While its rather cool that its available to everyone. Phones kinda killed the cool gadget market. Since your phone does everything, anything new or interesting is now some $5k+ minimum purchase.
I wonder if inflation adjusted gadgets are similar priced.
Phones especially killed the giftable gadget market.
Department stores and Radio Shacks used to be full of little golf computers and VHS rewinders and electronic Scrabble dictionaries and sports trivia games around Father’s Day and Christmas. It would be unusual in most families, I think, to give someone an app for Christmas.
They’ve also changed our relationship with industrial design. There are probably fewer people designing gadgets, and consumers are less used to acquiring a new device and learning how to use it. I didn’t grow up in a particularly gadgety household, but by the time I was 12 I had learned to work a pretty wide variety of electronics with different interfaces and physical media. Nowadays even your TV is basically a smartphone with a remote.
> Nowadays even your TV is basically a smartphone with a remote.
I bought a decent amateur camera 10 years ago that ran on Android. No idea if they're still using that OS for cameras or other non-phone electronics.
Some niche gadget-y things that are alive and well in the "a few hundred bucks or less" range:
* hardware tools / multi-tools
* bluetooth speakers
* portable projectors - outdoor big-screen movie night on the cheap
* the "sports/action" camera market - waterproof, magnetic/mountable, go-pro/insta360 etc
* pro/am mirrorless cameras are mostly too expensive to qualify but there's some really cool accesories now (handheld stabilizing gimbals, say)
* everything in the thread/zigbee/etc home automation space (sensors and buttons and automations...)
* car gadgets for enthusiast cars (things that plug into obd ports for diagnostics or real-time display of measurements), or "add android auto to your old car's built-in screen" multi-media retrofits (though in gaining things like this we've lost the ease of just things being single- or double-DIN in the first place), or dashcams
* vr headsets (feels very much like the sort of thing Radioshack of old would've been all over like the tiny handheld TVs)
* fitbits and such wearables
* portable monitors
* mechanical keyboards (as well as macro pads and such)
a lot of them qualify as "phone accesories" but I'm not sure that takes away from them
Half of those are basically just extensions of your phone. Just saying but I guess you are right gadgets have moved to be cell phone feature extenders.
Projectors and keyboards have both been around forever, I don't think most consider them gadgets but its a matter of opinion.
Or have gadgets become incredibly cheap? 99 cent iPhone apps etc?
There's an aspect of fun and tinkering that is gone. You can't usually change those apps or use them in ways not intended by the maker.
I'm still falling in love with dedicated devices.
My Sony digital camera is still a lot of fun (so are my medium- format film cameras for that matter). Of course the phone is the camera I always have on me.
I have plenty of other dedicated devices but I'm kind of lazy to think about them, list them. (A digital 12-channel recorder/mixer just jumped to my mind though.)
In music, phones also killed metronomes and tuners which I'm thrilled about because by themselves those are $30+ instead of $1 (or free with ads) for an app