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Comment by grepLeigh | Hacker News Reader

This is a meta comment, but I think it's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers.

Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.

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I really don't think the iPhone (or even Android) was the equivalent of the Kenbak-1 in terms of smartphones. There were "smartphones" before the iPhone.

IMO the iPhone was the 90s PC era where these things got a lot better and more ubiquitous and less fragmented.

And (also in my opinion) coincidentally 90s led into an the era where overly dominant OS vendor(s) were crushing the fun and freedom out of computing. Phones are harder to escape from that than with PCs though.

Yep, I too remember Windows CE 5 on my Audiovox slide out keyboard phone which in 2006 was blowing people's minds. I got it purely so while on-call I wouldn't have to head home to handle incidents.

It was a great mobile computing experience but terrible at being a phone.

I'd argue the equivalent of iPhone/Android on the PC side would have been Windows 95, when things really became consumer focused and had their revolutionary explosion take off. That was "only" 28 years ago now

Agreed on the Win95 timeframe for the start of the take off phase the iPhone kicked off - just that PCs peaked, stagnated and got boring much less than 28yrs later (eg around 2010ish?).

I was disagreeing with the claim that PCs took longer than smartphones did to reach that plateau. They did take longer to reach the initial (Win95/iPhone) take off point though. Smartphones spent less time in the primordial phase - probably more a case of better internet availability though.

I hear what you're saying, but I feel this release is less boring than other recent smart phones. It seems that they are really at an inflection point where they are able to start really utilizing their AI chips for deeper integration. From a hardware perspective, I agree this release might be boring. I don't think the Tensor3 is a far faster chip than the Tensor2 (for general purpose CPU tasks), but the AI processing capacity of this chip seem like the focus of this model. The new display seems pretty great, but I have been pleased with my Pixel 7 display.

Yes, I think it's kind of odd to see people disregarding some of the pretty impressive efficiency, security, and reliability improvements the phone hardware has undergone. Smartphones are astoundingly good at their jobs.

Windows Mobile and Palm phones were around int the early 2000s. I think they would absolutely need to be included if considering the history of smartphones.

Don’t forget Symbian! I had a NES emulator on my Nokia phone back in the day. Wonderful stuff.

Motorola MPx200 for the win!

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I think the expanded AI capabilities are the biggest step forward for phones in like 5+ years or more.

But I'm someone who is still using a pixel 3, so maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better about purchase I need to make because my phone's battery is pretty close to useless.

Have you considered replacing your battery instead? Or is it useless with the latest software updates?

Aren't you concerned about the lack of security updates for the mini super computer attached to every facet of your life and authorized to act as you?

Not at all. I am more concerned having Facebook (or any other Zuck’s spyware) installed on that very computer. I cannot imagine how anyone would hack my very phone. Also I like to decentralise devices, so none of my devices is a super-device. My go-to phone (iPhone SE with no iOS update, but with security updates) has only a few apps installed that I need for being away from home. My other smartphone (Nexus 6P with no security updates) has loads of apps installed, but I use them only when I need it. The phone has its WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular turned off all of the time. I cannot imagine the way you hack into it, tbh. And even if that would happen, I cannot imagine what a hacker would get out of it, if anything at all.

Current LLMs and misc. deep learning enable an early kind of ubiquitous personalized AI augmentation that's always with you.

One barrier to innovation here is that most of tech has shifted to think of empowering users as not the goal, but rather, empowering users is an occasional necessary step towards the company exploiting those users harder.

We could use better thinking.

In addition to the other comments about pre-iPhone/Android smartphones, another part of the story are the devices that preceded even those, the personal digital assistant (PDA). There's the well known PalmPilot and various Windows CE PDAs like the Compaq iPaq and Dell Axim and even earlier, now largely forgotten devices like the HP 95LX and 100LX, a DOS based palmtop PDA that was really quite capable for 1991, and probably a few even earlier than that. So the evolutionary path to the modern smartphone probably stretches to 30+ years.

Waiting when button phones will become the trend again

Since buying a larger-screen e-ink device, I have been wanting to go back to a dumb phone. But just a few features preclude this.

1. Dialing in the dumb phone. No dumb phones support CardDav syncing.

2. Very few dumb phones can function as wifi hotspots for the e-ink device.

3. Few dumb phones can record calls.

4. I forget what eight was for... seriously I had one or two other issues but I don't remember what they were.

Always up for a good Femmes reference!

Android phones can't record calls either.

My current Samsung Note does.

My Pixel 7 Pro does. But I have GrapheneOS, so maybe that's not a vanilla feature.

Recording calls was possible on pretty much any Android phone until google killed the accessibility API in May 2022, since then at least Google and Samsung phones can still record calls, it's just disabled in some countries for legal reasons, but people then buy phones from other regions on ebay/other similar platforms. It's been a "thing" for years.

Maybe I’m weird, but I’d sooner get rid of all my “real” computers and replace them with a typewriter (or… nothing) than ditch my smartphone. It does way too much useful stuff.

Not weird compared to the general population I think but I would hope still a weird sentiment for the general HN readership.

I dunno—I can use a "real" computer to do geek stuff, but my phone does a whole hell of a lot more that's way, way more important to my everyday life, most of which a "real" computer would be worse at or isn't practically an alternative at all. I'd have to spend money and space (for other electronics) plus a bunch of time to replace what a smartphone does for me. Losing my "real" computers would do me practically no harm, by comparison (assuming we're not counting my employer's computer that they loan me so I can earn a paycheck—gotta have that, sure)

I remember getting the original Motorolla droid back in 2010. Half of my friends had iPhones. Other half were still on regular phones.

By 2014, everyone had a smartphone.

It's because of how limited they are. Companies gave up trying to add stuff, and are in fact removing stuff and sensors in an attempt to up the sales of watches, earbuds etc etc. As long as it sells , they won't bother with better improvements

If I could plug them into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor setup and be running a full fledged OS they'd be exponentially more interesting than current. Their usefulness is hindered in their current form. Yes I know about Dex.

> It's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers.

I think people are not yet ready to accept the exact same thing is about to happen to cars. Some company will have a perfectly usable electric self-driving vehicle and will produce tens of millions of them a year. They will be an appliance, like your toaster, and nobody will care anymore.

I'm sure it will happen to other things in our lives too.

People have been saying self driving cars are just around the corner for a decade or so now.

I do believe the future you outline will happen but IMO the timeline is very far from clear. Significant challenges remain for self driving cars.

We're quite a ways off from full self driving cars and it's not clear that we'll ever get there. By that I mean you can drive anywhere you want while taking a nap. Car companies will still be working on improving limited self driving / enhanced cruise control for the foreseeable future which leaves plenty of room for differentiation.

It's already like this for ICE cars in the UK. So many people buy them on PCP deals and upgrade them every 3 to 4 years. It's pretty much a meme at this point about a certain kind of person:

https://youtu.be/J9n0_5p8XKo?si=dGwvSYAb676TVMEI

The real PC revolution was when manufacturers were able to come out with a machine every two years that was much better than what they made two years ago. Machines like the Apple ][ and Atari 2600 lasted a lot longer than their makers thought because upgrading meant replacing all your software until the PC AT clones came around.

I got my first smart phone 20 years ago.

Me too. Mine was Motorola MPx200. What was yours back then?

Blackberry

We're coming up on 20, but I get it.

> how long it took PCs to reach the same stage

I think PCs still have revolutionary improvements, not only tiny incremental changes: huge core counts, tensor cores, ray tracing, SSDs, etc.

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