Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
Electronic advancement, if you talk about cpus and such, hasn’t stagnated, its just that you don’t need to upgrade any more.
I have a daily driver with 4 cores and 24GB of RAM and that’s more than enough for me. For example.
It has absolutely stagnated. Earlier transistors were becoming literally twice as dense every 2 years. Clock speeds were doubling every few years.
Year 2000, first 1GHz, single core CPU was released by nvidia.
2010 the Intel core series came out. I7 4 cores clocked up to 3.33GHz. Now, 14 years later we have sometimes 5GHz (not even double) and just shove more cores in there.
What you said “it’s just that you don’t need to upgrade anymore” is quite literally stagnation. If it was a linear growth path from 1990 until now, every 3-5 years, your computer would be so obsolete that you couldn’t functionally run newer programs on them. Now computers can be completely functional and useful 8-10+ years later.
However. Stagnation isn’t bad at all. It always open source and community projects with fewer resources to catch up and prevents a shit ton of e-waste. The whole capitalistic growth growth growth at any cost is not ever sustainable. I think computers now, while less exciting have become much more versatile tools because of stagnation.