The age of “Good Enough”

What’s next when everything works fine?

640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody.

— Bill Gates, apocryphally

Technologists like to speculate, and fret, about the end of Moore’s law: the long-standing rule-of-thumb that computer chips will double in performance every 18 months. If the pace of improvement ever slows down, they think, the whole tech industry might collapse!

Luckily, Moore’s law remains (mostly) alive, but there’s another looming possibility that should be far scarier to tech CEOs: Even if computer chips keep getting faster, eventually users might stop caring. At some point, last year’s chips will simply be good enough.

Crazy as that may sound to long-time techies, “good enough” is practically inevitable — just look at the car industry. There’s still plenty of innovation in cars, but it revolves around luxuries and bragging rights rather than practical specs. The ritziest supercar you can buy still won’t get you to work any faster. I think this old Citroën ad sums it up nicely:

From Reddit

How long before a cheap Android phone could make the same ad? Well, it already could! A Moto G Power from last year fits the bill nicely:

As fast as an iPhone (for browsing Facebook)

Same battery life as a Galaxy Note (if you charge it every day)

Takes photos that look nice (just like a Pixel).

Of course, that phone has a slower CPU than an iPhone, fewer megapixels than a Galaxy, and a lower screen refresh rate than a Pixel. It can’t shoot 8K video, doesn’t get 5G speeds, and shoots muddy, grainy photos in low light. But, do you care? Maybe, maybe not. As with cars, the difference is in the leather seats and the precision suspension — the luxuries, not the necessities.

Practical, Aspirational, or Status Symbol

As a thought-exercise, let’s split all the features of a modern smartphone into three categories:

• Practical: This feature makes it easier to accomplish daily tasks like staying connected, taking photos, tracking health, and staying safe.
• Aspirational: This feature empowers some users to accomplish more, or to live better lives — but most people can’t or won’t take advantage of it.
• Status Symbol: This feature mostly just gets you bragging rights.

You and I will probably disagree about where some features should fall. For reference, here’s the breakdown I came up with:

In the early years of smartphones every generation would bring tangible improvements in the “Practical” column. The iPhone 3G had an App Store, the iPhone 3Gs could record video, and the iPhone 4s had a voice assistant. These days, though, the differences between last year’s phones and this year’s phones are largely confined to the latter two columns — aspirational features and status symbols. It’s rare for a new feature to meaningfully improve your day-to-day life.

And it’s not just phones! It’s hard to think of a better poster child for the “Good Enough” age than the iPad Pro, which is such a deeply excellent tablet that I can’t imagine anything Apple could do to improve the hardware (the software needs some help but that’s another issue). Nobody is asking for a faster iPad. Or, a camera with more megapixels. Or surround-sound with even more speakers. Etcetera.

What changed?

Simply put, we’re starting to hit limits that have nothing to do with technology. We can’t make phone screens much larger because they wouldn’t fit in the average pocket. And we can’t make laptop batteries any bigger without the FAA banning them from airplanes.

More interesting are the limits imposed by our own bodies. For example, our brains can only absorb about 11 megabits per second of information, and our conscious minds can only process about .0004% of that (~50 bits per second). Computers can handle a billion times that much data processing, but much of that work is ultimately meant for consumption by humans. Whether it’s a spreadsheet or a web page or a video game, there’s only so much information your computer can flash across the display before your brain starts to hemorrhage.

A more concrete limitation is our eyeballs. For most of us, sight is the primary way we understand the world. Human eyes are, by most measures, very good — but they’re not perfect. We can’t see colors outside a fairly narrow spectrum of light, or objects that are too small or too far away, or lights that flash faster than about 24 times per second. Our technology is starting to catch up to these limitations. Our eyes are starting to become the bottleneck.

The absurdity of 8K

As an example, let’s talk about screen resolution. TVs with 4K resolution (that is, 4000 pixels horizontally) have largely saturated the market, so TV manufacturers are looking for the next big thing. Their brilliant idea: even more pixels! TVs with 8K resolution — 8000 pixels horizontally — are starting to go on sale.

But, should you care? Let’s do some math to find out. From Wikipedia:

The maximum angular resolution of the human eye is 28 arc seconds or 0.47 arc minutes. For a pixel pair (one white and one black pixel) this gives a pixel density of 128 pixels per degree (PPD).

Your eye has a field of view of approximately 135 degrees, so some napkin math reveals that the maximum screen resolution you could possibly discern is approximately 17,000 by 17,000 pixels, or “17K” in video format parlance. This assumes you’re sitting so close to the display that you literally can’t see anything else.

The average TV sold in America last year was 55 inches diagonal. In order to see the full 8K resolution on that TV you’d have to sit just over 3 feet away from it, or about the distance from the back of your couch to the front of your knees.

If you sit a (fairly average) 7 feet away from your TV, you won’t get the full benefit of 8K video on anything less than a 116 inch TV. A 116 inch TV! This $150,000 TV still wouldn’t quite be big enough.

The numbers are even sillier for 8K on a phone. Even a 6-inch “phablet” can’t show 8K video unless you hold it 3 inches from the tip of your nose.

You can check my math, and play along with some cool sliders, here (click Runtime -> Run all to make it interactive).

If you have a very large TV and you sit very close to it then maybe — maybe — you can see all the fine details in an 8K video. This actually seems more likely for gamers, although games would actually need to be designed and textured with 8K monitors in mind to get the full benefit. And even then, 4K is detailed enough that any extra resolution is unlikely to actually confer an advantage in the game. 4K is good enough.

Most people will never need a TV with a resolution higher than 4K. You can quote me on that — this is my Bill Gates moment. 8K may find a niche, like VR games or virtual surgeries or giant animated billboards, but that niche will never include your home TV. Or at least, it won’t need to — TV makers might force it on us anyway, like they did with 3D TV.

The only way 4K video will ever look old-fashioned is if the very idea of a TV becomes old-fashioned. Otherwise, we’ve reached the pinnacle of resolution.

The dominoes start to fall

Video resolution isn’t just some nerdy spec you find in your owners manual of your TV, it’s the main attraction! Sight is the primary way most of us understand the world, and higher resolution screens make that sight even clearer — to a point. You may have upgraded your TV specifically to get a higher resolution. It may be the main reason you pay for fast internet, or the upsell that moved you to a more expensive Netflix plan. It’s the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray, or between a PS4 and a PS5. You might buy a new camera to shoot in higher resolution, and then have to buy a bigger hard-drive to store the results. Video resolution is a driving force for the entire tech industry.

For example, 8K video is often mentioned in the same breath as 5G cell service because it’s honestly hard to think of any other reason for 5G Ultra Wide Band to exist. Good quality 4K video only needs around 45mbps of bandwidth, which is easily achievable on 4G cell networks. 5G UWB can achieve up to 4,000 mbps. That’s fast enough to stream eighty-eight different 4K movies at the same time. It’s fast enough to fill a base-model iPhone’s entire storage in 32 seconds flat. It’s a solution in desperate need of a problem, and 8K looked to be a good candidate.

But 8K is absurd. And, setting that side, 4000mbps is well beyond the 100mbps or so you need to stream 8K video. Technologists tend to believe that “if you build it, they will come” — that some ingenious innovator will figure out the “killer app” for 5G and generate such an ungodly sum of money that the whole of San Mateo county can buy another Tesla.

But that can’t keep happening forever. Unlike the economy (or, perhaps, very much like it), bandwidth and gigahertz and screen resolution cannot simply grow by 5% per year every year indefinitely. Eventually that growth will unlock its last killer app and, so depleted, grind to a halt. The entire tech industry will have to pivot to something new.

Change is good

It’s hard to talk about the tech industry without talking specifically about Apple. As of their writing, their market cap is approximately equal to the combined value of Google, Amazon, and Meta combined. They outpaced their tech-company competitors by becoming a luxury brand. Or rather, by becoming the luxury brand — by far the largest and most valuable in the world.

I think they’ve anticipated “The Age of Good Enough” for a long time. In some ways they actually jumped the gun on it by designing their high-end Macs to prioritize form when professionals were demanding more function. But, for many of Apple products, the function is already solidly “Good Enough” and so the form rightly takes priority. It’s no accident that iPhones come in a new color every year, or that Apple ads spend so much time talking about high-quality materials and precision-milled chamfers. They have, very successfully, pivoted into fashion.

Maybe that’s not giving Apple quite enough credit as a tech company. Sure, they haven’t introduced a significant new product line since 2016’s Airpods, and the iPhone has looked largely the same since 2017’s iPhone X — but they have still made some meaningful advances. This year’s inclusion of satellite-based emergency beacons on iPhones will legitimately save lives and bring peace of mind. To me that’s a perfect example of the kind of technology that will continue to be meaningful long into the future.

The old Citroen ad at the beginning of this article notably doesn’t mention anything about safety. It doesn’t say “just as many airbags as a Toyota” or “same crash safety rating as a Volvo”. That’s partly because the ad predates seatbelts (!) but the omission would likely be the same today. Expensive cars tend to be safer than cheap ones, whether it’s better construction or more advanced driver-assist tech. As we (slowly) enter the age of self-driving that will only become more true. We don’t need our cars to go any faster, but we’ll always need them to be safer.

Similarly, our gadgets don’t need to keep getting faster or lighter or higher-resolution, they only need to help us live safer, healthier, more meaningful lives. Those are hard problems to solve, involving not just technologists but also biologists and sociologists and politicians. Maybe that’s why so many companies have been satisfied with just linearly improving the technology we already have. Real change involves risk, and risk is a 4-letter word.

It’s hard to predict what will come next. The web changed the world, then smartphones changed the world again, and now smartphones are excellent and ubiquitous and we’re all getting a little bit bored with them. If Silicon Valley wants to stay relevant it needs to come up with something new, really new. Not more speed, not more resolution, not more status symbols. Technology companies still have the inventive capacity to make your daily life better, but they also have the ad budget to sell meaningless specs. Keep that in mind next time you update your tech. If they want your money, make them work for it.