4 ms·

> is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of

> is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last couple thousand years would be literally unable to conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts, they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s Americans, or any citizens around the world at the time, would be more than astounded by 3-4 billion people being essentially always connected on a gigantic, seemingly instantaneous global communications and commerce network. The modern smartphone would similarly astound, what they can do all-in-one and the quality of it (the audio, the video, the music, movies, news, communication, click-button services & purchasing, digitization of money, the quality of digital photographs and how many you can take with no regard for space, it would all astound). Someone from the 1980s would be just as astounded by a recent iPhone, they'd feel like a time traveler. People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. Maybe people have now widely forgotten the shock effect it had, I haven't forgotten. That said, the parent's claim was an exaggeration. We're not inventing/harnessing such extraordinary stuff every year. Maybe a few things of note per decade globally. CRISPR, cracking the human genome, modern antibiotics, Internet, Web, transistor and microprocessor, software, computers including personal, space flight, powered flight, various engines, electricity and electric light, fossil fuels, nuclear power and weapons, various green revolution outcomes (food production), solar and a few key renewable energy technologies, the commercial/industrial laser, and so on. There are several dozen things that can be added to that list from the last 100-150 years. A few per decade globally might be a reasonable peg.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. This is a large exaggeration. I was there as an adult. It was another cool piece of tech, sure, but come on.
- rvense 5y ago
  I think it depends who you were. Some people went more or less directly to being always connected to an iPhone from a world of monochrome Nokias and portable CD (or cassette, even) players and the internet being on a PC tower in a separate room of the house, if you had it at home at all. The intermediate steps - laptops, Palm pilots, iPods - were far from universal, at least in my world.
  - bouncycastle 5y ago
    I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and the technology was already there, so not like it came out overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.
    - rvense 5y ago
      "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Most people were blissfully unaware of the existence of PDAs, much less how they worked or what they could do, and for them the iPhone might as well have emerged perfectly formed from an unspecified bodily orifice of Steve Jobs. The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified.
      - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        > The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified Not in the American middle-class, upper middle-class, and wealthy.
        rvense 5y ago
        who cares about them
z3t4 5y ago
People give too much credit to the iPhone. There where a lot of full screen smart-phones before the iPhone The same with mp3 players before iPod. Apples hardware and design is OK, but their marketing is in their own league, like for example a company selling flavored water bottles while there's good quality water taps available almost everywhere. They can take something that is already readily available and sell it for 2x the price, and at the same time make people think it's revolutionary.
thefounder 5y ago
>> truly astounded by the iPhone. For some reasons I was not truly astounded at all. I had several smartphones before but I preferred smaller "cool" phones until iPhone 4. The iphone became for phones what the ipod was for music players. Great device but not really from the future. I bought it for the web browser. Even today I use my iphone perhaps at 10% of its power mostly for things that I do on my laptop anyway(mail, chat, web browsing) so I'm actually astounded that I can't hook it to a monitor and use it as a computer/macbook so to me it seems we got stuck in the past.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

> People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. This is a large exaggeration. I was there as an adult. It was another cool piece of tech, sure, but come on.

rvense 5y ago
I think it depends who you were. Some people went more or less directly to being always connected to an iPhone from a world of monochrome Nokias and portable CD (or cassette, even) players and the internet being on a PC tower in a separate room of the house, if you had it at home at all. The intermediate steps - laptops, Palm pilots, iPods - were far from universal, at least in my world.
- bouncycastle 5y ago
  I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and the technology was already there, so not like it came out overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.
  - rvense 5y ago
    "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Most people were blissfully unaware of the existence of PDAs, much less how they worked or what they could do, and for them the iPhone might as well have emerged perfectly formed from an unspecified bodily orifice of Steve Jobs. The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      > The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified Not in the American middle-class, upper middle-class, and wealthy.
      - rvense 5y ago
        who cares about them

z3t4 5y ago

People give too much credit to the iPhone. There where a lot of full screen smart-phones before the iPhone The same with mp3 players before iPod. Apples hardware and design is OK, but their marketing is in their own league, like for example a company selling flavored water bottles while there's good quality water taps available almost everywhere. They can take something that is already readily available and sell it for 2x the price, and at the same time make people think it's revolutionary.

thefounder 5y ago

>> truly astounded by the iPhone. For some reasons I was not truly astounded at all. I had several smartphones before but I preferred smaller "cool" phones until iPhone 4. The iphone became for phones what the ipod was for music players. Great device but not really from the future. I bought it for the web browser. Even today I use my iphone perhaps at 10% of its power mostly for things that I do on my laptop anyway(mail, chat, web browsing) so I'm actually astounded that I can't hook it to a monitor and use it as a computer/macbook so to me it seems we got stuck in the past.