Ubiquity and unmet promises drained status from tech products by 2016

Evidence

By 2016, tech wasn’t just losing its mystique; it was losing its cool. Smartphones, once sleek and expensive status symbols, had become ubiquitous. With more than 70 percent of the US population owning a device, the novelty of pocket-size black rectangles had faded into mundanity. Silicon Valley’s promises of the future—self-driving cars, airborne internet drones, seamless “wearables”—had failed to change our lives. Cars still had steering wheels, connections still relied on Wi-Fi and cell towers, and once-breakthrough devices now stagnated in small, incremental updates. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 511

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete content: the section number 70 percent smartphone ownership is a hard data point useful in the counter-case argument about what actually changed.