Has tech hardware really come on in last 10 years?

There's many technologies that existed in 2008 but they've come on so much that they've made a significant change. Smartphones have continually evolved and increasingly replaced dedicated devices, mp3 players and compact cameras, they're working their way into cars with Android Auto and Apple Car Play plus their first steps into seriously replacing PC's as well.

Also we've seen the move from physical to digital, I remember how futuristic an optical disc seemed when I saw it in a Bond film but now a blu-ray disc seems almost like a vinyl disc now. It's not just that we can stream music and video but the huge selection and ease of playback, it's incredibly convenient to consume such media on a variety of devices and have the progress synchronised between them all.

Personal data is also more likely to be stored online and almost returning to the mainframes of old with the bulk of processing carried out by central servers and the end devices are just clients. I remember when voice recognition just seemed a joke but now we have comparatively powerful AI assistants which are not many steps away from Joi in Bladerunner.

On a different note, I find the new VR systems simply incredible. I had no interest in them as I'd used the original and rubbish VR systems plus I'd had no interest in 3D films. However after having a shot of a Rift, I bought a Vive shortly after and it still blows me away in a way that's hard to describe. Beyond the obvious applications it's incredible the potential for the likes of remote communication. You can share your screen which appears as a large TV in a virtual environment and you can sit alongside the other people viewing the screen and chat to them as well with the system representing how they are moving as well. It's quite eerie in some multiplayer games where the person has a human avatar and it has accurate movement since it can track the head, hand and body positions.

I've worked in IT for 30 years, and the thing that impresses me are the developments in vision and speech-recognition systems. In technical terms, these are both incredibly challenging and their steady development over the past 10 years has been fascinating to watch.

Neither are yet perfect, but I would expect further steady development and it's only a matter of time before we start to see phone-based and other customer service situations beginning to be staffed by lucid, fluent and adaptable voice-recognition systems.

In terms of finding viable applications for some of these technologies, I think it will be adoption by businesses rather than consumers that will be key.

I'm pretty satisfied with 300Mbs broadband, much faster than 10 years ago.
As for the rest of tech, it's far in advance of 10 years ago and probably advancing far faster than it ever did.