With the television screen sizes and viewing distances the vast majority of people use, 720p is indistinguishable from 1080p or 4K. Also, how much of what most people watch is worth having extremely high resolution equipment?
Hell, nobody even noticed that the previous generation of cable boxes in our regional cable monopoly (now duopoly) only output 720p. The new boxes are 1080p and it doesn’t make any visible difference to anyone I know.
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Is this article implying that we are in some sense poorer for not having an abundance of the latest electronics? I, for one, do not feel poorer for not having a tablet. I am not angry that my cheap Chinese phone is not an iPhone CLXII. And you kids stay off my lawn.
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You live in the Tenderloin? /s
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I wonder if the invisible hand is ever going to stop stroking investors, shareholders and corporate management long enough to help stabilize things?
Give me a “dumb” TV option that is 4K when I have the money to buy it – not lease it, and not put it on a credit card – and I’ll buy it. In the meantime… meh.
The $1k smart phones have priced me out of their market. Eff that in the ear.
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…the top culprit is substandard, unavailable and/or overpriced broadband;
I don’t see where the Pew study made this conclusion, sensible though it may be. Is this perhaps the opinion of the poster?
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I haven’t been able to find any dumb TVs so far (I’ve been looking for a couple of days, for a friend).
Every big screen model I see for sale around here has some kind of soon-to-be-abandoned software on it, and a fair bit of it is Java based for maximum future sorrow.
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Yeah, I think there was a tiny window when it was possible. Now I’m holding out for a return to sanity, or until my last TV breaks… whichever comes first.
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Even if you find one, the dumb TVs which still exist are always at the bottom of the lineup, with years-old display tech and/or panels which were rejected for the nicer (smart) TVs, and sometimes even cost MORE than higher-quality smart TVs from the same manufacturer (I guess they recover the difference through some combination of economies of scale and selling your viewing habits to advertisers?)
The only exception to this is projectors, which is the route I went. Otherwise, the best option IMO (and what I have done for my parents) is to get a smart TV, NEVER connect it to any network, and pretend the smart features don’t exist. Unfortunately, I live on the other side of the country from my parents, and the TV managed to bamboozle them into entering their WiFi password between visits.
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I think you mean “lower Nob Hill”.
For years I loved in the TenderNob.
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Am I reading the chart right? Only 5% of Americans had a computer in 2005?
This is pretty clearly saturation, despite Cory insisting it’s not saturation. Most of the people who want tech have it, now.
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You’re looking at the “social media” line. Check the colors. “Desktop/laptop computer” doesn’t start 'til 2008, for some reason, and it’s at 74% there.
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Ah, I see.
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How about VR? That’s got to be charting…
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How many people who want fast broadband have it? And how many poor people have all the access to tech that they want?
Sure, saturation is a factor. But so is stagnation, decay and inequality. There is a common thread running between this, crumbling bridges and crappy public transport etc.
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Alas, 15% of us are Moonstone-Biyhalistock, Amethyst-Biyalistok and Moedoemhaedd-Ahmkadish and for no particular reason stay 60 feet away from accessible technology.
If we seem to at times, it was the production company’s.
Our communal quantum LẨMP happens to be grail-shaped and have rights-of-way as a meltwater mitigation accessory. It is only used to defend against the giant mosquitoes, which tap and drain the oil of any clad fiber, leaving it barren; though there is one trained mosquito with like 50 USB drives on its legs and a shell-shocked ox stabilized by a pair of NAS and a generator.
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Did that exactly several years ago here in Ontario. Have never missed the added speed we got from Rogers. Have never been tempted to switch from techsavvy to any of the new fibre alternatves - DSL remains by far the cheapest option and remains more than fast enough for our needs (we don’t stream high def video, which i think is the main thing people think DSL isn’t fast enough for).
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Pretty sure it’s just the cosmic background SlashDot…
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I own a month-to-month flip phone. Don’t want all the other stuff on a smartphone. The only reason I have this flip phone is because the landline service out here is so dicey (and I don’t want to be tracked and GPS-ed).
What about new categories of tech devices which aren’t listed in that report?
For example:
