Why does it seem like technology hasn't improved from 2010 to now?

[hotdogPi]

Computers: I got my laptop on Christmas 2010. It still feels very similar to when I first got mine (having to get new ones in 2016 and 2019). It's still 250 GB storage, and Minecraft actually uses more of my battery per hour than it did in 2012, despite that computers are supposed to be getting faster.

Smartphones: The iPhone 3, the first one with an App Store, came out in 2008. New features seem to be more aesthetic than functional; I'm still on the first type of iPhone SE (between iPhone 5 and iPhone 6; 2016), and everything runs fine on it, even the newest stuff.

WolframAlpha can still answer about the same range of questions as it could when I first discovered it. You would think it would have improved.

Uber started in 2009, so the technology was there in 2010 despite it not becoming popular until later.

Pandora (the streaming service) began in 2000. That's not a new concept, either.

Video game graphics have been perfectly realistic for a while – Half-Life 1 came out in 1998.

The Nissan Leaf (all-electric) came out in 2010.

Zoom began in 2012, but it was not the first of its kind. Skype began in 2003. If the 2009 flu shut everything down like COVID-19 did, we would still have been able to have online meetings and classes.

[RobbieL2415]

Moore's Law.

[Dirt Roads]

Even though I'm not sold on it, autonomous vehicle technology has entered the stage during this past decade.  In the railroad world, positive train control (PTC) using 220MHz data radio is a solid technology that still needs some additional development to become more than just a safety feature.

[Scott5114]

Because the commercial tech companies have shifted their thinking from "How do we improve our products" to "How do we make more money"?

In the 1990s and 2000s it was all about innovation. I make my phone faster than yours, or have more features, or whatever, and I'll outcompete you and make more money that way. But in the 2010s it became about marketing. How do I provide disincentives to keep people from switching to my competitor? How do I do planned obsolescence to sell more phones? How can I collect data about my users to sell to advertisers?

When you remove profit motive, you remove the marketers, so the only thing left to do is make the product better. Which is why open source software has been improving by the same leaps and bounds since 2010 as it did in the decade before that, and commercial software is stagnating.

[jeffandnicole]

What would your your phone to do today that it couldn't do back then?

[hotdogPi]

What would your your phone to do today that it couldn't do back then?

Assuming you mean what I expect it to be able to do (there are a few typos in your post):

• Have Siri able to answer almost anything with a definite answer, and even sometimes unprompted if it's helpful (as an option, of course). Maybe I said it's 6:38 PM when it's actually 5:38, or "32 and snowy last I checked" when the forecast has changed and it's 41 and rain. Or I'm on a highway, I ask out loud if there's a Starbucks at the upcoming exit, and it answers yes or no, sometimes with qualifiers such as "yes, but it's 2 miles out of your way".
• Take a screenshot of something in a foreign language, have it automatically translated to English. Such a thing does exist, but not well. Same with currency conversion (if you're paying with foreign cash, you can see the original price by not looking through your phone).
• Knowing exactly what went wrong when something malfunctions, and being able to recognize that something's wrong.
• Point it at something, and it says exactly far away it is (can currently be done, but only at 8 feet or less), what material it is (includes identifying living things), and if it's the outside of a building, when it was built based on location data.
• Be able to tell with 100% accuracy if it's a scam call, and if it is, automatically report it so that they get shut down.
• Maybe a way to control the phone, tablet, or laptop without touching it?
• Anything that hasn't changed or changed much since 2010 should be faster on a 2020 device than a 2010 device.

Siri won't even answer "when was this phone first turned on" or any variant wording of this question.

[Max Rockatansky]

In some sectors like electric cars I would say it's improved a ton.  The price with EVs has come way down from production capacity increasing/getting better and the range has improved significantly.  What hasn't really improved as much as I would have expected is charging speeds nor a shift towards universal charging infrastructure.  Imagine if you bought a car with an internal combustion engine and had to buy brand specific gasoline?

[Scott5114]

Some of the items on the list presented by 1 (the first two, and the "what material") are there simply because they're hard problems to solve. Language parsing and processing is hard because human languages are complex, context-dependent, and riddled with exceptions, which makes it very difficult to model them in a way a computer can understand. It's possible to do, but it starts taking more processing power than is available on a mobile device to do it in an acceptable time frame. If you're doing this with the added step of optical character recognition (gleaning text from an image) or speech-to-text interpretation, you add more places things can go wrong. (OCR sucks even when you're doing something like scanning a library book or newspaper with a known font, much less doing it from a photo where optimal conditions are not guaranteed.)

Scam call detection is never going to be 100% accurate, because there are humans with an incentive to defeat the detection. You are always going to be chasing a moving target, and the risk of false positives is greater to the developer than that of false negatives (wouldn't want to be a company whose software flagged an important medical call as being a scam call).

The rest is more or less doable. uptime(1) has been a Unix utility since probably the 1970s so there's no reason something similar couldn't be implemented on iOS.

Lack of error messages that materially aid in diagnosing a problem is a symptom of the marketing involvement–if we refuse to admit a problem is happening then the user will think everything is okay and not be mad enough to buy a different phone. Or people will get too confused by the error message and have a mental breakdown. The willingness of Linux and other Unixes to barf out elaborate error messages can be disconcerting to some users, but most of the time copy and pasting them into Google will result in some sort of advice as to how to start solving the problem. All computing devices should follow this lead.

[GCrites]

Because most real technical change between 1995 and 2010 was just screen stuff/digital. And screen stuff was easy once we got over the HD and miniaturization hump. Meatspace is already mostly maxed out for now and much trickier to change. Evolution happened in meatspace during that time but revolution did not. You have to go back to the first half of the 20th Century and even into the 1800s for actual revolution.

[webny99]

I think we've reached a point where technology has advanced so much that there's no longer enough incentive to find more ways to become lazier.

[Duke87]

I think you're just looking in the wrong places. Some other things to consider:

- In 2010, LED lighting was this newfangled thing and available applications of it were very limited. The entire list of Energy Star approved LED light bulbs fit on one page. In 2020, LED is now the standard for most new applications, and the LED lights themselves have become more efficient and more reliable than they were a decade ago. To the point where you actually now have businesses replacing older LEDs with new ones and reducing their electric bills in the process.
- The average energy efficiency of things like air conditioners and refrigerators has quietly improved a bit over the last decade as well.
- In 2010, anyone working in the utility industry would have told you "you can't store electricity at grid scale". In 2020, grid scale battery storage systems exist and are rapidly growing in number.
- Between 2010 and 2020, options to stream or download music became better and more numerous. YouTube switched from flash wrappers to streaming protocols and now allows longer and higher quality videos.
- Social media has certainly evolved a lot between 2010 and 2020, though whether it has improved is subjective.
- As others have mentioned, new cars have gained a bunch of features (and "features", sure - again, subjective) between 2010 and 2020.
- PC hardware admittedly hasn't advanced much overall in the last decade, but solid state storage media (including SSDs) has grown in capacity significantly.
- For those who care for it, the "Internet of Things" has made major advances. Home CCTV systems that you could monitor from your phone didn't exist yet in 2010. The Nest thermostat debuted in 2011. Alexa entered the world in 2014.

[J N Winkler]

As others have suggested, I think this is mostly a result of the focus of innovation largely moving away from consumer-grade commodity hardware such as phones and laptops.  I certainly haven't felt pushed to replace my current laptop (purchased 2011, still running Windows 7).  On the other hand, there have been great strides in machine learning, to the point that computers can now interpret medical diagnostic imaging more accurately than humans in many cases.  Speech-to-text recognition is also much more accurate than it used to be, to the point that wrong words in automatic captions are noticeably easier to skip over.

In the consumer space, the biggest negative development of the past decade has been the substitution of software-as-service and à la carte subscriptions for buy-once and "emporium of everything" subscription models.  I think we are still working through the backlash.

[kphoger]

What would your your phone to do today that it couldn't do back then?

Assuming you mean what I expect it to be able to do (there are a few typos in your post):

• Have Siri able to answer almost anything with a definite answer, and even sometimes unprompted if it's helpful (as an option, of course). Maybe I said it's 6:38 PM when it's actually 5:38, or "32 and snowy last I checked" when the forecast has changed and it's 41 and rain. Or I'm on a highway, I ask out loud if there's a Starbucks at the upcoming exit, and it answers yes or no, sometimes with qualifiers such as "yes, but it's 2 miles out of your way".
• Take a screenshot of something in a foreign language, have it automatically translated to English. Such a thing does exist, but not well. Same with currency conversion (if you're paying with foreign cash, you can see the original price by not looking through your phone).
• Knowing exactly what went wrong when something malfunctions, and being able to recognize that something's wrong.
• Point it at something, and it says exactly far away it is (can currently be done, but only at 8 feet or less), what material it is (includes identifying living things), and if it's the outside of a building, when it was built based on location data.
• Be able to tell with 100% accuracy if it's a scam call, and if it is, automatically report it so that they get shut down.
• Maybe a way to control the phone, tablet, or laptop without touching it?
• Anything that hasn't changed or changed much since 2010 should be faster on a 2020 device than a 2010 device.

Siri won't even answer "when was this phone first turned on" or any variant wording of this question.

He he he, you and I are going in opposite directions!  About a month ago or so, I finally got so sick of being addicted/married to my smartphone that I took the plunge.  I downgraded to the phone shown below.  I keep my old smartphone in my desk drawer at work, because I use it for a mobile VPN pass, which I can access via Wi-Fi to the company router.



I wanted a flip phone, but my periodic travels in Mexico require me to get a phone that can roam on GSM networks.  This was the only GSM-capable dumbphone sold by Verizon that isn't a piece of crap.  And actually, it's made really well.  It was built with construction workers in mind:  it's waterproof, dustproof, solid construction.  It's big and heavy enough that I bought a leather belt-clip holster for it.

The only downsides are that it's difficult to view pictures on the smaller screen, and that I'm back to texting in T9.