Has the phone world 'plateaued'? Yes. And no...!

The titular question is one we debate often on podcasts and the like. The most obvious answer is 'Yes', of course. Any smartphone made in the last five years will be waterproof, can run anything you care to throw at it, its screen will still be fine, the cameras eminently good enough for what most of us 'snap', and so on.

So for uncle Joe and cousin Betty, and probably for you, the reader, tech plateaued some time ago. With the likes of the iPhone X onwards, the Pixel 5 onwards, the Samsung S10 onwards, even if some niche security updates have now stopped, they still run up to date apps and have updated middleware - they'll do the job for everyone.

And with the tech from such flagships rippling down to mid-priced phones and even really budget options,  even examples from those worlds in the last few years are now perfectly useable and long-lived. (True, in most case, you'll need a case these days, but that's a given.)

Making for a short blog post. But talk to those on the cutting edge, testing the most outrageous new phone hardware and keeping an eye on new tech being developed, and they'll say that phone tech certainly hasn't plateaued. With better phone camera zoom here, brighter displays there, faster fingerprint readers to the left, and ever faster chipsets, I can see the point. 

The delta of phone tech 'ability' from year to year hasn't slowed at all. At the specs level, and, if you push a phone to its limits, at the experience and results level too. It's just that 99% of people reading this won't notice much of these improvements. If you swapped out my current iPhone 14 Pro Max for my two-years-older 12 Pro Max (restoring my data and apps), and ignoring minor cosmetic aspects like a screen notch versus 'Dynamic Island', I think it might be days, even weeks before I'd notice!

Ditto if you swapped out someone's (say) Samsung S24 Ultra for a (again, two-years-older) S22 Ultra and did the same hypothetical data/setting restore - I doubt they'd notice for many days. Rather proving the 'plateau' point.

It's all good though. Whichever side of the 'plateau' debate you're on, we all gain across the board, year on year. As do our families and friends, as they inherit hand me downs, perhaps. Everyone's phones are getting better, little by little, hardware and software - and that's good.

Of course, after two decades of me writing about phone tech, it does mean that there's a lot less to enthuse about, to experiment with, and generally scribble/wibble on about. Which is partly why I stopped writing articles for tech sites in 2022 - these days I'm 90% about actually enjoying the tech and only 10% reporting on the bleeding edge. Phew!

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