Mildly Infuriating

I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today's money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.

My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.

When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.

Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.

Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.

At the same time tho, our ability to shrink dies, to create displays of millions of pixels flipping perfectly day in, day out for decades - I recycled a Dell LCD monitor at work from 2003 yesterday, still working - to build cars that are more dependable than ever in history with actual moving parts - we take for granted the things that become dependable, even in ways that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago, because we're always on the bleeding edge of tech where it isn't working perfectly, because we're shipping the minimum viable product, and now on a yearly schedule.

I think we could just chill with having smartphone wars for a few years, since there's not a huge need to upgrade often, and people can't afford to eat right now, but they're releasing more and more foldable phones, making them standard as folks adopt. People will complain about how the hinges don't work, how they fail a lot more. But that won't stop them from buying them, from kids demanding them at Christmas, etc. And you know what? Aware of all this, and being chronically broke myself, I have still been subconsciously noting the intro prices for next year's folding phones because part of me wants the cool little toy first.