[coldtea]

>I’m currently travelling at about 180mph on board a high-speed train in Japan.

Which is also (high speed trains) an 30+ year old technology, even if the train you're on was built more recently.

That's what the parent means about those older technologies having more impact. Which is trivially true: earlier low hanging fruits give substantially more bang for the back to progress, and then you get incremental progress and finally marginal returns on any technological fields.

The airplane was a huge development. The modern commercial airliner (50+ years old by now) as well. A jet "which is something like 20% more efficient than the equivalent from a few years ago"? Not so much.

>Using the ubiquitous LTE network, I can make a real-time HD video call to my family back in the UK, using my palm-sized, battery-powered computer.

Which again, compared to the initial impact of the internet and mobile communications it's just an incremental improvement. Being able to send messages and talk from Japan to the UK instantly -- great impact. Being able to send HD video on top of that? Not so much.

[ghaff]

I agree that LTE/HD is incremental. It's probably fair to say that ubiquitous mobile smartphones are something more. (Initial mobile communications less so. When I had a feature phone I often didn't even carry it with me although certainly some people probably found them more transformational.)