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This is one of those things that sort of snuck up on me over the last decade — computer speed just isn’t really much of an issue anymore.

In the early days of computing, things were crazy slow. I remember playing Jumpman on my Commodore 64, which loaded from a cassette tape. Loading the game took about 45 minutes every time I wanted to play! We later got a disk drive for the computer, which could load games in 3-5 minutes instead, which was much better.

While things improved a ton since then, up until just a few years ago computer speed was something people fussed about quite a bit. For years the solution was “add more RAM” (which worked very well), and in later years it was “switch your hard drive to an SSD”, which also worked well. I still remember when my late friend Brad showed us his Macbook after he added an SSD, and the speed difference was crazy!

Outside of gaming, though, you just don’t see those kinds of concerns anymore. For normal day-to-day work, everything you need to do happens instantly on even a halfway decent computer. I think this has helped lead to the rise of the Chromebooks (which outsell Macs) — cheap hardware is all you really need for most tasks, because today’s cheap hardware is hundreds of times faster than top-end hardware from the recent past.

Internet speed is the new problem

If anything, as the need for “computer speed” is disappearing, the need for consistent “internet speed” will be here for a while. That’s certainly improved tons in recent years, but there are still some major gaps. For rural parts of the country, we’re still years away from any good solution. Elon Musk’s Starlink is fascinating, but at best it will be able to serve around 2% of the country (and even that is years away). 5G won’t help much in rural areas either, because 5G signals just don’t travel very far.

I don’t have the answer for internet speeds. I think some improved legislation to open up competition will help in many places, but it’s not the final answer. While that’s being sorted out, though, it’s nice that all of our computers are amazingly fast now — and we didn’t even realize it.

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A few days ago, I was fortunate enough to be featured on Evan Chasteen’s Uplink Marketing podcast. Throughout our 33 minute conversation, we covered a lot of interesting things, including some thoughts on the book Sapiens and how that impacts marketing, the future of AR and self-driving cars, a look at whether Facebook is really listening to us or not, and a bunch of other fun tangents.

Evan is a brilliant marketer and did a great job of leading this conversation. You can listen to my episode here, or check out all of his episodes here.

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For better or worse, as time goes on we’re going to own fewer and fewer items, and lease them instead. Gizmodo recently published an article titled “In 2030, You Won’t Own Any Gadgets“, and I tend to agree with most of it.

At first blush, this is a bad thing. Don’t we want to own our stuff? Not always. I think music is a great place to start.

While owning CDs / cassette tapes / vinyl records is a neat thing, most of us keep all those in the back of a closet somewhere, because we much prefer Spotify or YouTube Music. It’s rather inexpensive, and gives us access to essentially everything. There’s certainly some lost nostalgia in not going to the mall to pick up a new CD, but from a practical point of view I think we’re almost all happy with the move to streaming services.

Games

The music analogy is interesting, because I see the same thing happening with video games and Google Stadia. The main criticism again Stadia is that “you don’t own your games”, which is completely valid, but we just went through the same cycle with music and then movies — and we’re all pretty happy with how that has worked out. Seeing video games go down that same road makes sense, and should work out well for us.

Cars

It gets more interesting when you talk about larger things like cars. It’s widely believed that most people won’t own a car in the not-too-distant future; they’ll just request a ride from Uber (or similar), likely with no human driver in it. Why own a car that just sits in your driveway at least 90% of the time?

The ramifications of this are potentially quite good. If no one is driving their own car, then the need for parking lots will decrease dramatically. Sure, Uber and others will need a place to keep their fleet, but it can be far out of the way — it won’t be next to your office, baseball stadium, or other popular areas. Those parking lots can be freed up for other uses.

Personally, I really like my car and don’t want to give it up, and I don’t see this part happening very soon, but it’s coming. I already don’t own my music, movies or games, and essentially don’t own my phone.

What will we still own in 2030? Quite a bit, I’d think, but certainly less than we do now, and it’ll only keep dropping from there.

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The history of the smartphone is fascinating. For the last 20 years, various things have been coming together to help your phone replace a wide variety of separate devices, including notepads, cameras, GPS units, etc. This image is a fun example of that:

Now it seems like things might be going the other way a little bit. Now that your phone replaced all of those items in one device, that one device is slowly splitting up based on use case.

You already have smart watches and increasingly smart ear buds. We’re not far from having some kind of augmented reality piece to help with vision (similar to Google Glass, but more smoothly integrated), and all of those devices are getting smarter with each iteration.

At that point, you’ll be able to talk to your ear buds to get information from your assistant, see things like driving directions and social media updates on your glasses, take pictures with your watch or glasses, and really accomplish quite a lot without even taking your phone out of your pocket.

As Ina Fried says, though, this doesn’t mean that your phone will go away. In her words:

The smartphone isn’t going away. The laptop computer didn’t make the desktop vanish, and the phone didn’t do away with the laptop. IBM’s mainframe business is still going strong,

At the next phase, I see our phone being the hub for all of the other devices. If those external devices can remain relatively “dumb”, with your phone supplying the smarts, they can be smaller, lighter, and have a battery that lasts longer. Tech may eventually catch up to have them replace your phone entirely, though we’re probably some distance from that.

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A recent episode of the Reply All podcast had a few of the hosts digging into each others search history. The results were interesting and funny, so I thought I’d dig back the past few weeks of mine to see what kind of interesting things I’ve been looking for. You can find yours (if you use Google) on this page: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

Here are some of mine that I thought were noteworthy:

onomatopoeia
I saw this come up in conversation, but it’s a word I often can’t remember, so I looked up the official definition to put into my Anki collection.

alien head suckers fortnite
I play a bit of Fortnite with my daughter, and the new season has these alien parasites that clamp onto your head and slowly kill you. I didn’t know what they were called or how to get rid of them, so this was my first search in that trail.

stunning image of a blue whale under a small fishing boat
Someone posted an amazing image of a blue whale just under a small fishing boat, but it seemed photoshopped so I was investigating a bit.

windows 11 release date
I’ve heard lots of buzz about Windows 11, so I was curious when it would be released (this coming winter).

stanford pitcher
I saw some folks feeling bad for the Stanford baseball pitcher, but their posts didn’t say much so I was curious why. Turns out he threw a game-ending wild pitch, which is indeed a tough way to lose.

connect m175nw to wireless network
Our printer at the office was having some issues, so I was getting it reconnected to our network.

you can’t change the profile picture for this account google
A client was getting this message in his Google Workspace account, so I had to figure out why and how to fix it.

chrome hyperthreading
If you have a Chromebook, you can re-enabled hyperthreading to make it run about 10% faster, with essentially no downside.

it crowd do you trust me
We were talking about an old episode of “The I.T. Crowd” and this scene came to mind, so I had to look it up.

reset uconnect 8.4
My wife’s Jeep Cherokee is having some issues with the entertainment unit. They can generally be resolved if we just reboot it, but it turns out that’s a very complicated thing to do!

how many advertisements is a person exposed to in a day
Working on a related post and wanted to find solid numbers here. Best I can find is that it’s somewhere between 4,000 – 10,000. That’s a lot!

the office dwight’s wedding hay bale holders
Someone posted on Facebook “You must be xx old if you know what these are”, and I was quite sure the photo was hay bale holders like the ones that Dwight had at his wedding in The Office, but I had to make sure. 🙂

madden 22 stadia
Madden 22 was announced, and I wanted to see if it is coming to Google Stadia. It is, and I preordered it!

where to stream billy madison
My daughter and I wanted to watch Billy Madison, so I looked up where to stream it. Turns out it’s free on Hulu right now, so that was pretty cool.

truist park 109
I went to a Braves game recently and our tickets were in section 109, so I was curious to see exactly where that was.

lingering calf pain after cramp
I hurt my calf while running six weeks ago, and it’s still lingering a bit. Not too bad, but just annoying. Working on getting it healed back up.

All of these searches were within a two week period, and were just a small fraction of my total searches. I suspect this is about normal for me, and probably for you as well, but it was fun to dig back in and see some of what I’d been looking for recently.

Are there any fun recent searches in your history?