Is it me or is there less innovation in technology now?

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Now it just seems that people are constantly reinventing the tablet so to speak .
Back in 2000 + and 2004 We where making the switch from CRT to LCD, people where switching to broadband and games where getting better.
Is it me or is technology just being reinvented all the time now days?

Agreed - it seems to be a lot of improving old technology, rather than never-before-seen new stuff.

...SSD's are close to "new"... sorta'.

It's hard to see progress when you're caught up in the middle of it. If you compare technology at say 10 year intervals than you can easily see the improvement.

To be fair, some technology has advanced really quickly. I'm sure if some of you compare your current PC to the one you had 10 years ago the difference in spec will be huge. Even until around 5 years ago my broadband speed was 2 mbps, now its 30 mbps. Then there was the jump from vhs to dvd and crt to lcd. At the moment, upgrades to technology seem to be more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Couldn't have said it better my self!
Come on tech companies... I want Revolution!

They slowly release the upgraded tech in support of their business model which is well defined and timed.

Everything we see hitting the market is already obsolete.

It seems to me that the latest consumer-level technologies are mere extrapolations of older technologies.

Inventing new ways of doing the same old things is like inventing a new way to move a piece of paper from one side of the desk to another.

I mean, so what if I can download movies? Why would I want to watch another remake of a sequel to a revised story that was based on a book that i read in the third grade?

It seems then that 'progress' at the consumer level is more of a "Bread-and-Circuses" concept than anything to do quality of life issues.

From 3,000,000 years to 10,000 years ago, technology was more evolutionary than revolutionary. We are now in a second stage of this.

There is more technology being invented now than ever before.

The underlying theory is deeper than ever and more mathematically sophisticated.

All of the easy advances have been made. Now we are up against the hard stuff, like unifying quantum physics and relativistic physics.

ruveyn

Comparing the first computer I ever programmed on to my current computer, there was an evolutionary progress that improved the memory capacity by about 12,000 times and the clock speed by 283 times. Neither one was a revolution, but they were still impressive.

The revolution was the solid state theory with which we understand transistors and the technology that permitted microscopic etching. Quantum physics (dated from about 1913, when Bohr more or less got hydrogen atoms right) was a revolution in physics. It lead to the displacement of deterministic mechanistic physical theories. Now a days deterministic theories are treated as heuristic, not as fundamentally correct.

ruveyn

One of the reasons for less innovation in technology, (at least from the standpoint of IC design) is due to the fact that we due to the fact that we've reached the physical limits of what we can do with IC circuits around 2k2. --Any improvements made since then have been evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

For example Computer CPU's have a physical speed limit of around 3GHz, We reached that speed limit in 2k2. All improvements made since then have been improvements in cache design, deeper pipelines, and adding more CPU cores on die.

A side effect of this is that the because the technology involved has become mature, less money is spent on R&D, and costs for producing CPU's has dropped significantly.

"All of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked." -- My Graduate Thesis Advisor

IBM was on the edge of some real breakthroughs... CPUs with many dozens of cores, CPU's using light instead of electricity in order to break the electron barrier/limitation, processors with transistors (etc) that go UP as well as flat (3D-processors instead of the standard flat design.) Some people were even working with crystal vs. silicon for chips - crystal for storage, too!

The consumer market won't get them until the technology can be refined and mass-produced cheaply.

What about spintronics?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics

And there has been some progress in q-bit base computation. However this is in the very early stages of development.

ruveyn

Well yes there is that, but not within the immediate future. What I meant is that currently applicable technology has been maxed out for the past 10 years, any further improvements to them will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.