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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

What do you think hasn't been?

I think the big game changer in the PC space was graphics cards, but since their introduction, it has all been incremental improvement -- at first, pretty fast, then... slower. Much like CPU improvements, although those started earlier.

I can't think of a point where the next generation of PCs was astoundingly different from the prior one... just better. It used to be that they were reliably faster or more capable almost every year, now the rate of improvements is almost negligible. (Yes, graphics are getting better, but not very fast if you aren't near the high end.)

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Arguably form factor, i.e. smartphones and tablets. Whether you think that's incremental or not is subjective, I guess.

I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.

Smartphones and tablets aren't PC replacements, they're TV replacements. Even we, deep into the throes of the smartphone age, still need to use real computers to do the tasks we were using them for in 1995, e.g. programming and word processing.

The fact that computing went through yet another phase transition with mobile is pretty much undisputed. Battery tech, energy efficient chips, screens, radios, solid-state storage, etc. Of course it's not the same as a desktop/notebook, because it's optimized for being in our pockets/hands not put on a desk. (But the compute power is there, plug in peripherals and many phones easily beat a desktop even from ~10-15 years ago.)

It remains to be seen where LLMs and this crop of ML tech can go in the garden of forking paths, and whether they can reach truly interesting places.

Smartphones let us do some tasks we couldn't do at all in 1995, such as GPS turn-by-turn navigation.

Sure, they also do other tasks we were already doing in 1995: mobile telephony, mobile TV watching (we had portable handheld TVs back then--they were awful but they worked), mobile music listening (Sony Walkman), easy-to-use photography, but there's some things that we couldn't do at all before this technology became mainstream, like mobile banking.

GPS turn-by-turn wasn't commonly available in the consumer space in 1995, but the first successful consumer turn-by-turn GPS came out 1998 with the Garmin StreetPilot. So close to 1995 but not quite there.

Still though, GPS navigation was definitely a common thing pre-iPhone. I remember being gifted a cheap one a few years before the iPhone came out. We didn't need smartphones to do GPS navigation. TomTom came out in 2004, three years before the iPhone launched and four years before Android had Google Maps with Turn by Turn navigation.

You need smartphones to do GPS navigation in the modern sense, which is: 1) look for e.g. "Italian restaurant" in your area 2) look at choices nearby, screen out ones currently closed, too expensive, bad reviews, etc., and pick one 3) navigate there

In the early days of GPS, you needed an actual address to navigate to. That's not very useful if you don't know where you want to go in the first place. Smartphones changed all that: now you don't need to know a specific place you want to go, you just need to know what you want to do generally, and the nav app will help you find where exactly you want to go and take you there. That's impossible without either an internet connection or a very large local database (that's out of date).

The POI database was largely the big selling point of TomTom though.

And the Magellan GPS I had pre-iPhone had quite a POI database as well. I think it had monthly updates available online. I could search "Blockbuster" or "gas station" or "public parking" or "hotel" and it would know locations. Obviously it wasn't making dinner recommendations but it did have a lot of restaurants in it.

Also you specifically called out turn by turn. Knowing the one off holiday hours of a hole in the wall restaurant isn't necessary for turn by turn GPS.

I would say smartphones and tablets are new devices, not, per se, PCs.

Smartphones did bring something huge to the table, and exploded accordingly. But here we are, less than 2 decades from their introduction and... the pace of improvement has gone back to being incremental at best.

They're, at a minimum, PC replacements in the sense that I'm currently on the Internet and posting on a message board from my bathtub instead of needing to go over to my desk to do that.

When people go shopping for a PC, they don't buy a cell phone. Both can connect to the internet, but they're different products.

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