Comedian Louis C.K. does a hilarious bit about technology. “Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy,” he says.
When I was a kid we had a rotary phone. We had a phone you had to stand next to, and you had to dial it. … If they called and you weren’t home, the phone would just ring lonely, by itself. … This is what people are like now: They get their phone, and they’re like, Ugh, it won’t … Give it a second! It’s going to space! Can you give it a second to get back from space?
Readers frequently send me that Louis C.K. clip when I pan some new technology, or when I ask for more features when I review a gadget that already does amazing things. Just look at some of the wonders possible with today’s smartphones: Your phone will identify pretty much any song instantly, translate any phrase on the fly, and not only find the nearest fancy restaurant but also show you its menu, what people think of it, and let you book a reservation. If you owned such a device a decade ago you would have been considered a god. But today you throw the phone against the wall because it sometimes stops working when you hold it the wrong way. Isn’t that churlish? Shouldn’t we appreciate, rather than criticize, the tech that dominates our lives? As Louis C.K. puts it, “We live in an amazing, amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots.”
I don’t think so. Funny as he is, Louis C.K. misses something important about technology and how it improves: We’d never get anywhere if some of us weren’t impatient and ungrateful. Sure, today’s gadgets can do amazing things. But that’s always true of today’s gadgets. The latest and greatest will always be better than the stuff we had before. But it’d be foolish to be happy with merely surpassing yesterday—if that were the only basis for judging tech there would be never be any reason to make anything better. The color television came about only because some spoiled idiots were unhappy with black-and-white TVs, and the HDTV made its debut only because a few ingrates couldn’t stand standard-def. Disappointment, in other words, fuels innovation.
At least I hope that’s the case, because I have a confession to make: I was disappointed by the year in tech. We saw exceedingly few revolutionary technologies this year. In almost every category, the best products of 2010 offered only incremental improvements over those of 2009. They worked just a bit better or offered a few more features but did little that was an obvious leap forward.
Let’s start with smartphones. The big story this year was the ascent of Android: Google’s mobile operating system came out on several great phones, it saw monster growth, and its market share now seems sure to surpass that of the iPhone and the BlackBerry. Last week I wrote that the Nexus S, the new phone designed by Google itself, is the first Android phone that I’d leave my iPhone for. In 2011, I expect to see many similar, high-quality Android devices.
Android, though, achieved these gains without really moving the smartphone bar forward. Instead, it played a great game of catch-up—this year, Android’s user interface and functionality caught up to the iPhone. The iPhone, meanwhile, remained in place. Apple’s big hardware innovation in the iPhone 4 was to put the antenna in a spot most susceptible to interference and to cover both the front and back of the phone in glass (because why have one easily breakable surface on a gadget that’s bound to fall out of your hands when two will look so much better in ads?) The iPhone’s software offered no great leaps, either: Apple’s phone will now multitask in the same way that Android already does. Yippee?
I sure hope Steve Jobs is losing sleep over this. There are now few major differences between Apple’s Jesus phone and its rivals’ products. It’s time for another moment comparable to when Jobs first unveiled the iPhone in 2007—we need Apple, the great engine of innovation in the tech business, to blow everyone out of the water once more. In 2011, I want an iPhone that can sync with my computer wirelessly, that can stream music from the cloud, and that offers a new user interface that makes it easier to manage the dozens of apps that now clog my phone. But that’s just for starters. I also want a phone that can achieve truly mind-blowing things—face recognition, say, or one that offered a reimagined screen-based input method that is as fast and accurate as typing on a computer keyboard.
Improvements like these would also help the iPad, the gadget that dominated tech coverage this year. There’s no question that the iPad is a stunning device and that its debut seems sure to spark a whole new category of touch-screen tablets. As I wrote when I first got my hands on it in April, Apple’s tablet is a fantastic leisure machine, a computer that lets you do every fun thing you want to do—watch stuff, read stuff, play stuff—better than you can on a conventional computer. I still think that’s true. But by the end of the year I found myself using the iPad less and less; I haven’t even looked at it for a couple weeks.
Why? In November I bought Apple’s 11-inch MacBook Air, a machine that is almost as small as an iPad but includes one killer feature: a keyboard. The Air is portable enough to be an iPad-like leisure machine—I watch loads of Netflix shows on it and I surf the Web endlessly—but it also doubles quite well as a work machine. With its solid-state storage and instant-on capability, the Air represents the future of notebooks—and, thus, a threat to the emerging tablet category. I don’t know how the battle will shake out, but I’d probably use the iPad a lot more if it had a text-input system that rivaled the Air’s. I hope that’s something Jobs’ minions are working on.
Apple’s tablet didn’t deliver on one other much-touted prediction: It didn’t kill the Kindle. Amazon released a new version of its e-reader this year, and it also made Kindle books readable on many other devices. But Amazon’s best move against the iPad was its decision to reduce the Kindle’s price tag. You can now get a 3G-enabled Kindle for $189, down from $299 last year, and there’s now a cheaper, Wi-Fi-only model that sells for $139. Amazon did not, however, fulfill my prediction that the Kindle would sell for $99 for the holiday season. I’m amazed—and bummed—that this didn’t happen, but I assume that Amazon’s decision to keep prices above $100 suggests that the Kindle is selling really well as is.
The Kindle’s success in the book market mirrors that of Netflix, another company that has adroitly managed the shift from physical to streaming media. 2010 saw a huge expansion in Netflix’s streaming service. The company added more movies and TV shows to its catalog and, like Amazon, expanded its reach to many more devices. Nearly every Internet-equipped device in my house, from my computer to my TV to my Blu-ray player to my iPhone, can now get access to Netflix. This expansion has sent viewership skyrocketing—Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak viewing hours in the United States, the network company Sandvine reported this fall.
You might see a pattern here. Amazon made its books available on lots of devices and did really well as a result. Netflix made its movies available everywhere and did really well, too. This should be the signature tech lesson of 2010: Cross-platform, cloud-based media is the future of all entertainment. All of our books, our movies, and our tunes will soon live on servers far away from home, allowing us to read, watch, and listen whenever and wherever we want. And this year we saw one more step toward that future: A start-up called OnLive launched a platform that lets you play stunning, graphics-intensive video games without a console or an expensive desktop. In the end, OnLive was probably the most promising technology I saw all year. And I can’t wait to see what it does in 2011. I’d also like to hear what you think. What were your favorite gadgets of 2010? Back in January, I wrote up a wish list for the year in tech —I wanted Amazon’s Kindle rivals to build a universal e-book store, I wanted better multi-touch on Android phones, I wanted wireless syncing and multitasking on the iPhone, and I wanted Google to open up Google Voice for everyone. Looking back, I see that most of my wishes were fulfilled—and I still wasn’t happy. So, what would it take to make you happy in 2011? Leave your answers in the comment below.
Slate V: Farhad Manjoo on a great new app for travel planning:
