Superphones, Hyperloops, and Other Tech Predictions That Haven't Happened (Yet) (tulsaworld.com) 39
Bloomberg looks back at what tech industry titans predicted would be happening "by 2020."
- Here's what Huawei Technologies Co. said in 2015 predicting a "superphone" by 2020, according to ZDNet: "Inspired by the biological evolution, the mobile phone we currently know will come to life as the superphone," said Shao Yang, a strategy marketing president of Huawei. "Through evolution and adaptation, the superphone will be more intelligent, enhancing and even transforming our perceptions, enabling humans to go further than ever before." It's not entirely clear what that means, but it probably hasn't happened yet. In the interim, Huawei found itself in the middle of a trade war, and the Chinese company is focusing largely on mid-priced phones for its domestic market...
- In 2013, Elon Musk outlined his vision for a new "fifth mode of transportation" that would involve zipping people through tubes at speeds as fast as 800 miles per hour. Several tech entrepreneurs heeded Musk's call and went to work on such systems inspired by the billionaire's specifications. In 2015, one of the leading startups predicted a hyperloop spanning about 60 miles would be ready for human transport by 2020. Rob Lloyd, then the CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, told Popular Science: "I'm very confident that's going to happen." It hasn't. His company, now called Virgin Hyperloop One, has a 1,600-foot test track in California and hopes to build a 22-mile track in Saudi Arabia someday. Musk has since experimented with hyperloops of his own, and even he has had to scale back his ambitions. Musk's Boring Co. is building a so-called Loop system in Las Vegas, starting with a nearly mile-long track that consists of a narrow tunnel and Tesla cars moving at up to 155 miles per hour...
- It was barely two years ago when the maker of blowdryers and vacuum cleaners said it would sell an electric car by 2020. Dyson canceled the project this year, calling it "not commercially viable."
Other predictions include John McAfee's infamous 2017 prediction that one bitcoin would be worth $1 million by the end of 2020, "about three weeks before a crash would erase 83% of value over the next year."
And in 2012 Intel predicted that by 2020 we'd have computer chips that consumed almost no energy
- In 2013, Elon Musk outlined his vision for a new "fifth mode of transportation" that would involve zipping people through tubes at speeds as fast as 800 miles per hour. Several tech entrepreneurs heeded Musk's call and went to work on such systems inspired by the billionaire's specifications. In 2015, one of the leading startups predicted a hyperloop spanning about 60 miles would be ready for human transport by 2020. Rob Lloyd, then the CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, told Popular Science: "I'm very confident that's going to happen." It hasn't. His company, now called Virgin Hyperloop One, has a 1,600-foot test track in California and hopes to build a 22-mile track in Saudi Arabia someday. Musk has since experimented with hyperloops of his own, and even he has had to scale back his ambitions. Musk's Boring Co. is building a so-called Loop system in Las Vegas, starting with a nearly mile-long track that consists of a narrow tunnel and Tesla cars moving at up to 155 miles per hour...
- It was barely two years ago when the maker of blowdryers and vacuum cleaners said it would sell an electric car by 2020. Dyson canceled the project this year, calling it "not commercially viable."
Other predictions include John McAfee's infamous 2017 prediction that one bitcoin would be worth $1 million by the end of 2020, "about three weeks before a crash would erase 83% of value over the next year."
And in 2012 Intel predicted that by 2020 we'd have computer chips that consumed almost no energy
My prediction for 2030 (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people tend to conflate things (Score:2)
Just because there is progress in one area, doesn't mean there is equivalent progress in different fields.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/201... [ucsd.edu]
Re:Because people tend to conflate things (Score:5, Insightful)
Super batteries are a bit like artificial intelligence. Once you can actually build a thing it doesn't count.
There's three ways to fail at tech prognostication. Predicting something that will never happen (at least in production) is just one of them. The others are (a) prematurely predicting something when it's predicated on other things that have to be invented, and (b) predicting a milestone that gets swept past so quickly people don't notice.
Smartphones were an example of (a). People were making "converged" devices for over a decade before the iPhone, but they were clunky, power hungry, and big. Jobs was a master of timing, recognizing when things like battery technology, processor computation/watt, and UI developments were in place to build something with a clean sheet. Superbatteries are examples of (b). Twenty-five years ago a battery that could deliver 50 watt hours, that would fit in a laptop case, weigh less than a pound, and have no memory effect would have been a super battery. Now it's just a garden variety battery.
Make mine a super battery (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You may have to wait for a bunch of slightly-better batteries to hit the market, then some kinda-almost-super batteries, then some kinda-supers, the almost-supers, and finally supers. That's how its been so far. The first Lithium Ion cells were only an increment on Ni-Cad.
We do have some twice-as-much-storage-by-weight hitting the market this year, but the price is only 200 recharges and thus only will affect big-budget people who just gotta lose that weight, the electric drones. It's the kind of increm
Re: (Score:2)
You may have to wait for a bunch of slightly-better batteries to hit the market, then some kinda-almost-super batteries, then some kinda-supers, the almost-supers, and finally supers.
What you are describing is literally the phenomenon that people overestimate in the short run, but underestimate in the long run. Those "percentage" advances stack on top of each other and are the very definition of exponential growth. Ten 25% improvements is an order of magnitude advance. Since the early-mid 90s Li-Ion batteries have dropped in cost by a factor of 30 and the energy density has increased by a factor of 5, and they last longer too.
Viable? (Score:2)
"not commercially viable." -Dyson
How about significantly more difficult and way less profitable than figuring out of to mold inject a couple of cents worth of plastic, making it shiny and stuffing it full of the cheapest parts you can find to make the most pretty POS you can. Then spending 10 times the product cost on marketing hype to justify why you want 50x the cost of manufacture for a product that is
more pretty than functional. Not to mention for half the price buyers can buy a better product that wil
Vacuums? (Score:2)
Are you talking about Dyson vacuums? They are actually pretty good.
https://thewirecutter.com/revi... [thewirecutter.com]
The best vacuum cleaner you can buy is a canister model from Miele that costs around $700. So, yeah, quality costs money.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Here's what makes it work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Computers are actually regressing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Um, as much as I am a retro enthusiast, I take exception to this
"We lost the high response times and good black levels of CRTs "
I assume you mean low response times, as in fast. But have you looked at a CRT recently vs a LCD? It's a disaster for the CRT.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on the CRT. There were very good CRTs. Some of them had better contrast than I've seen on an LCD screen, but their resolution was a lot poorer. And they were full of lead.
Re: (Score:3)
I have seen 1080i CRTs back in the early 2000s. They were awesome but way too big for my tiny apartment at the time. I enjoyed my Wega CRT but the geometry issues really distracted from any advantages the CRT may have had over LCDs of the time.
The only time CRTs seem superior is when I turn on my good old Commodore 64. I have never found a combination of LCD and scaler that gives a display as good as a CRT. The scaled display is invariably noisier and blurrier on a LCD than a CRT.
I suppose the 64's video si
Re: (Score:3)
>But have you looked at a CRT recently vs a LCD? It's a disaster for the CRT.
As a matter of fact I have, and I'm not seeing a disaster. A friend's good but not great CRT gaming monitor on his old retro-gaming system from around the time when LCDs were just becoming pricey options for office PCs, but not yet at all appealing for gaming. Maybe 20+ years ago?
The size is narrower but about the same height as today's decent mid-range LCD monitor. The DPI is pretty close to the same (it had been doubling ev
Re: (Score:1)
For me, the blank between screen refreshes with CRT's led to vision issues (eye strain and headaches). When work switched from CRT's to LCD's, those problems disappeared at work. I replaced the CRT monitor at home soon after.
FWIW: my vision (myopia) improved for the first time at age 57 after 18 months using LCD computer monitors. According to my optometrist, other patients with myopia also experienced small improvements after the switch. Your results may vary.
I'm not a gam
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, yeah - eyestrain is absolutely a huge improvement with LCD. Not directly relevant to image quality, but intensely relevant to anyone spending a lot of time looking at a screen.
Re:Computers are actually regressing (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as laptop screens go, there's plenty of choice in full HD or 4K panels, and as for the response time, the display of the one I am on now runs at 144Hz, with a 10ms response time. A good gaming monitor will have between 1-5ms response time. Close enough to the performance of a (very good) CRT as to make no difference.
Re: (Score:2)
A 144hz screen with 10ms response time? So it shows the current and half the previous frame constantly?
Actually it's worse than that, when the response time is more than about half the frame time any motion just become a smear. 1.4x is back to 1980s levels.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see why motion would "smear". It would just be delayed by 10ms.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
CRT displays had good black levels, but horrible resolution, were bulky and expensive, used too much of power... Again no big loss.
Display resolution, chip trace widths, ... What we have is good enough on these fronts, and we want more network connectivity, mobile
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to say that iPhones are stuck with "retina" displays that aren't even HD (1080p), while everyone else is releasing even midrange phones with 1440p displays.
Low energy (Score:4, Informative)
And in 2012 Intel predicted that by 2020 we'd have computer chips that consumed almost no energy
Maybe that didn't happen, but chips have gotten a lot better at power management. They consume a lot less power, especially when idle. There's some smart home devices running on a single battery with a stand-by time measured in years. Philips made a radio control light switch with no battery, it's powered by the force of you pushing the buttons.
Re: (Score:2)
But that's the issue, isn't it?
If the prediction is not quantified from the very beginning, it's not really a prediction. For instance, "consumed almost nothing" is so vague, it's basically meaningless.
And don't get me started on the superphone nonsense. "the superphone will be more intelligent", "enabling humans to go further than ever before." What do those expressions even mean? How much more intelligent? How much further? Are we talking about actual distances here? Or this supposed to be a Star Trek ins
I've been alive long enough ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Tesla did not go bankrupt. (Score:2)
Though no one seems to know why its stock price is this high, the fact is, it is at all time high.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The mark to market losses suffered by the shorts in aggregate since 1/1/16 is staggering. 7.25 billion! They were up, +5.1 billion YTD in the first week of June. Nearly breaking even with the losses from 1/1/16 to 12/31/18. Then... from +5.1 b to -2.25 b in six months!
Elon always delivers what he promises. Except his timeline would be all messed up. BEV with 220 mile range for 35,000$, promised to be delivered in Jun 2017, he sold a few in Mar-April 2019. M
Re: Tesla did not go bankrupt. (Score:3)
superphones (Score:3)
Vegeta: As for me, I will find a level BEYOND Super phone!
Tien: So, what? Like a mega-phone? Ultra-phone?
Vegeta: ... you're mocking me.
Tien: ... Maximum Over-phone!
Vegeta: F*CK OFF, TRICLOPS!
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged, episode.44: "Cell Reception"
The Hyperloop problem (Score:2)
Pipelines are the safest and most cost-efficient way to move any commodity, so the idea is, why not use them for people? But because any transportation system requires a right-of-way, any new transportation technology inevitably gets gated by the problem of acquiring the land or easements to run its lines. Even Hyperloop routes that are chosen to exploit long straight stretches of usable right-of-way in an existing corridor, like I-5 through central California, would spend most of its budget haggling or con
Re: (Score:2)
Or why Elon started the Boring Company. Right of way issues are just going to get worse, not better. What precious little open right-of-way that's left is rapidly getting consumed by rail and park/green spaces.
My city is currently consuming all of our existing shoulders, express lanes, medians and parking spaces for public transit and cycling right of way. So far there have been very few losses in driving traffic right of ways but I'm sure those are next when capacity is maxed out using shoulders and
Not commercially viable (Score:2)
"- It was barely two years ago when the maker of blowdryers and vacuum cleaners said it would sell an electric car by 2020. Dyson canceled the project this year, calling it "not commercially viable."
Judging by the number of refurb vacuum cleaners and expensive fans I see selling all over the web, I'd say the vacuum cleaner and expensive fan business isn't really commercially viable, either. Maybe they sell new stock as refurbs with a shorter warranty so they can hit more price points. Or maybe their stuff
great recovery (Score:1)