by Brian McKay
Take a look around your general surroundings right now and tell me how much technology you see. The very fact you’re online reading this article shows you must have some type of laptop or mobile device at your fingertips. Then, there are probably loads of other things nearby like portable chargers, TV’s , and so on. My point is that technology is such a central part of our lives, and it’s gotten to a stage where we take a lot of it for granted. We’ve become so used to having certain things that we don’t even think about life without them!
To really drive this point home, here are the top tech innovations we definitely take for granted and don’t appreciate as much as we should:
Smartphones
Smartphones are certainly one of the most underappreciated things out there. We’re accustomed to using our every single day, to the point where we almost can’t function without it. As it mentions on www.stlouisfed.org, around 77% of the adult population owns a smartphone - that’s a pretty staggering stat when you consider the other 23% is probably in the older generation. We don’t appreciate the convenience of smartphones but imagine living without one for just a day, it would be madness.
Waterproof technology
Waterproof technology has been around for a long time, we just don’t usually notice it. It’s only recently that smartphone manufacturers have started making a big deal out of it, but most tech is waterproof to a certain degree. As it shows on www.pctconformalcoating.com, waterproof capabilities are usually provided by a particular type of coating technology. This protects circuitry from rain and water, meaning you can drop your phone in the bath and it’ll still be fine! This is the reason we’re not afraid to get our phones out when it’s raining - because we know they won’t malfunction on us. Take this technology away, and we’d be living a much more cautious life.
Wireless networks (WiFi)
Those of you that are old enough may remember the first days of the internet in the public domain. You used to have a dial-up connection where you also couldn’t have your phone line and internet connected at the same time. So, you’d need to unplug the phone line to plug in the internet, and there’d be this long dial-up tone as you connected. It was so inconvenient, and there was never this permanent connection that we have now. You can walk into any household, and there’s a wifi network ready for you to connect to right away. Public places have free wifi, and you can even connect to the internet on planes as well. It’s probably the most underappreciated tech innovation out there.
For those of you interested, here’s a quick video that shows the evolution of the internet from way back in its first days to around about where it is today:
It’s funny to think about how much technology we take for granted every single day. If you remove these three things from your lives, then things change dramatically. What’s interesting is thinking ahead 20 years and looking at the technologies we take for granted then - some might not even be invented yet!