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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

I'm a technically sophisticated user, and I don't want a new phone. I would almost certainly like it less than my current four year old phone.

It would have a faster CPU, more RAM, and more storage, but it's rare I run into any of those limits. It would have a better camera than my current phone, but it would still be worse than my Olympus. It would have a bigger screen, but I wouldn't have a bigger hand and that would make it harder to use. It would have a bigger battery, but it would need a bigger battery. It wouldn't have a headphone jack, and I use mine. It might have an AI thing, but I don't want an AI thing.

For about a decade after the current era of smartphones launched, they weren't good enough to do all the things people wanted them to, so most people were eager to upgrade when possible. Now they are, and an upgrade usually brings more hassle than excitement.

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> It would have a better camera than my current phone, but it would still be worse than my Olympus.

This is actually one of the reasons why I changed my phone last year. I don't know about your Olympus, but mine doesn't fit in my jeans pocket, even though it's one of the smaller models.

I don't always what to carry a dedicated camera with me, even though I bought a m4/3 specifically because of how portable it was. But I do like to be able to take good enough pictures, and the iPhone enables me to do that.

My camera isn't pocketable, but if I'm doing photography such that I really care about the result, I bring it. If I'm not, I usually use the phone camera to document things I want to remember or show other people, and doing that slightly better is not very valuable to me.

I'll admit to occasionally contemplating a Ricoh GR III, which is quite pocketable.

> It would have a faster CPU, more RAM, and more storage, but it's rare I run into any of those limits

I quite honestly cannot think of a single time I've run into any of those limits in at least the last 5 years, personally!

Exactly.

It's just a natural maturity-curve that every new piece of tech inevitably goes through.

Tech on the maturity curve:

ICE cars: settled

EV cars: rising

PC's: settled

Phones: settled

Smart TV's: slowly rising still

Wearables: rising

It seems to me that it's based more on the use cases than the speed of improvements to the technology itself.

There were times when a CPU four times as fast changed what I could do with a PC. For a long time, with Moore's Law in full swing, we reliably got that sort of improvement every three years, and PCs older than that were widely seen as obsolete. Today that would only speed up batch jobs for me and have no impact on any of my workflows.

Some sort of on-device AI thing is probably the next threshold for PCs. I don't think there's anything production-ready and compelling right now, but I can imagine useful automation features when it gets good enough.

It's also that software back in the day was much more fine-tuned to use the very limited resources as well as possible, so getting a better CPU would visibly speed up things.

Somewhere in the late 2000s, the CPUs got powerful and cheap enough (in the sense of "cents per MHz") that it shifted from having to be creative to get your programs to perform at acceptable speed, to not having to and instead focusing on delivering marketable software faster.

The only thing nowadays I can imagine requiring a substantial amount of raw processing power would be on-device AI processing, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, as large parts of the processing is still done in the cloud.

Editing high-resolution video comes to mind as an example of something that will still stress most PCs. Being able to scrub through footage and preview the effect of edits in real time without using low-res proxy files demands a lot of performance. I think higher-spec modern PCs are there for 4K, but I'm not sure about higher.

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