this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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A LOT of people have completely failed to grasp how much technology has stagnated in the last 20 years.
Yeah, my smart phone with Internet access basically everywhere begs to differ.
Phones didn't changed fundamentally since 2015.
Saying technology hasn't progressed in 10 years is a very different statement than technology hasn't progressed in 20 years.
Phones, as we know them today, entered market much later than consoles or PCs.
My point is that eventually we hit the ceiling of progress. PCs and consoles hit their peak 20 years ago while phones did 10 years ago. Things haven't changed in a while for both of them and it doesn't feel so far that there will be major progress any time soon.
We've got driverless cars and CRISPR gene editing. Those weren't around 20 years ago. You don't think those are major advancements?
The Iphone entered the marked in 2007, before that is what entirely possible to connect a PDA to the internet via you dumbphone (using IRC from my palm pilot in the 90s surely felt cool...)
My phone can literally be used as VR goggles and stream HD video pretty much anywhere in the country. But smart phones existed in 07 and PDAs existed in the 90s. Yeah, no difference between these things. lol.
Ah... you mean its better at providing a more potent form of a digital drug? Ok...
I feel like y'all are just being contrarian doomers. Listen, I get it. The ruling class of billionaires use technology for nefarious purposes to control us and extract every penny of money they possibly can by selling our attention spans in ever increasing ways. I'm not saying they don't. I'm not saying we live in a utopia. I'm just saying that there have absolutely been a lot of technological improvements in the past 20 years.
Folks saying "actually PDAs had internet access in the '90s" are, fuck, not even missing the forest for the trees, they're just covering their eyes and refusing to acknowledge that they're surrounded by trees.
We've got driverless cars. Yes, they're far from perfect, and I wouldn't really say they're adequate, but we do have honest to god driverless cars. Electric ones too! And they aren't just a gimmick, they really do give gas cars a run for their money. 3d printers are a home commodity now much like traditional printers have been in the past. CRISPR lets us modify genes. The idea of watching a 4k video on the Internet in 2006 would've been crazy. AI has improved a lot, and I don't even mean the modern generative AI like LLMs or Stable Diffusion, even prior to that machine learning was a huge thing.
Relevant XKCD.
That was released in 2014. You know what I can do now with my phone? I can take a picture of a bird and search to see what kind of bird it is. Reverse image search has been around for a while, but it used to just find things that were mostly pixel for pixel matches. Now it's much more capable.
May your optimism last.
The first smartphones were released in 2007....
You don't think there's any difference between today's phones and the 2007 ones? Not in cell coverage either?
Not in terms of navigating a city, which have had universal coverage since the flip phone days.
Also, just an FYI: GPS has had global coverage since the 1970s and doesn't require a cell signal at all.
Smart phone advancements have been incremental since they were released, very little had changed in terms of basic functionality. The biggest difference is that you can listen to music while your getting navigated now.
Dude, take the rose tinted goggles off for a second. I had a GPS navigation system for my car early on, around ~2010, maybe a little earlier, that thing was shit. It could hardly figure out where I was in the city. It would very often snap to the wrong road and I'd have to reboot it. Today, it's simple. I just pull out my magical everything device and use an app. Technology has progressed A TON in 20 years.
Yes. that is why smartphones replaced integrated navigation about 15 years ago. It's OK that you were a late adopter, but that doesn't change what happened. I was happily using google maps to navigate with my phone on a little holder on the dash and actively making fun of people like you by 2010.
It was actually kind of funny to have better navigation and a better stereo in my 1993 Ford Ranger with a quarter million miles on it than dumbasses that bought new cars in 2010.
Why are you being so condescending about this and making so many assumptions about me? I wasn't a "late adopter." I was a teenager. I didn't have a smart phone. I didn't have a "new car in 2010" nor a built in navigation system. I was using a standalone TomTom GPS in highschool in a 1996 Honda Accord. That was 20 years ago. Technology is significantly better now.
Sorry you are so butt hurt about making dumb choices 20 years ago.
Again, I was a teenager. The TomTom was a gift. Sorry they didn't give me a damn iPhone, I guess? 🙄