5 ms·
That’s a bit silly of a thought experiment, because nothing survives it, since everything has its niche. If we had started with smartphones, computers coming al
by arijun 3y ago
That’s a bit silly of a thought experiment, because nothing survives it, since everything has its niche. If we had started with smartphones, computers coming along with their big screens and external input devices, people would be flooding to them. Even the timeline we have doesn’t survive—when smartphones came out it turned out people love having computing accessible from their pocket.
- xanderlewis 3y ago> That’s a bit silly of a thought experiment, because nothing survives it I don’t think that’s true. There are developments that really do constitute genuine progress: for example, going from CRTs to LCDs. It’s hard to imagine a world populated by high-resolution, energy-efficient, colour-accurate flatscreens suddenly being replaced by the invention of a gigantic ugly box that performs worse on every available metric. …and yet CRTs still exist as a ‘niche’ product. There’s a whole corner of the internet where people admire and collect them. It may well be that ‘spatial computing’ or whatever you wish to call it is going to be a genuine step forward, but it’s also easy to imagine it might not be. And that’s not true for every technology.
- theshackleford 3y ago> that performs worse on every available metric. Except motion. In which twenty year old monitors on my desk make everything put next to it look abysmal by comparison.
- i5-2520M 3y agoTo be fair there are a few metrics where CRTs smash any LCD, mostly response time related, but OLED and MicroLED can bridge that gap...
- xanderlewis 3y agoFair point. But I don’t think the average consumer cares about those metrics.