Exactly. The problem is nothing is genuinely better. Its just turd polish.
The only thing that has made a difference to me in the last decade is an SSD. On a daily basis, I can't tell the difference between my 2007 laptop and my 2013 high end workstation.
If what is referred to as progress leads to things like flooding the market with 1920x1080 glossy, reflective displays for PCs, then there's issues to me.
There's been more than just SSD out there that have been huge as far as progress. Multi-core processing pretty much ended all the hangups and fears of programs endlessly cycling on your CPU and hindering your chances of killing it easily. Now, we're to the point you can have an app hang and not even notice it right away as it pegs a 1 of 4 or more cores.
Not sure the date exactly mouse wheels became the norm (early part of the 2000s but not sure the year), but I'd hate having to click to scroll everything all over again. Try playing some of the older PC games before the era of the scroll wheel. The UI looks pretty dated on them when you realize you can't scroll. Semi related, but the addition of more gestures to touchpads for laptops as well.
Wifi was still pretty new for the average person 10 years ago as well. I mean we all had wifi routers I would guess, but the average consumer wouldn't be thinking about it for a few more years.
Prices dropping dramatically on IPS type displays is also huge to me at least. If only non-glossy, high resolution monitors above 1920x1080 became more predominate.
I made the step back from a HP Veer to an older Samsung Smartphone. The difference in DPI is enormous, and only after using a different font and a nice theme to hide the effects of low-DPI as far as possible I was able to stand the Android.
Which means for me that I'm sold on 4k Displays (and higher), if the effect is even only near to the one I experienced, if you get used to it, you won't want to get back. I image it to be equal to the effect of old CRTs with the curved display, which was unbearable after getting used to a (good) TFT or even one of the modern CRT without the curve.
The resolution change we experienced earlier, or at least I did, was always with a bigger screen. A 17" with 1024x768, a 22" with 1280x1024 and now ~24" with 1920x1080. So most(?) of us never experienced a real DPI increase on the desktop, only on smartphones or tablets.
I really hope it will be the next step after the SSD. Higher DPI-displays are genuinely better.
Precisely. Those who are ensconced and comfortable with the inertia of "good enough," may feel that way simply because they don't know how much they would enjoy a high-definition full-view desktop display because nothing like that exists.
I've said elsewhere that without the iPad 3, we'd still have 1024x768 on tablets and there would be those of us shouting for higher resolution tablets, only to be frustrated by counter-arguments of "1024x768 is fine!"
If you disagree with me--if you believe that a high-density large-profile desktop display is just plain silly--I hope that one day if and when we do actually see such a device become available, and you sit down in front of one and mutter, "wow!" that you will remember this conversation. :)
