What tech has improved slower than expected?

[bloomen]

For me it's mobile signal which is still a joke in tons of places.

I also expected storage to be bigger and cheaper by now. SD cards are certainly moving along, but by now I expected laptops to have 10-20 tb with ease. Obviously there are physical limits and the cloud has taken over but I still expected it to have moved further.

What else has disappointed you with its lack of progress?

[Wilmslowboy]

Batteries

You must be joking about storage, I debated long and hard about my first desktop Mac having 40MB or 60MB, 25 years later my phone has about 2,000 times as much.



Edited to add, Mobile phone coverage is largely to do with economics.

[bloomen]

Wilmslowboy said:

Batteries

You must be joking about storage, I debated long and hard about my first desktop Mac having 40MB or 60MB, 25 years later by phone has about 2,000 times as much.

Good call about the batteries.

I expected more from storage. Most laptops have around 1 tb and have had for many years now. There aren't many you can get more than 2-4 tb into other than things the size of patios.

[rdjohn]

I think that autonomous vehicles will always be 5-years away.

This weeks episode provides a realistic insight.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13...

[Digger]

BT & Broadband speeds in general. Yes I’m aware it’s a hefty cost regarding infrastructure.

Here is another classic case of BT Openreach ineptitude typically not helping the situation...

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

[paul.deitch]

AI has not met any of the hyped expectations for me.
Yes it can do some limited things very quickly, but can it make me a cup of tea?

[bitchstewie]

Batteries.

Just give me an iPhone X that I can use for a minimum of 2 days without having to keep an eye on battery.

[Mothersruin]

Hoverboards - saw them in a 1989 documentary about 2015 and NOTHING!

NOTHING!!!

[12TS]

Stuff just working. It’s a constant battle to restart, reset, upgrade, reset passwords etc.

In the early iPhone days it seemed great, but now it’s just as bad as all everything else. That’s partly cos there’s a lot more settings and stuff going on I guess. But still.

And printers.

[Norfolk B-roads]

Battery tech comes in step changes with new chemistry. The same dudes that invented LiPo are working on solid state batteries that will give your EV a range of 1000 miles, and charge much faster. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a2...

My immediate thought for slowly improving tech is.... video conferencing.

Why, in 2020, does every meeting still start with 15 minutes of people faffing about with trying to get Skype for Business working properly, or installing software, or trying to get rid of audio feedback from laptop microphones, or dialing in on the phone because the audio doesn't work...

And when you do get everyone in, why can't you hear a damned thing anyone is saying? We have loads of bandwidth, and dozens of audio and video codecs to choose from, and everyone sits there, silhouetted against the room lighting, and pixelated by stuttering mpeg compression, and sounding like they're mumbling underwater.

It's such a simple problem to solve. So many one to one facetime/whatsapp/zoom type things work fine. But get 10 people from 10 companies on a Skype call and 5 of them will have technical difficulties. Because VC tech only works if everyone uses the same system, and everyone uses Microsoft products at work, we are stuck with the absolute clusterfk that is Lync/Skype/Skype for Business version incompatibilities, or occasionally a forward thinking IT director will fork out for Webex, but then all the guests are late because they have to install that and work out how to use it. I hear MS are turning Skype for Business off soon, and so we'll all have to endure the crap that is Teams, which is only about 10 development-years behind Slack...

Honestly, we have iPhones and VoIp and Facetime and lots of cool communication tech. So why is Video Conferencing no better than it was 15 years ago?

[Driver101]

The PH website.

[Mazinbrum]

Driver101 said:

The PH website.

This forum, having to put in the html code for a url to work, so 90s.

[snuffy]

Norfolk B-roads said:

My immediate thought for slowly improving tech is.... video conferencing.

Why, in 2020, does every meeting still start with 15 minutes of people faffing about with trying to get Skype for Business working properly, or installing software, or trying to get rid of audio feedback from laptop microphones, or dialing in on the phone because the audio doesn't work...

And when you do get everyone in, why can't you hear a damned thing anyone is saying? We have loads of bandwidth, and dozens of audio and video codecs to choose from, and everyone sits there, silhouetted against the room lighting, and pixelated by stuttering mpeg compression, and sounding like they're mumbling underwater.

It's such a simple problem to solve. So many one to one facetime/whatsapp/zoom type things work fine. But get 10 people from 10 companies on a Skype call and 5 of them will have technical difficulties. Because VC tech only works if everyone uses the same system, and everyone uses Microsoft products at work, we are stuck with the absolute clusterfk that is Lync/Skype/Skype for Business version incompatibilities, or occasionally a forward thinking IT director will fork out for Webex, but then all the guests are late because they have to install that and work out how to use it. I hear MS are turning Skype for Business off soon, and so we'll all have to endure the crap that is Teams, which is only about 10 development-years behind Slack...

Honestly, we have iPhones and VoIp and Facetime and lots of cool communication tech. So why is Video Conferencing no better than it was 15 years ago?

Because people will.not set it up and leave it alone.

So everyone piles into the meeting room. Ah, bks, we need to kit. Someone trots of to reception, returns with all the kit under their arm. Then spend said 15 minutes plugging it all in, setting it all up. Then, when the meeting has finished, it all gets unplugged and returned to reception.

And of course no one things to do that 15 minutes before the meeting starts. They only think about it 15 seconds before the start. Or another one is that there's another meeting in the room you want and no one ever allows time between booking times. Hence there's no gap between one ending and the other starting.

Hence 15 minutes of faff. It's not the technology so much as the people.

[Cantaloupe]

Progress on molecular transporters a la Star Trek is painfully slow if not static, I would be expected by now to be able to
zap myself to New York , see a show, do a bit of shopping then whizz my molecules back to blighty in a millisecond.

[CoolHands]

Self driving cars. It’ll never happen.

[Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area]

I don’t know if this applies to other brands of smart phone, but it should be possible to view the screen on an iPhone in bright light conditions. That and battery life are the only failings for me.

[PositronicRay]

Fax machine, pretty good, sending documents.

Doesn't do anything else though, even after 30yrs.

[AlexC1981]

I'm 38 now and when I was around 8 and using a Commodore 64 my brother told me that game graphics would look like television in the future. They are getting there, but still have a long way to go.

I thought when the Human Genome Project was completed we would be able to develop cures for all sorts of nasty illnesses a lot quicker than we seem to be doing.

[JulianHJ]

Nuclear power - lots of startups looking at fusion, a few proposals (implemented??) for safer fission designs (I seem to remember something about a ‘pebble bed’ design) yet it still costs countless billions, we still have major accidents and we’re still reliant (in the UK at least) on natural gas for most of our energy.

[Funk]

bloomen said:

Wilmslowboy said:

Batteries

You must be joking about storage, I debated long and hard about my first desktop Mac having 40MB or 60MB, 25 years later by phone has about 2,000 times as much.

Good call about the batteries.

I expected more from storage. Most laptops have around 1 tb and have had for many years now. There aren't many you can get more than 2-4 tb into other than things the size of patios.

The issue with storage is that typical file sizes have grown enormously in that time whereas power demands on batteries haven't. If you went back to the 90s and said we'd have songs at up to 50Mb each and films up to 60Gb each people would've thought you were joking.

Not only has battery life got better but so have the efficiencies of the devices using them.