/Has Tech Plateaued?

Apple’s annual September event just concluded, and with it, the announcement of the iPhone 16 models. For someone like me - someone who has been actively seeking a reason to upgrade from an already flawless iPhone 14 Pro - there was nothing compelling in this latest release. The iPhone 16 feels more like a rehash than a true upgrade. If you thought the differences between the iPhone 14 and 15 were minor, the iPhone 16 takes that even further. Aside from a new "Camera Button" that mimics functions we've had for years, it’s essentially the same phone. Ironically, my Sony Xperia XZ1, a phone I owned six years ago, already featured this so-called innovation¹.

This trend of diminishing returns in smartphone advancements is no longer surprising. We've entered an era where the pace of innovation has slowed - which is not necessarily a bad thing. Devices today are highly efficient and more than capable of handling the average user’s needs. For instance, would a 50% faster chip drastically improve how we consume TikTok? Probably not. So why keep releasing new models with such minor changes? The smartphone market once brimmed with excitement - especially in the Android ecosystem, where features like under-display cameras and fingerprint sensors offered meaningful uniqueness². Today, almost every phone is just a sleek slab of glass. While I appreciate clean, timeless industrial design, there's little left to be excited about.

The real question is, where do we go from here? When you look at current smartphones, it’s clear that processors are already faster than most people can fully utilize, cameras are approaching mirrorless quality, and OLED screens are nearing perfection. However, one area still holding us back is battery technology. Despite the leaps we've seen in other components, batteries remain stuck in the early 2000s era. For over a decade, I’ve maintained the same nightly routine of plugging in my phone, and the prospect of better battery life always seemed just around the corner. Yet, every few months, claims of breakthroughs in battery chemistry come and go without delivering meaningful change. We seem to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of hype.

I’m optimistic that a breakthrough will eventually come, likely from the electric vehicle industry, whether it’s the elusive graphene battery or something entirely new. To illustrate the extent of the problem, there’s a scene in Master of None where Busta Rhymes talks about investing in a phone battery company whose products last for weeks. That show turns ten next year, and we’re still waiting for batteries to catch up with the rest of the tech.

Once battery issues are resolved, attention will likely shift back to processors. However, even here, we’re encountering the limits of what’s physically possible. Semiconductor nodes like TSMC’s 3nm and upcoming 2nm processes aren’t literally that small; in fact, we've been hovering around 13nm in practical terms for years. Shrinking further is a battle against the laws of physics, particularly quantum tunneling, which becomes more problematic as we reduce the size of transistors. Adding more cores to processors isn’t a sustainable solution either, as light speed and die real estate impose additional constraints. While we haven’t hit the absolute limit of computing speed, we’re getting closer with every advancement.

A relevant example is AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series, which followed their highly successful Ryzen 7800X3D. After Intel’s missteps with their 13th and 14th Gen processors, expectations for AMD’s next release were high. Yet, the Ryzen 9000 series didn’t deliver the massive performance leap consumers anticipated. Instead, AMD focused on lower power consumption and prices with only modest gains in performance. The real promise may lie in their upcoming 3D cache chips, but the trend toward efficiency over raw power is clear.

Beyond hardware, there’s another factor limiting our ability to fully leverage current technology: software. Many applications aren’t optimized to take advantage of modern processors, resulting in unnecessary inefficiency. Software bloat is rampant - it’s far easier for developers to release poorly optimized apps than to write efficient code. A surprising number of programs don’t even utilize multithreading properly, leaving several CPU cores idle while only a few are tasked with the workload. While there’s still potential to optimize software and CPU architectures, the prevailing mindset has been that faster processors will compensate for these inefficiencies. For a long time, that assumption held true.

Yet, now, we find ourselves confronting the physical limits of technology. Data centers in the U.S. alone consumed around 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in one year - roughly equivalent to the annual energy usage of 6.4 million American homes. That’s also equivalent to 1.2 million lifetimes of personal computer use. There’s a theoretical minimum amount of energy required to perform any computation, known as the Landauer limit, but our computers are currently millions of times less efficient than that threshold.

As we approach the limits of what can be achieved with traditional hardware, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the future of innovation won’t be found in faster processors or increased core counts. Instead, the focus will likely shift toward creating smarter, more energy-efficient technologies that can sustain the needs of the Information Age. It’s time to redefine progress - not as a race for raw power, but as a move toward a more sustainable, efficient future for technology.