Has the End of the Tech Explosion Begun?

Interesting column for Tech Crunch argues that developers and manufacturers are running into insurmountable hardware limitations that will begin to slow the current breakneck pace of tech innovation.

Which may not be so bad or unnatural -- the past decade or so has just been silly with tech advances. I distinctly remember Lois posting at ShortNews about the promise of tablet computers when there were no truly commercial tablets available -- nothing in the way of an iPad or a droid tablet.

That was when "tablet computer" meant something like this:



My guess is that the slowing of the tech explosion will be something like the time period between, say, 1993 and 2000. Modest, incremental advances upon smartphones and tablets as they become the new legacy devices:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/13/your-app-is-slow-because-our-world-is-ending/

This could mean another stock market crash. I lost most of my 401K in the 90's dot com crash. The rich manipulators keep the balls in the air until they come crashing down.

I think maybe, depends industry need new blood in control, all of them seem to be going for the same market (dumb non tech people, I guess its the most profitable) it would only take a few minor adaption to open up new wave of tech. One is a shift funtionality on Touch screens so that the 2-button mouse interface can be replicated which allows far greater funtionality from a touch screen making it less of a novelty to something that can be seriously used. Greater interconnectivity between devices would also be part of it. there are heaps of things that a technically possible but no one has packaged nicely so it can be consumed by Average users. Which hinders smaller Developers since they don't have the infrastucture to get some of these inovations out there and wide spread enough for others to also Develop companion software/accessories.

Truth is top end power is not the issue anymore it is interface Win8 is the opposite direction to where it needed to go to support innovation.

Plus alot of the power Your computer is using it just to report on you and prevent you using Pirate stuff, for what You want to do your machine is alreay powerful enough, but it isn't if it is using half it's resources monitoring your activities and reporting back to Google/Apple/MS and then customising Advertisements to you.

Good points, and I agree that a lot of processing power is used for stupid things -- surveillance, and security from viruses as well. However, I think mass market tech will always be just that -- they want to sell these things to people who can barely read. That said, if you're more savvy there's so much you can do with, say, an Android phone that many probably don't even realize.

I did read about a really interesting feature that may be added to smartphones within a few years -- scientists are developing tiny T-ray scanners. In a phone, these could use tetrahertz waves to detect dense materials behind lighter materials like cardboard (great for inspecting packages) or even walls. Probably would be at least as controversial as Google Glass, though ...