Slashdot Mirror
Where Have All the Gadgets Gone?
waderoush writes "How many electronic gadgets did you own in 2005? How many do you own today? The answer is almost certainly a lot fewer. Counter to the dominant trend in consumer technology since the 1920s — and despite predictions of a coming 'Internet of things' — there may actually be *less* electronic stuff in our homes and offices today than ever before. That's thanks largely to the rise of multipurpose wireless devices like smartphones and tablets, which are now powerful enough to replace many older, dedicated devices like point-and-shoot cameras, music players, digital voice recorders — even whole home entertainment systems. To prove the point, here are before-and-after photos from one San Francisco household (mine) where the herd of digital devices has been thinned from about three dozen, eight years ago, to just 15 today."
Uh? What's going on here?
Also note the pictures: It seems he changed, not the world in general.
In 2005 we see a microwave and stuff that seems to be a lot of mobile phones and remote controls. What is preventing him from getting lots of unused mobile phones today? The remotes seem to belong to the stuff below the TV, he got rid of his fancy stereo (with CD-player, amp, loudspeakers).
Yes, the world changed. Yes, you need fewer gadgets. No, personal experience is not evidence and I think those pictures show only a change in his personality: From a young "I need to have every crap" he went to understanding he does not need every crap. Apart from that, the reduction we see in the pictures is not impressive at all. And apart from that, "personal experience" is no evidence for global developments.
I don't even have a mobile (cell) phone. I think my collection of gadgets is about the same.
Anyway, the more important question is "what is the sacrifice you are making by embracing multi-purpose devices?" A DSLR will produce better photos than your iPhone (or whatever). A point-n-click camera will also. A dedicated scanner is likely to produce a better scan than a scanner tacked on to a printer. I could find examples relevant to the other examples as well but there is no point because they are easy to find. I, personally, would prefer a dedicated "gadget" that does one thing and does it well over a gadget that does many things but with less quality. YMMV.
Maybe some people are choosing to replace game consoles and such with tablets, but i'm not. I've still got a PS3 and a Wii. I've still got a digital camera that i use to take "important" pictures because it does a much better job than my phone. I admit i haven't used my dedicated mp3 players in awhile, but i think that's the only device that's actually been phased out. Of course that only got phased out because i got a smartphone, so that evens that out i guess. And since then i've also added a Nook, a tablet and a Roku.
Perhaps if you have less electronic devices it's because you decided you wanted less?
Of course going by the sample pictures it looks like you have a lot of redundant pieces of electronics that i never bothered with. I've had one "boombox" type stereo system pretty much my entire life. No need for separate CD players or tuners, and i've certainly never needed a turntable!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Where have all the gadgets gone?
Long time charging
Where have all the gadgets gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the gadgets gone?
Gone to smartphones, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Your point?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
I've just purchased two old Casio organizers via E-Bay and a calculator! This proves conclusively that the author is wrong.
It can be old, broken and useless . . . but a geek will still hoard it. Every geek has a drawer, a box, a closet, or a garage stuffed with useless stuff. There just might be some possibility that it will be good for something in the future. Maybe the Zombie Apocalypse will infect Ethernet, so I will need that PCMCIA Token Ring card?
Every time I go digging for something it's like a Computer Archeological Wonderland. Wow! BASIC programs on paper tape! The old HP 41C calculator!
I never own less gadgets . . . just more. Where have all my gadgets gone? Who knows. But they are around here somewhere, and can find them if I look hard enough.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The "do one thing perfectly" bit works pretty well with software, and in an unlimited or at least "big" environment.
I don't see how that carries over very well to the hardware in my jacket pocket, though.
Yes, I *do* quite like having a portable multipurpose device that performs many communications and data retrieval/display tasks acceptably well. I certainly don't want to carry a phone, an e-reader, an mp3 player, and an Internet pad on my morning ride on the subway when my smartphone will let me get phone calls, read my novel, listen to that Sun Ra album I found last night, and check the weather forecast to see if there's a chance the rain will clear out by lunchtime, all in one go.
But since you've evidently lots of pockets, go right ahead. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The change from some Bang & Olufsen speakers to the earbuds was a real winner... Most of his choices revolve arround the adoption of Apple products.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
"Do one thing perfectly" works well in some hardware, worse in other cases. Cameras are a case where the physics dictates the size of the optics needed for certain capabilities, so to get eg good telephoto capability or good low-light capability one needs a dedicated lens.
Likewise with printers. Sure an inkjet all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax is nice, but there are still uses for large format printers & scanners, and high-volume copiers. They're just not needed for the average household, so the specialized devices are relegated to the businesses and hobbyists that need them.
Not a sentence!
a) I still own all electronic devices which i owned in 2005, so the absolute number has increased
b) I did not have three dozens of Gadgets in 2005
c) Not even the number of "active" gadgets has decreased. active back then:
* camera (compact)
* mobile phone (Nokia 6310i)
* palm (z31) (replaced also a stolen mp3 player)
Now:
*camera (compact)
*mobile phone #1 (galaxy note II) - playing/reading documents/consuming media/surfing the web/feeds/google+
*mobile phone #2 (nokia e63) - workhorse for phone calls and emails
*ebook reader (sony) - use it when in eant a quite time in a bright place on a bench to read a good book (leave the other devices at home)
*mp3 player (Used for sports/biking - before owning the galaxy note used also everyday)
*tablet (galazy tab - surfing on th couch)
I like that the gadgets got more diversified. Its just convenient.
> To prove the point, here are before-and-after photos from one San Francisco household (mine) where the herd of digital devices has been thinned from about three dozen, eight years ago, to just 15 today.
Awesome. Once burglary was a real hit and miss. Now your victims case their places for you. Even lists his dog. Google tells me his dog it is an Australian Sheppard. Sound docile enough. I can always get it drunk lol.
http://www.wikifido.com/page/Rhody
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Shepherd#Temperament
Now when will Wade be out of town?
Xconomy robotics event 4/11 https://twitter.com/wroush
"Far too many people have too much information online as to their schedules and what they will be attending and where." http://protectitnow.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/your-home-security-never-before.html
I'll just have to arrive early to beat the crowd. I have dibs on the Canon Powershot S5 IS and the iPhone5.
What do you mean by owned by a corporation? Why should owning one device mean you're owned by a corporation?
Does that mean if you have more devices you're not owned by a corporation and instead owned by more corporations?
You can always switch to a different multi-use device.
I think he means owned as in pwned. The point being that the cost of switching in both time and money becomes so high that you stay with the company.
The more DRM'ed software and data you use, or the more apps for which there isn't a port or the API is proprietary, the more you owe your soul to the company (app) store.
You don't have to reprogram your calendar, re-buy office software, stop playing your favourite game and set up numerous accounts again if you change your camera from company A to B. Unless, of course, that camera is on a mult-function device. Then you have a strong reason not to change your camera, or if you do, stick to the same company. Pwned.
Doomed to mediocrity too, given that a multi-function device is always a jack of all trades, master of none.
I like the freedom to choose, and change individual gadgets easily. You don't need the modern day equivalents of TVs with built-in VCRs, and if you think a little ahead, you probably don't want them either.
You know that guy with the shiny smille and a device that does lots more things than yours does? Don't follow him; he's a Judas goat.
Convergence may have gotten rid of the need for multiple devices, but devices are much more personal these days. Rather than one phone per household, it is one phone per person. Instead of one computer per household, it is one computer or tablet per person.
A lot of the old gadgets will still exist anyway. An individual may have a tablet to watch TV alone, but they will also have a TV to watch as a family. An individual may have a tablet for web browsing, but there will still be a computer for the kids to type up their school papers. While most families will be perfectly happy with their camera phone, any family with a photo nut will also have a digital camera. (The prior statement applies for most hobbies.)
As for that disappearing microwave, I don't see how he managed that. It was a lot easier to cook eggs with your CPU in 2005 after all.
Does his Macbook run hot enough to replace his microwave?
Doomed to mediocrity too, given that a multi-function device is always a jack of all trades, master of none.
Part of the difficulty is that they're really a jack of all trades, master of many. I gave away my old point-and-shoot camera, that cost me a few hundred dollars a just few years ago, because the camera on the iPhone gave better results. Not only do the pictures look better, but it automatically tags the photo with positional data, which is something that I specifically want.
My iPhone is also a great at other things, and I don't think that it's limited to Apple. Modern cell phones do a lot of things incredibly well. Yes, you're forced to do business with a big corporation to have them, but really, what's the alternative that you would advocate? Building your own computers out of sticks and dirt?
All the different audio types had different head curves. A turntable was different than an ultra-short wave radio, different than a ferro-magnetic tape or a chrome based magnetic tape. To connect them together, you needed an equalizer to adapt the different head curves to better fit together.
With digital equipment, the need is gone. The signal gets digitalized once at the source, and then it is handled digitally until the final amplifier, where a DSP creates a new analog signal from the digital version. Each bit is threated the same, so no need to equalize it somewhere in the signal path. Differently than in analog times, where we had a signal-noise-ratio of about 60 dB (or less, depending on the equipment), now the signal has 96 dB. There is only one part we have to slightly equalize, that are the actual loudspeakers. For that, a 5-way-equalizer looks quite approbriate. Everything else is overkill.
In the 80s and 90s, a computer from a few years ago wouldn't just be slow, it would be absolutely obsolete. It wouldn't even run new software.
That's still true on consoles. Xbox and GameCube were abandoned fairly quickly in favor of Xbox 360 and Wii. It's also true on mobile, where phones still being sold today can't run some of the apps on Google Play Store because the apps require Android 4.x and the devices are stuck on 2.x.
You have a laptop that can run everything handily
Except companies stopped making 10" laptops at the end of 2012 because they want customers to start buying a separate, higher-margin laptop and tablet instead.
and a phone that includes the PDA.
Except it can be far more expensive to consolidate. A PDA such as the Galaxy Player or iPod touch costs $0 per month more than what one's already paying for Internet. Replacing your dumbphone with a smartphone, on the other hand, means replacing a $7/mo bill with a $35/mo bill (source: virginmobileusa.com) because a lot of carriers refuse to activate voice-only service on a smartphone.
The average person really isn't looking hard enough to recognize the difference in picture quality between an iphone and a serious camera. My old digital shoots much better pictures than an iphone, and my girlfriend's 1 year old cheap digital camera also shoots MUCH better pictures, but most of the time nobody's going to notice.
Examples of where the iphone shines and falters vs dslr:
http://connect.dpreview.com/post/2863436371/leaving-my-dslr-at-home-iphone-experiment
A lot of people don't need a camera that shoots in low light, extreme detail, or fast action. I needed to send my insurance company photos from an accident where I was rear ended before, my wife's cheapo digital took perfectly detailed photos in the evening effortlessly, with or without flash. The iphone just left us with a blurry mess, we were grateful to have her camera with us. In another situation I was selling a vehicle and a potential buyer wanted to see the paint quality, the iphone really just couldn't take a good enough picture to handle that. Our 3 year old dslr took wonderful pictures and helped me make a sale in that situation. Finally, I have kids in kickboxing and we all race motocross. Trying to take pictures of any of this with an iphone feels like trying to get a portrait artist to sketch live action. The dslr is a requirement for us to catch any of these moments decently.
Bottom line: You might not need a "real camera". If you need to take pictures in low light, extreme detail and zoom, or live action you do. If you don't, and you aren't a perfectionist the iphone is actually a better choice for you, and you can always borrow a dslr from a friend for some rare occasion.
Author of TFA here. So many people have mentioned the microwave that I had to respond. Yes, I still have a microwave! It's built into the kitchen and it belongs to my landlord, so I wasn't about to rip it out for the "after" photo. I should have made that clear in the original text, which has now been updated.
Thanks, (almost) everyone, for engaging seriously with the premise of the article. Of course it's anecdotal, of course I was writing about my own experiences. This is a given when you're writing a personal essay. But my guess -- and it seems to be correct, from a lot of the comments -- was that a lot of other people have also noticed that they're able to get along with fewer gadgets, especially since the new wave of touchscreen mobile gadgets are basically the Swiss army knives of electronics. Others haven't had this experience, and that's fine. My real point was that it's possible to get the same stuff done today with fewer tools.
Sorry if my preference for Apple products put off a bunch of readers, but the theme would hold up even if I were an Android or Windows customer.