Consumer Tech: Failing to Innovate
I’m feeling baffled. I’m on a three year old laptop with a two year old smartphone and a four year set top box hooked up to a six year old receiver and projector.
In theory there have been enormous improvements made in technology in the interim; RAM, CPUs, GPUs, networking, HDMI 2.0, Dolby Vision & HDR10, Dolby Atmos, 4K / UHD…
..and yet the stunning part to me is that none of these have yet been packaged in such a way as to create an obviously compelling and superior experience.
I could spend $600 to upgrade my receiver and another $1000 to install ceiling mounted Atmos “top channel” speakers, $200 for the new 4K Apple TV and $2k for the Epson Home Cinema “4K” (lol) projector…and I’d then be able to start purchasing 4K content that would look a _tiny_ bit crisper. But of course the point of 4K isn’t the 4K, it’s the HDR and the gamut expansion to really nail the color palette, right? Ah, well HDR only really matters if you can actually effect a very bright white in contrast to a dark black, so that Epson projector won’t be able to deliver a meaningful HDR experience, so I’d have to *downgrade* from my current 120" 1080p experience to, say, a 77" LG 4K OLED which — OH SHIT — costs $15k. Okay, so now I’m spending the cost of a small car to get a dramatically _smaller_ display when it’s well understood that display size is effectively the primary measurement of watching satisfaction. Errr…how about that wider gamut? Well it turns out that there are competing standards for that; BluRay is recorded in REC.709, _some_ BluRay UHD content will be available in the wider REC.2020, it’s mastered in DCI-P3 colorspace and measured relative to Adobe sRGB. Oh and that $15k LG OLED doesn’t have 100% REC.2020 coverage. What % coverage does it have? Who knows, they don’t publish that. Oh, and your fancy new Apple TV 4k will emit only a fixed-rate signal and does a crappy job at mapping HDR10 content to Dolby Vision so a lot of your very expensive movies on your very expensive TVs or projectors will look bad.
The point is not to drown in the minutiae but rather to point out that the experience sucks, even if you throw a lot of money at it, which is a failure of the tech & entertainment industries to successfully solve for a compelling experience. The underlying technology and content are there to have theoretically delivered something great but the actuality is terrible and confusing, so I’m left not spending money upgrading my home theater because I’m not sure that — even $20k further down the pipe — I’d have a set up that was materially that much better.
The same for my iPhone 6S+. I have no assurances that the 8+ or X will offer _dramatically_ better battery life or enable me to do things with my phone that will make my life better. (No, sending personalized poop emoji videos doesn’t count.) I’m 2–3 generations behind and it doesn’t matter. That’s appalling.
My trusty laptop’s two generations behind as well. 2.2GHz i7 with 16GB of RAM. RAM is the main thing I’m gated on — same for many (most?) professionals. And guess what the most fancy, most expensive Mac laptop you can buy three years later has? 16GB RAM. So I could spend almost $3000 on a new laptop and get a Touch Bar I don’t need (sacrificing an Escape that I do need), a bit extra and faster SSD storage (which is actually handy), I think get slightly worse battery life and lose my Magsafe (BOO), and have a slightly faster processor (not helpful). Useless.
I feel disappointed, like the industry has failed to usefully bring together the advances enabled by new technologies in a way that delights. Let’s snap out of this, people. Let’s build some magic.
