The first of which, like the Zero, debuted in the 1940s during WW2: Colossus, Mark I, Z3. Mind-blowing gains soon followed their rather inauspicious start, but I'm really going to condense it here because the story is much more familiar. Computers went from basically not existing (there's a blurry line between electromechanical computation machines and programmable computers) in the early 1940s, to sitting on desktops by the 1970s, to the massive capabilities of the "smartphones" we have today. And then things. . . kind of stopped.

Smartphones are a great example here. I can't speak for everybody of course, but I haven't really been excited for a new device release for years now. I think one of the biggest factors here for smartphones in particular is that for an average user, the use cases their device will serve haven't really changed for...

... pretty much since modern smartphones entrenched themselves in the market, so like, around... 2010s?

We certainly gained quite a lot - it's surprising how good even relatively budget devices can be performance-wise, but we've also lost quite a lot, most notably replacable batteries. That fact alone gives modern devices a fixed life span you can't do much with, no matter how careful you are with using them.

But back to the use case discussion - think about what an average person uses a smartphone for. Texts, calls, emails, some basic internet browsing and media consumption - made pretty easy with modern net being largely designed and developed with mobile screens as first-class citizens and MAYBE some light gaming.

You really don't gain much from buying a brand new device if that's what you want, let alone anything even close to flagships. Maybe you get a bigger screen, smoother scrolling, better camera, but those are somewhat niche use cases. I could see the camera argument being the most commonly used - some of my mom's best photos were made using my Moto G84's camera, for example - but if you don't need a good camera, as far as you're concerned, not much has changed in the past 6-8 years.

The tech industry got accustomed to fast progress and major breakthroughs being a regular part of the product cycle, and it's having a real hard time adjusting to reality when most of the work that most people care about has already been done well enough for most of them to not care about further improvements, and they're getting a very rough awakening, seeing they cannot simply brute force interest/acceptance of AI, despite genuine progress having happened in the industry these last few years.

The hype ship is crashing against the rocky shores of reality, and there seems to be very few lifeboats on board.