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For the longest time I would have said the internet was the most revolutionary moment in the last century. But the more I dwell on it, I debate if the pocket t
by basch 4y ago
For the longest time I would have said the internet was the most revolutionary moment in the last century.
But the more I dwell on it, I debate if the pocket touchscreen smartphone was really the moment.
Before phone, I printed Mapquest onto paper. The end result was pretty similar to me using an old paper map. The internet was evolutionary in that regard. It replaced some newspaper, and letters/phone calls. Text messaging sort of existed tangentially parallel to the internet. Search engines were pretty cool. It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life. You didn’t have to like, drive home, to go dial in. Even having a color touchscreen pda that ran doom, it was still a novelty, and not like an extension of my being like the iPhone is now. Momentum scroll. And realistically it was the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 that was the turning point. iPhone 4 introduced mobile copy and paste.
- WA 4y agoThe internet would work just fine without smartphones. Smartphones would be pretty useless without internet.
- ben_w 4y agoSmartphones without the internet would be PDAs with amazing cameras. Still rather valuable, though with a somewhat lower set of price brackets for budget/medium/premium.
- alexthehurst 4y agoAgreed. Back when I was wringing the maximum utility out of every dollar, an iPod Touch alongside a feature phone provided a whole lot of usefulness for a few years, even with no mobile connection.
- nehal3m 4y ago> iPhone 4 introduced mobile copy and paste. To the iPhone. There were phones on the market that supported copy and paste by the time the first iPhone rolled around. I would tend to agree with you about the rest; the internet didn't strike the average person as very useful, or at least as revolutionary as it did with the advent of the smartphone. Arguably the iPhone was the mainstream breakthrough there. But this is what kills me, and you said it yourself: "It was only when the internet became portable that it really infected every moment of life." That was a good thing when the titans of today's web didn't employ armies of psychologists to hijack your attention to sell ads, inadvertently destroying the fabric of society. I don't have to tell the HN crowd how algorithms tuned to increase engagement blindly steer us toward outrage and division. I recently posted comments about how I went from the Apple ecosystem to as open source as feasible. Nowadays the FairPhone only does duty as a GPS (hardmounted to my car). I have to be able to receive phone calls so I still use a Nokia, but it lives at home as much as possible. For me personally, the total invasion of every aspect of life by the internet, and more specifically the tech giants in Silicon Valley, has killed all the joy and excitement I used to feel at the bleeding edge of tech. The bright-eyed sci-fi future turned out to be just another avenue for greed. It's just a laptop now, and a gaming PC for the (very) occasional game with friends. If my house burned down with those in it, I doubt I'd feel loss.
- basch 4y agoYeah, I had copy/paste on a Windows CE device, but Apples per usual was better. And what I meant by it is I would otherwise give the revolution award to the 3GS, but really the 4 was the first “feature complete” iPhone, without visible pixels. It was the maturation and commotization moment for a previously bit niche product.