s new glasses model A company executive who can take pictures by touching the temple said to him: “Isn’t that better than having to pull out your phone and hold it in front of your face every time you want to capture the moment?”
I got the manager’s point of view. It’s true that devices like the Apple Watch, Facebook glasses, and Snap’s Spectacles are smart about making smartphone features less obtrusive. companies, including Facebook, blow up and Apple Like the failing Google Glass, they’re also working on glasses that aim to combine digital information such as maps with what we see around us.
The comment also shows that any new consumer technology will have to answer inevitable questions: Why buy another gadget to take photos, navigate bike directions, or play music when I can do most of it with the smartphone I already have in my pocket? Do I have to live in the metadata when I have a similar experience on my phone’s rectangular screen?
Smartphones are unlikely to be the god of technology, and I’m curious about the evolution of technologies that want to move away from them. But at least for now, and perhaps forever, many of the technologies used in our daily lives are complementary rather than substitutes for our phones. These tiny computers can be so useful that there will never be a post-smartphone revolution.
Before you go …
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Should you buy a new phone now? In a recent column, my colleague Brian X. Chen reviewed the questions to ask if you had considered the following. replacing your smartphone with a new model: Can you fix what’s bothering your phone instead of replacing it? Can you still get software updates with the current model? How would a new phone change your life?
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We wanted flying cars and we got an $850 robot vacuum cleaner, which drives dog doo: The company to create the latest Roomba”More than 100 models of physical pet droppings builtand algorithms trained on over a hundred thousand images to ensure the device avoids nonsense,” the Washington Post wrote. Also, robots collect a lot of data from inside your house. (Roomba still mixed with black striped carpet, despite.)
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“It’s a surprisingly dark show, and it was done on purpose.” this is thought provoking article It’s about a new series of videos on TikTok that focuses on a famous family and humanizes people who have been thrust into social media fame.
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Check out these video clips striped owl’s nest in Indiana. Baby owls learning to fly are truly the cutest things.
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