
Guess What's the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years - ukdm
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/guess-whats-the-fastest-adopted-gadget-of-the-last-50-years/254948/
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jd
And the cool thing is that a smartphone now serves the function of _all_ of
these gadgets. It's a music player, video player, camcorder, digital camera,
answering machine, and so on. Internet TV replaces the need for satellite TV
and a cellphone camera + email replaces the need for a FAX machine. It's
astonishing how few appliances you need aside from a smartphone.

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ohashi
But it does a poor job replacing the boombox. You need some other device or
attachment to really share that sound.

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gcb
It already does a pretty good job at annoying me in the bus with other
people's dance/rap "music"

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vectorpush
Certainly, if you don't personally enjoy it then it doesn't qualify as music.

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gcb
it could be my favourite tune, hearing it in a bus via a maxed out phone
speaker from someone 5 rows behind will hardly be considered music

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laughinghan
If you take another look at the figure, the highest correlating factor isn't
whether the "gadget" (by which they mean consumer technology, not any specific
device) is for "consumption of entertainment" or "communication or production
of media", as the text of the article suggests. It's simply how complicated
the technology is--dare I say, how innovative the technology is--and the
reason is simple: the more innovative the technology, the longer it took from
first being "on the market" to becoming mature enough to be widely adopted.

(How does one count length of time "on the market", anyway? What counts as the
first cell phone "on the market"?)

So what this is really saying is: the more advanced the technology, the longer
it takes for the technology to go from early-adopter to mass market.

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amirmc
I think I get your point but I don't think it entirely matches the graph. Is
an answering machine more technologically advanced than a portable CD player?

Edit: What I'm really trying to get at is that there are _so many_ factors
that go into adoption. Trying to sum it up by how 'advanced' the tech may be
is a gross oversimplification

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rosser
The GP said _complicated_ , not _advanced_. A CD player is much less
complicated for the "VCR clock has flashed 12:00 for the last four years"
crowd than an answering machine.

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amirmc
Please re-read his last sentence.

Also, this doesn't really affect my point. Complicated, advanced, cheap,
fashionable, etc are all valid factors in how/why things get adopted. Picking
out one of them, on the basis of a graph, oversimplifies things.

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Jabbles
Depends how you define "fastest". In this case it's "percentage of households
after 7 years". I think if we shortened the definition (arbitrarily) to 1 year
we would get very different results (yet keep the same headline).

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cperciva
Also, it's 7 years _after first introduction to market_. There are lots of
products which spent a long time going nowhere and then suddenly exploded once
they became sufficiently refined.

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pawosty
Such as the iPod? Or are you thinking of a different example?

Actually I might be way off with the iPod...

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cperciva
The first example which came to mind was the internet. After that, smart
phones.

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excuse-me
The internet came on the market in 1982, 7 years later it was still pretty
much only in universities.

If you count 1992 - when com connection was really allowed and the web was
invented it probably still wasn't in all that many homes 7 years later. 1999
was still dial-up for me and I was a Caltech grad student!

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mc32
I think the title is misleading. It's not so much about the fasted adopted
gadget but rather fastest adopted consumer technology.

Gadget connotes a single device --like a Kinect, iPhone or Garmin GPS.

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adestefan
_It's worth noting that all five of the fastest-adopted technologies were for
the consumption of entertainment not communication or production of media._

IMHO, that's the biggest takeaway from this article.

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fredsters_s
Definitely fits the 90:9:1 theory of consumption : curation : creation. I
wonder to what extent the startup community or entrepreneurs in general
represent an abnormal distribution of that ratio...

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crusso
The things on the left side of the graph were relatively inexpensive consumer
devices while the things on the right were generally more expensive.

The author's surprise that the color tv or cell phone weren't more quickly
adopted seems ignorant of price considerations. Color televisions and cell
phones were very expensive when they were introduced.

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callmeed
When you consider all the D batteries I had to buy for my boom box, it was
pretty expensive ;)

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keithpeter
+1

My Panasonic took 8 of those

Seriously, the boombox was relatively low cost of _entry_ , and the
distributed stand-alone nature of the device. You didn't need connections,
signal strength &c. Just some music.

Correlates with Kodak box camera in the 19th/20th century?

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ideadude
I think this is apples to oranges comparison due to differences in prices.
Early cell phones cost much more than boom boxes or CD players and they
carried a monthly fee with them.

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zwischenzug
Yeah, that. CD players were highly desired but very expensive in the early
days. Boom boxes came in and were probably cheaper than a decent hi-fi.

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zalew
I was guessing that's the walkman (in any form), was close.

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xbryanx
It's interesting to compare this to the rate of adoption for the land line
telephone:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnZb5H7...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnZb5H7tDMvTdHVDNm5ONGhBU2NMRFpPRDlYYm5jV0E&gid=0)

This new technology took decades to reach mass use, from the time it was
introduced on the market.

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__alexs
A direct requirement for new infrastructure deployment to make use of a new
technology is always going to reduce the rate of uptake.

The top 5 things on the list all require pretty much just a factory and a
large number of trucks to get value out to the consumers quickly. Plus
customers themselves were providing amplification in the value being delivered
on those trucks by producing their own mixtapes and VHS recordings to swap
with friends all the time.

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crusso
That's an excellent point. Cell phone networks and color television content
took a long time to develop. They weren't useful to very many consumers when
first introduced, so the market rate was naturally very slow.

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Steko
If they're going to break out stereo color tv from color tv then why not break
out "superphone" from smartphone (which isn't even listed)? Not even 5 years
from the iphone debut adpotion rates are pretty high.

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datagramm
One wonders exactly what constitutes a 'boombox'. Would my bakelite wireless
count? Or must the device have a fade-sporting b-boy attached to it's base to
qualify?

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meatsock
no, your bakelite radio would not count, as a boombox is understood to include
a tape or cd player - few radio stations adapted to the new musical styles
quickly enough for the street.

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planckscnst
My guess was the keyless entry remote, which I expect is now very close to
100% penetration in the US. I wonder if that was one considered for the chart.

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btucker
I'm in the 0%! But in all seriousness, I think the problem here is that these
were actually introduced back in the early 80s on high-end cars. So it took a
lot longer than 7 years to become widely adopted.

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simba-hiiipower
..that's the power of MUSIC!

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josiahq
Suprised the fleshlight wasn't on that list

