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by Patrick Lenz.
Original Post: 2013 – A Disappointment?
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Was 2013 a seminal or particularly extraordinary year for technology? No, I’d say not. But it certainly wasn’t a “lost year”, by any measure.
He walks us through the rather incremental evolution in technology that came to market in 2013 that, when compared to the original products they incrementally improved upon, provide a rather stark revolution in just a few years. One of the most prominent examples would be the original iPhone released in 2007 compared to this year's iPhone 5S, which is, claims Apple, 40x faster than the original.
Gruber closes his piece with:
There’s a nihilistic streak in tech journalism that I just don’t see in other fields. Sports, movies, cars, wristwatches, cameras, food — writers who cover these fields tend to celebrate, to relish, the best their fields have to offer. Technology, on the other hand, seems to attract enthusiasts with no actual enthusiasm.
Wise words, indeed.
But, seriously, have any of those fields that are blessed with more enthusiastic writers seen any revolutions in 2013?
Let's find out.
Sports
While I'm not a fan of any sports that could be considered mainstream like soccer, baseball, or American football, none of these seem to have gained anything revolutionary in quite some time by my research. In soccer, FIFA announced the controversial roll-out of Goal-line technology to additional tournaments, but that's pretty much about it. And besides, does an improvement in rule-keeping really count as any kind of revolution?
A sport that is dearer to my own heart since 2013 would be CrossFit, which gained a lot of traction and popularity recently. But CrossFit, Inc., the company, has been around since the year 2000 and even the CrossFit Games have been held since 2007. So, they’ve been around a while as well.
Performance analysis and data-analytics seem to have picked up significantly in recent years, but it's debatable if this is an innovation to be attributed to sports, rather than, say, technology.
Movies
3D Movies have been pushed heavily for years now and 2013 was no different. But from an innovation-standpoint, nothing seems to have revolutionized movies. Theaters were dwarfed with Hobbits, the Hunger Games, and Thor, among others, this year, which are all splendid movies in and of itself, but they didn't particularly revolutionize.
If anything, the wide-spread availability of tools like GoPro cameras and even the iPhone 5S with its 120FPS slow-motion shooting capability has promise to open up movie making to more people than ever. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Cars
I've relentlessly watched Top Gear season 19 this year. I've been to the Frankfurt Motor Show in Frankfurt, too. Yes, there were more electric cars than I had assumed there would be. But Tesla has been shipping its Roadster since 2008. The other car news at the show revolved around everyone and his dog building Audi R8 look-a-likes, rendering calendar year 2013 as definitively a year of evolution on the car design and development front.
Google's driverless cars, which have been road-legal since 2012, have completed a proclaimed accident-free half million kilometers. It’s a great accomplishment, but it’s simply building on what they’ve already been doing.
Could Uber, who are disintermediating car-for-hire transactions everywhere, then be the innovation of the year 2013? Not really. The San Francisco-based startup had its inception in 2009 and rolled out a lot of its fleet in 2012 already.
Wristwatches
No, Apple hasn't released anything to put on your wrist this year.
People are still buying watches like jewelry, with technology like the tourbillon in them that is more than two centuries old. Companies like Patek Philipe make a billion dollars of revenue a year by selling watches that cost $21,000 on average, putting them in the 8th spot of the biggest watch makers of the world with a marketshare of a stunning 3%. (That does sound familiar, doesn't it?)
And we'll just pretend Samsung's awkward Galaxy Gear ad has never happened.
Cameras
My photography has severely suffered in 2013. But that wasn't due to the lack of newly available camera gear. The current crop of professional D-SLR bodies from Nikon and Canon are nothing short of outrageously well-built, photo-construction machines.
And take the new kids on the block, like Fuji's X Series of mirror-less cameras (I own an X-E1, released in late 2012) or Sony's new A7, a full-frame mirror-less camera body with interchangeable lenses, which is something that we hadn't seen in such a compact format before.
However, the real photography revolution of the century was the transformation from film to digital several years back. First with bulky D-SLR bodies, now with these incremental steps to achieve great image quality with a minimal amount of gear, accessible to as many consumers as possible.
Sure, comparing the images coming out of the A7 to the images of the first compact cameras in the early 2000s feels like a drag race between a Dacia Logan and a Mercedes SLS. But year-over-year, camera makers have taken very conservative, incremental steps on the pixel ladder, improving resolution and image quality.
As well, if you had a time-machine and showed the images (and movies) created by the camera in this year's iPhone 5S (a telephone, for crying out loud) to someone a mere 10 years ago, you'd be accused of witchcraft. (Again, it must be noted that most of the incremental imaging improvements in the iPhone 5S are in software, not the actual camera hardware.)
Food
I am able to plot a bit of an uptake this year of more conscious and healthier food-intake in some of my immediate surroundings. This may in part be due to a partially proportional amount of uptake in food allergies or just due to my getting older.
Eating healthy isn't exactly a new thing, though. Quite the contrary, in fact. The fundamental rules of diets like Paleo are based on our primal past. And if you just want to grab your greens from the farmers market instead of eating at McDonald's (no offense) that's perfectly fine too.
On the tools-side, blender manufacturers like Vitamix must be one of the most conservative on the planet. Their model 5200 has been around since 2007, you can still by it new (I did), and you get a 7 year warranty on it. Why would you replace your blender every year anyway?
Side-note:
If you are looking for a great, practical introduction to Paleo, get the Paleo Primer. It's much less theoretical than the usual suspect and full of great varieties that'll even make your kids happy.
Technology
That brings us to the technology sector. Has 2013 really been this disappointing?
For example, 3D printing got much more affordable in 2013. While it may still be a few years off until you can finally stop leaving the house altogether and print fresh underwear at home, you can get a 3D printer for under $1,000 these days. Commercial products like the Cubify Cube are a bit more expensive, but there's always the RepRap Open Source project that will even supply you with the accompanying printable objects.
And, these printers are being heavily used by the people who are prototyping the products you’re buying right now. Walk into many design studios and you’ll find bins full of 3D printed mock-ups and prototypes.
2013 has also been the year of the civil drone. Both Amazon and DHL have announced tests of commercial package delivery via unmanned drones, all of which were made possible by advancements in technology.
And even the controversial technology stepchild that is Google Glass deserves a spot in the technical innovations of 2013, even though Mims laughs at it in his piece. I wouldn't go so far to award it the Mobile Product of the Year, but it is an innovation, plain and simple. It might take another few years to really come to fruition, but it’s a definite sign of how the computer-to-perpetually-connected-personal-device-transition is going to play out.
In conclusion, most of the innovation in 2013 flew under the radar (some quite literally) and was mostly incremental and evolutionary. But when comparing several different sectors, it's glaringly obvious that we technologists have been spoiled by a continuum of tiny revolutions in a very short, compressed timespan. So much so, that we're caught up in declaring each individual product either revolutionary or not when in reality, innovation is happening steadily, right in front of our eyes, sometimes creating a new continuum that cannot be grasped immediately.
Repeating revolutions at the pace they just so happened to occur in the past is not only not feasible in the long run, it's a completely unrealistic and unhealthy expectation.
Take a step back, look at our connected world as it is today, and you'll realize that what we have here is the amazing result of hundreds of innovators putting their lifeblood into their products, some of which among our direct peers.
I'm excited about technology today and just as excited about what the future brings.
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