Thursday, at a flashy event in New York, Samsung unveiled yet another phone: the Galaxy Note 9. Like you’d expect, it’s rectangular, it has a screen, and it has a few cameras. While unveiling what it hopes will be the next hit, it unknowingly confirmed something we’ve all been wondering: the smartphone industry is out of ideas.
Phones are officially boring: the only topic that’s up for debate with the Galaxy Note 9 is the lack of the iconic notch found on the iPhone X, and that it has a headphone jack. The notch has been cloned by almost every phone maker out there, and the headphone jack is a commodity that’s unfortunately dying. However, the fact that we’re comparing phones with or without a chunk out of the screen or a hole for your headphones demonstrates just how stuck the industry is.
It’s clear that there’s nothing really to see here. Yeah, the Note is a big phone, and it has a larger battery too. It’s in different colors, it’s faster than last year, and it has wireless charging. Everything you see here is from a laundry list of features that other smartphone manufacturers also have, and the lack of differentiation becomes clearer every year. It’s the pinnacle of technology, and it’s a snooze-fest.Yeah... did I mention already that Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore? I think I might have.
This isn’t exclusively a Samsung problem: Every manufacturer from Apple to Xiaomi faces the same predicament. [...] As smartphones pushed the boundaries and iterated at breakneck pace over the last decade, they’ve quickly run into limitations governed by the laws of physics: A phone can only get so thin or light, and the year-to-year speed and battery upgrades are becoming less-and-less impressive. There’s only so many millimeters you can shave off, and megapixels to cram into the camera, before it’s good enough for most people and nobody cares anymore.This is what the end of Moore's Law means. Smartphones were able to get smaller because smartphone makers were still learning how to pack all of those components into the smallest space possible, but there are limits to that which we've apparently reached. The race to smallness has yielded benefits for laptops and desktops, also, but microchips simply aren't increasing in power anymore, which means that this year's new tech is... more or less identical to last year's tech. Which is identical to the year's before that, and the year's before that, and the year's before that...
You get the idea.
It was only a matter of time before people started to notice that technology wasn't actually changing anymore. The exponential growth of computing power has been such a driver of change in our daily lives for a long time now, and we're still coming to terms with exactly what that means, but it looks like we're going to get that time now... before technology leaps forward again, leaving us panting in its cold, impersonal wake.