It's still wild to me how consumer hardware outpaced cheap lab tech so decisively around 2010-2012. At the time I was in a research lab that needed wireless ne

It's still wild to me how consumer hardware outpaced cheap lab tech so decisively around 2010-2012. At the time I was in a research lab that needed wireless networking + high-def video + light source + on-device processing + battery power + small form factor. It turns out that even compared to Raspberry Pi, the cheapest possible solution to that problem was "buy old Androids on Ebay and add external batteries". A handful of years before that we would have been cobbling together a $500 device, or more realistically scrapping the whole project. The whole model of feature-dense sensors suddenly crossed from something for major production runs and custom orders into single-unit consumer products, and I'm not sure people really noticed how big an impact it had on research.