2013 “A Lost Year For Tech” – Commentator

Quartz’s Christopher Mims contends that 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry, with innovation replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations. Mims maintains that not a single breakthrough tech product was unveiled in 2013 and Google Glass doesn’t count for reasons he expands on.

Mims observes that in 2013 smartphones became commodities — even Apple and Samsung’s high-end models which ahead from previhe notes were essentially incremental updates of prevous versions, and notes that most of the year’s big news out of Apple was about the company’s tax-avoidance techniques and general failure to deliver any new products of note — for example still not a player in the “phablet” category even though phablets have been a huge success for other manufacturers. He does acknowledge the iPhone 5s’s faster processor, but apparently discounts what its currently category-unique 64-bit support may hold in store for the future. I agree with him that the iPhone 5s’s fingerprint sensor feature was the answer to a question nobody had asked, and that by and large iOS 7 is a disappointing dud in terms of any substantive advance in capability or functionality, its changes being largely window-dressing that make it feel “more like a Microsoft release,” that “crippled many older iPhones and led to complaints of planned obsolescence.” A pretty difficult gainsay assertion when Apple refuses to let users of older iOS hardware, like your editor’s iPad 2, downgrade back to iOS 6 after discovering that their device’s formerly slick and quick performance running version 6 had been transformed into plodding clunkiness by version 7. I’ll consequently be inclined to upgrade to a newer iPad sooner than I’d planned, which I suppose is the point for Apple, however cynical.

Mims also notes that Microsoft managed to lose nearly a billion dollars on the Surface RT tablet in 2013 – in the hottest sector for the computing device market, and that BlackBerry, which investors once thought might be broken into smaller businesses with some latent value, is proving to be a near-total loss. BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) co-founder and co-CEO Mike Lazarides evidently agrees, having last week sold his Blackberry shares and withdrawing a takeover bid.

For the full commentary visit here:
http://qz.com/161443/2013-was-a-lost-year-for-tech/

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