[Retric]

It's odd, but I keep feeling like the pace of progress is slowing down. When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?”

A PS 4 feels somewhat better than a PS3 which was release 10 years ago. Cellphones seem stuck on the black rectangle design. Cars are getting ever so slightly better cruise control every year vs. becoming self-driving.

We almost have a cure for AIDS except not quite.

Or is that just me?

[JeffL]

My iPhone and iPad. It's not that many years that I've had them and they are nothing like anything I ever used before.

My dad's electric RAV4 made with Tesla components. That thing is so quiet and smooth and can accelerate like crazy.

My quadcoptor with HD camera is pretty awesome, and unlike anything available before.

Uber feels vastly superior to me than taxis or even renting a car in some cases.

This one might be weird, but I play a lot of games, and I feel like Heroes of the Storm which came out last year is vastly better than any other game I've ever played in my life. Maybe that's just me? :)

Reading HN and Reddit is a vastly superior experience to reading newspapers and magazines.

I feel very excited to be alive with all the innovation going on.

[jonsen]

You are describing state of the art, not addressing the speed of progres.

[JeffL]

I was just responding to the question: When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?”

[johngalt]

Generic IT guy here. No matter how good the new machine is people always assume it's the same or worse than the old one. I'm not sure what drives this general feeling, but it has been a consistent theme. Despite every metric improving, people feel as if progress is stagnant.

> When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?”

Mid 2011 when I put a high dollar SSD in my laptop for the first time.

[pault]

...says Retric, typing on a cheap, portable super computer which is connected to a globe-spanning network that pipes all the world's information directly into one's eyeballs, on-demand, at the speed of light...

[Retric]

Fiber optics and the internet are both older than I am.

The internet is 45 years old. Companies started laying huge fiber optic networks in the 70's.

[grey-area]

You skipped over cheap portable supercomputer...all the worlds information

The internet may be a few decades old but we're just getting started using it, and portable computing using the Internet has accelerated rapidly in the last decade along with virtual assistants, AI, bioinformatics, autonomous cars, robotics, drones etc etc. Lots of things are changing very rapidly right now.

[euyyn]

The world-wide web of the mid-to-late 90s is a qualitative improvement over the internet of 45 years ago. Heck, when I was a kid, ubiquitous videoconference (on non-mobile terminals!) was Science Fiction. Today, when someone sees me VC'ing with my mom at the other side of the planet, using a thin screen I can hold in my hand, it's just a dull urban thing.

[at-fates-hands]

I've been using old smartphones for a while now and even phones that were released in 2014 are dirt cheap since for me, there is no discernible differences between models.

Can I:

1 - Take a picture and post it somewhere

2 - Surf the internet and use apps for consuming content

3 - Take some video and upload it to youtube

4 - use it to text message friends and family

5 - make and receive phone calls

These 5 basic functions are available on EVERY smartphone manufactured today. The differences? Minute. My LG G2 vs. the LG G3? The LG G3 has a Mildly better screen, 1 more GB of RAM and few other minor improvements.

You're absolutely correct progress is slowing down in tech. The biggest move forwards I thought was when Microsoft completely redesigned the interface of their Windows phones. It was totally original and I thought much better than how Android copied Apple's design.

Other than that? Not sure there have really been HUGE tech advancements in the smartphone arena. Same goes for PC's and Cars. Unless you're a HUGE hardware guy, I don't see big improvements or revolutions in these areas of tech.

[bhauer]

For what it's worth, I don't think it's just you.

Innovation is a diffuse thing, though, and I often find that when I perceive innovation as stalled, the truth is that innovation is simply happening in places I don't care about.

A few weeks back, a Youtube video [1] was shared here that asked if computers are still getting faster. The video argues that they are. I don't dispute that. However, I think it's widely acknowledged that the pace of real-world performance increases—especially in CPUs—has been slow of late. The largest performance boon in the past 5 years has been the widespread use of SSDs as main storage.

I just built a powerhouse workstation for my office that replaced a 2008-era first-generation i7. While this new workstation has gobs of cores, each individual core is only modestly faster than the individual cores from 2008. To me, computing speed is one of my paramount technology desires. The ideal is for all of my computing interactions to occur in 0 milliseconds. I want all my computing devices, and especially my workstation—the device I spend 8 hours at each day—to provide the pinnacle of performance. So it is acutely disappointing to me that the computing horsepower I have available to me is broadening but not becoming faster. Innovation is happening in the low-power space, not the workstation space. Obviously, there are incremental advances, and service to enthusiasts, but I think any honest observer would realize that the market is smaller so the drive to invest R&D in high-power processor performance is diminished.

I feel the same way concerning the enormous amount of R&D investment going into centralized cloud platforms versus decentralized private/federated networks. I contend that had private networks seen as much raw brainpower invested in the past 10 years, managing a secure private network would have been made easier for laypeople, and ultimately we would have retained greater privacy and self-ownership of data. I also feel that computing devices working together over a secure private network in a peer-to-peer model would be vastly preferable to using a vendor-provided centralized cloud to provide device interop. I would prefer my phone and workstation work together directly, on the same private network, rather than using a cloud server as an intermediary.

But as I said at the beginning, it's a matter of opinion and perspective. Broadly speaking—across the whole universe of technology—innovation is happening. But often I find it's happening in areas of little appeal to me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuLxX07isNg

[ameister14]

Usually things come in waves, in a couple of different fields: communication, transportation, or manufacturing/agriculture. We've just gone through a communication revolution and are about to enter a transportation revolution, where people stop actively driving cars, and a manufacturing progression where manufacturing is more distributed and automated. It's not all consumer products and making them better. It's the process they get to you.

[jbattle]

one random example - i'm shocked at how good cheap RC drones are (compared to what was available just a few years ago)

[RikNieu]

I suspect the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive will be spurring on novelties and developments.