How does electronic technology so reliably get better every single year? How is there always new products with seemingly no cap to ability to develop them? (Thinking video game consoles, GPUs, CPUs, etc.)

Question

I don’t really understand how it’s realistic that every single year new GPUs, CPUs, consoles, TVs, etc. are being released with new technological advances. How is there not a year where it’s like “welp, actually our tech right now is advanced as we can figure it out”. Do they hold onto some features to save them for future releases?

In: 1

Answer 1

Basically, capitalism.

Think that literally hundreds of thousands of people across the world try to up each other so you will buy the product they work on, so they work very hard to find small improvements. These small improvements over time create large shifts in technology.

Just look at the difference between this year’s versions of the IPhone vs last years. It has very small improvements. But if you see that every year there are small improvements, then you look at the iPhone today vs 15 years ago, it’s night and day.