Peak technology was the power of computers and cellphones but not smart phones.
I'd argue early smart phones should be included with peak. Once everyone had a smart phone, social media became too ubiquitous and everything needed a useless app filled with dark patterns/microtransactions is about when things went on decline.
When the first iPhone was released it didn't even have an app store until iPhone OS 2, so the earliest smart phones were held back the lack of developers, the lack of a way to write software, the time it took to come to some kind of understanding on how to write software for mobile (a brand new paradigm), and the lack of adoption among users.
So yeah, for a couple of years smart phones were a bit of a novelty item. And of course the thing that a lot of armchair nerds really derided them on was the fact that they didn't have physical keys! "You can pry my Blackberry out of my cold dead hands." Imagine trying to make that complaint today.*
*Though the touch screens on the early devices were not as good as on today's phones, so the criticism had a little bit of merit.
My first Android phone, a used Samsung Stratosphere, had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I remember touch screens being terrible in the halcyon days of early smartphones and having one with a physical keyboard, or at least a 0-9 keypad, was a perk for a time.
When my Stratosphere finally broke in like 2013 or 2014 I was bummed out because there weren't any new phones like it with physical keyboards. But by that time touch screens had gotten better, so a physical keyboard wasn't really needed anymore.
I'd argue early smart phones should be included with peak. Once everyone had a smart phone, social media became too ubiquitous and everything needed a useless app filled with dark patterns/microtransactions is about when things went on decline.
When the first iPhone was released it didn't even have an app store until iPhone OS 2, so the earliest smart phones were held back the lack of developers, the lack of a way to write software, the time it took to come to some kind of understanding on how to write software for mobile (a brand new paradigm), and the lack of adoption among users.
So yeah, for a couple of years smart phones were a bit of a novelty item. And of course the thing that a lot of armchair nerds really derided them on was the fact that they didn't have physical keys! "You can pry my Blackberry out of my cold dead hands." Imagine trying to make that complaint today.*
*Though the touch screens on the early devices were not as good as on today's phones, so the criticism had a little bit of merit.
My first Android phone, a used Samsung Stratosphere, had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I remember touch screens being terrible in the halcyon days of early smartphones and having one with a physical keyboard, or at least a 0-9 keypad, was a perk for a time.
When my Stratosphere finally broke in like 2013 or 2014 I was bummed out because there weren't any new phones like it with physical keyboards. But by that time touch screens had gotten better, so a physical keyboard wasn't really needed anymore.
Early touchscreens were dogshit. Like 100ms+ of latency and the software was terrible at trying to figure out which link you were tapping, etc