For most of human history, if you buy or make something, there’s a pretty clear distinction between the periods during which it is being made and being used. A leather bag or wooden table might age and show wear, but the leather bag doesn’t grow a pocket overnight, and the table doesn’t show up for breakfast with room for one more chair. Most things pretty much work the same way from the time you unwrap them until they break or get stashed in the basement. But that’s different in technology. These days, functionally equivalent changes can and do occur on our electronic devices all the time.
The past 10-15 years have offered an explosion of advancement in consumer technology; more and more aspects of our days turn on and blink, and are susceptible to upgrades. Modern consumer tech mania really began with the iPod[1] during the first half of the Aughts, followed by iPhone and Android smartphones as high-tech status symbols in the second half, which are must-have pocketable items today. What’s really changed is that every tiny computer more powerful than a graphing calculator is now a tiny networked computer.
Smart phones were probably some of the first bits of consumer electronics that regularly got updates. You’d plug it in with a cable, it percolated for a while – maybe showed a progress bar – and then it behaved somewhat differently, hopefully better. If you, like me, bought a first generation iPhone in the fall of 2007, by the next fall it was almost a completely different machine – there was the App Store, it could find itself on a map (!), you could search your contacts. Another year later, we had Copy-and-Paste! It’s not hard to compare a smart phone to a desktop computer, and we’ve been updating those forever (anyone else remember the mania surrounding the upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95? Start Me Up!).
Around 2012, more and more devices started to come out of the box with a request to pair with a smartphone or connect to wif. And before they could begin doing the purpose for which they’d been purchased, they needed to update. This was the Internet of Things, or IoT, that was just a lot of talk initilaly initially, and now is the world we live in. Thermostats, watches, TVs, streaming media players (Roku/Apple TV/Fire TV), network routers, fitness trackers, smart deadbolts, scales, light bulbs, Alexa – the list grows daily – they’re all either online all the time, or phone home in some way at some point. More and more, what used to be static is now dynamic, mostly getting better over time.
[1]Of course Nintendo’s Game Boy came out in 1989 and lives on in the Nintendo DS line and Switch, both of which want to update on first power-up.