30 years ago, you were lucky if you had a 300 bps acoustic modem. 20 years ago 9600 bps was considered state of the art. I am writing this while sitting in Peets in Los Altos where I have a 54,000,000 bps wireless connection, not to some local BBS, but to this much larger, almost unimaginably (at least it would have been to me in 1980!) complex structure, the internet.
In 1995, the little point and shoot camera I owned could fit 36 pictures on a roll of film. My new little Sony point and shoot has an 8gb memory card. It can fit 1,500 pictures on a "roll of film," and the memory card is so small I could balance it on the tip of a finger. It also takes better quality pictures than any 35mm camera I have ever owned, has an internal GPS, and an an impressive amount of computing power, at least when it comes to image processing.
We are living in truly amazing times. Never say never :)
Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily. The OSes have some attempts at support for UI scaling, but none works well enough to run all of the popular software decently at 200dpi.
Contrast that with iOS. I only have a handful of non-built-in apps, but they all work perfectly on my iPhone 4, none look worse, and all but the graphics-intensive games look better. I haven't seen any reports yet of software that doesn't scale properly on the iPhone 4.
Apple's tight control of the iOS software marketplace may be a key factor in this success. They may have privately checked a large amount of the software submitted to the app store, and rejected apps which failed to scale properly.
Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily.
I'm under the impression this isn't a problem. Scaling is a problem when you have bitmap images and try to scale from - say - an iPhone to an iPad. But on desktops, monitors aren't growing in size by a factor of ~2.77.
If you leave the screen size the same but increase the DPI, bitmaps will look exactly the same. They might seem visually out-of-place next to crisper UI elements. Is that what you mean?
I mean that things just don't look or act right. Try firing up Quartz Debug (if you have a Mac), setting the UI Resolution scale factor to 2, and restarting some apps. Every app I checked has problems.
For example, every app that used a standard Mac toolbar draws it incorrectly. Address Book's split views do not resize correctly. iCal's colored checkboxes are incorrect, and the popout from double-clicking a calendar item is very broken. In Safari, the busy icon on tabs isn't drawn correctly, the Top Sites search box is clipped, and the Bookmarks bottom toolbar is drawn incorrectly. The Dock puts right-click menus in the wrong place and draws them wrong, and handles drag and drop incorrectly. Finder doesn't scale the desktop icons. Preview's notion of "Actual Size" doesn't honor the UI Resolution scale factor.
Outside of Apple apps, I find that Photoshop ignores clicks on the menu bar entirely. OmniGraffle's toolbar is extra-broken, the disclosure triangles in its palettes don't work, and it draws the contents of documents incorrectly.
World of Warcraft scales up more than 2x. I can't even get to the username/password boxes. (This could be a feature.) Sketchup draws my document in the lower-left quarter of the window and random junk from the WoW login screen on the other three quarters.
Contrast this to the iPhone 4 experience. Every app I've tried looks at least as good on iPhone 4 as on iPhone 3GS, and none has had any drawing or behavior defects.
The Apple Lisa also had a keyboard with 77 keys while a regular MacBook keyboard has 78 keys.
Going full circle, though, the iPhone 4 has 2.3 times as many pixels as the Apple Lisa, has a full color screen, you can fit it in a pocket, and you don't have to hunt for a wall outlet when you want to use it.
There clearly is lots of innovation going on, but 54 Mbps wireless hardware was introduced over 11 years ago!
Furthermore, AT&T's DSL speed has only exhibited a .15 Mbps CAGR over the past 5 years to its current peak of 6 Mbps. Comcast's average cable internet speeds were 6 Mbps from 2005 to 2007, until they jumped to 12 Mbps in 2008.
In 1995, the little point and shoot camera I owned could fit 36 pictures on a roll of film. My new little Sony point and shoot has an 8gb memory card. It can fit 1,500 pictures on a "roll of film," and the memory card is so small I could balance it on the tip of a finger. It also takes better quality pictures than any 35mm camera I have ever owned, has an internal GPS, and an an impressive amount of computing power, at least when it comes to image processing.
We are living in truly amazing times. Never say never :)