ENIAC (which is 70 years old) had some obvious flaws: it was too big, too expensive, too hard to use, and didn't do enough. This has been true for computing hardware ever since. The first portable PC [1] is 35 years old. It was too big, too expensive, too hard to use, and didn't do enough. Ditto the first laptop, the first handhelds, the first smartphones, and pretty much every other first.
But that's no longer true for modern phones. Few complain their phones are too big, and many wanted larger ones, leading to the rise of the phablets. Phone prices could be lower, but they're cheaper than the phone service over the phone's life, so making them much cheaper won't make a big difference. They could still be a little easier to use, but ease of use isn't keeping anybody from buying one. And now they do pretty much everything; phones are the computing swiss army knife.
We may find a new direction to take things in, and there are some plausible candidates. But you can't use the history of computing platforms to predict future change in personal devices, because we've mostly solved the problems we set out to solve. As we've experienced with cars or buildings, we could easily be looking at decades of incremental change.
Citation needed. Although the addition of "these days" doesn't let us check any historical precedent, as makes the claim more like "it might have been different in the past, but from now on dominant consumer-facing platforms don't tend to last much longer than 10 years".
>smartphones only really took off exactly 10 years ago with the iPhone, so it's presumptuous to think we've hit the perfect sweet spot that will last us much longer.
That's irrelevant, since smartphones are just the continuation of computing platforms, so they herald back to ENIAC's time too. They are more portable computer in essence (that also takes calls -- which are now of course digitally communicated) than some novel technology.
>It's almost like arguing the ENIAC would be the pinnacle of computing for the next 50 years.
At the moment ENIAC has developed everybody knew it was early days, and tons of innovations unexploited for improvement. Heck, computing hadn't even hit the market much yet, it was all research work.
Today we already have exhausted Moore's law, and we're near physical limitations for further shrinking. It's as if people don't understand that innovations in platforms are S curved such that one see more improvement in a platform before it plateaus, before all the low hanging fruits have been implemented, and further research yields marginal returns for very expensive costs.
Yes: a) dominant consumer-facing platforms don't tend to last much longer than 10 years these days, b) smartphones only really took off exactly 10 years ago with the iPhone, so it's presumptuous to think we've hit the perfect sweet spot that will last us much longer.
It's almost like arguing the ENIAC would be the pinnacle of computing for the next 50 years. A lot of evolution happened, and "phones" 20 years from now will probably be nearly incomparable to phones today, just like your phone is just somewhat different from ENIAC.