Livre d'Or

I mean, I think that's a moving target. I think ten years ago we might've said the same thing about Desktop computers, that they offered sufficient processing and features for general use for anyone. And that's still true! Today's desktops don't offer any new features that ten year old desktops don't, and I've been running the same desktop my grandmother bought me as a graduation present from high school 13 years later, as a print server, and if not for one sticky little detail I could still be running that machine as much more than print server.

The sticky little detail is that in the past ten years we've discovered that sticking that same processing capability into a much smaller device doesn't just result in the same kind of device but smaller, it results in a transformative, qualitatively different kind of device, the mobile phone you now can't live without. If you view the mobile smartphone as a new kind of device, then perhaps we can say it has reached its functional maximum, and the improvements that are resulting now are merely small optimizations, but if we view the important technological progression as being from desktop to mobile device, you start to wonder just how transformative it will be when we discover a new form factor for delivering general computing technology.