We see portability in electronics being a continuing requirement, higher functionality, better battery life, requiring lower power for the actual electronics.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business and electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers.
Consumer electronics is a challenging one.
The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.
I'm not saying that more performance wouldn't be better - all these technologies are going to get better - that's the difference between first generation and second generation.
Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.
We are putting more and more power into a system which is less and less able to carry it reliably.
One of the things that's interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.
When you're displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content.
With electronics, they just get smaller and smaller.
There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.