I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation).
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
I'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones.
Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that.
It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device.
Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.
These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.
It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.
> When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.
Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
Not at all. The iPod of the day had a click wheel as an input device. The iPhone introduced us to capacitive touch, multitouch, gesture recognition, full web browsing. Huge leap compared to not only the iPod but the PocketPCs of the day.
Listen to the audience reaction when he shows how you scroll a list view: https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=OmbgSG7nmEpdAETl&t=970
> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.
> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo
Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
Smartphones also generally looked very different pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.
> "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-19-when-google-engineers-fi...
> It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.
Oh, thanks, I got my history the wrong way round!
> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
No, the iPods that were like iPhones (iPod Touch) were after the iPhone, not predecessors. The main iPod at the time of the iPhone introduction ("iPod Classic") had a small, non-touch screen in the top area of the face (except, most of the face taken up by the physical "click wheel" control, and a hard disk for storage, and other immediately pre-iPhone iPod's were basically scaled down versions of the same design (with Flash memory on, IIRC, the Nano and Shuffle, and no screen on the Shuffle.)
Compared to my PC, the smartphones of my friends impressed me because I could they had so many sensors to partake in the world compared to my 'autistic' / 'shut-in' PC which basically only had a keyboard and a pointing device, and couldn't tell which way I was holding it nor a barometre etc.
> One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
Probably over-analyzing this, but I can see why this might happen:
1. There's an ulterior motive of getting them to treat it safely, as it's one of the more-expensive and breakable things they might be carrying around, and they become obstreperous if it is unavailable.
2. It's probably the most immediate and tangible candidate. They probably aren't going to be around MRI scanners or cryo-cooled qubits or whatever.
They're also designed to be mistaken for sorcery. If you used a PC in the 90s then you have some idea how it works because the inner workings used to be more exposed, error messages had actual contents that could imply something about how you might, yourself, address the problem, etc. Even the bubble-headed marketing people had to learn how to use AS/400 to do their jobs. You can see how a modern phone is the same device only now LCDs place the CRTs and it uses a radio instead of physical wires for internet access etc. You may not be able to easily disassemble the phone but you know roughly what's in it.
Whereas if you've never used a PC, a phone is a black box. You tap the screen and it mysteriously does things. You're discouraged from trying to figure out how or make any changes to it yourself.
And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.
> And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.
In terms of risk-taking (rather than knowledge) IMO the opposite has happened: Older generations had to worry about voiding the warranty because you held down the two buttons at the same time that the manual clearly told you never to do on page 37.
In contrast, younger folks have grown up with cheaper devices with much-improved idiot-proofing. That makes the strategy of "try shit until it seems to work" a lot more viable.
Meanwhile, older folks look on, seeing confident action and misinterpreting it as competent understanding, woefully concluding that "Unlike myself, kids these days just know computers."
> In terms of risk-taking (rather than knowledge) IMO the opposite has happened: Older generations had to worry about voiding the warranty because you held down the two buttons at the same time that the manual clearly told you never to do on page 37.
That was never really a thing though. To begin with, warranties are generally pretty worthless because they cover exactly the things that don't usually happen. Power switch doesn't work one day out of the box? Covered, but unlikely to happen and probably not hard to fix yourself anyway. Dropped it and broke it? Not covered. Device is three years old and the battery is flat? Warranty is already expired.
If you haven't needed a warranty in the first month you probably won't need it at all.
> In contrast, younger folks have grown up with cheaper devices with much-improved idiot-proofing. That makes the strategy of "try shit until it seems to work" a lot more viable.
Except that the idiot-proofing is that if something is broken, you get a message that says "an error occurred" and there's no way to fix it because the brokenness is in an app you can't modify or is running on a server you don't control.
Meanwhile mashing buttons at random is more dangerous than ever because your whole life is in that device and it will readily transfer real money or send private files to people you don't want to have them or give attackers access to your accounts on various services.