What makes a great piece of technology today ? More and more, it's software.
I bought my phone almost two years ago. Today, it does things it didn't do back then, like shooting cinemagraphs, wirelessly syncing with my computer and beaming stuff up to my TV. My first Xbox 360 didn't play Netflix or Hulu when I bought it back in 2007. Now it does. My Kindle turns pages faster now than it did when I pulled it out of the box. The weird part isn't that these things have new powers that they didn't once upon time--it's that I'd actually be upset if they didn't. I expect my phone to be better today than it was yesterday, better tomorrow than it is today.
That wasn't always the case. When Sony shipped a Walkman, TPS-L2, it stayed the same. Four or ten or 15 years later, the play button worked just like it did the day it left the factory. (Unless you broke it.) A TV was a TV was a TV. The hands on a watch turned. And turned. And turned. Until they didn't. Once they were given form in plastic or metal or glass, gadgets weren't malleable objects. Form was function, forever.
What changed? It's the software, stupid.
Gadgets aren't just hardware anymore. Hardware is, more and more, just a delivery mechanism for software, toast under the jam. Consider the iPhone or iPad: They're blank slates. A screen with a battery bolted on the back fitted together by a glass or aluminum shell. Inside of them are basically the same guts, the same silicon as the shitty $99 Android tablet I wouldn't inflict on even the most loathsome human being (except maybe Chris Brown, fuck that guy) or the Windows Phone you've never heard of. More and more, it's the software that makes a gadget different or special, or even more simply, good or bad. A beautiful piece of technology running garbage software is just beautiful garbage.
We've crossed a point in which basically every gadget is a computer of sorts. Partly because we wanted them to be smarter and connected and because the world is simply a digital place now--there's no such thing as an analog mp3 player--but the ability to remake our listening devices and televisions in a computer's image has been driven by the fact that computing power and sensors got dirt cheap, and are getting cheaper everyday. The secret behind Microsoft's $150 Kinect is sensor technology that cost $10,000 before Microsoft got its hands on it. Your phone is stuffed with an array sensors: gyros, accelerometer, ambient light sensor, multiple mics, a camera. So of course all of your gadgets are tiny computers. Why wouldn't they be? And when everything's a computer, it's the software that counts.
