This chart showing the trend of global Smartphone shipments tells me that the world is almost saturated with these devices…. That the end of the road for mobile manufacturers like Apple and Samsung is not too far off .
All empires and their glory must in time decline and fall …. Before the smartphone era remember it was the exciting automobile empire that ruled the world between the 1960s and 2000s and thereafter became a stagnant, un-innovative and unregenerate product and industry.
This chart reminds me of the book written by Robert Gordon : “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”….. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2017/06/people.htm
Gordon’s controversial thesis is that the United States is likely to languish in the economic doldrums, largely because the inventions of the future are unlikely to be as revolutionary as those of the “special century” from 1870 to 1970.
Electricity, the internal combustion engine, and indoor plumbing dramatically improved the standard of living in a way that’s unlikely to be repeated, he argues. Most advances since then have been incremental rather than transformational.
The Smart Phone was a great invention no doubt…. But in the years ahead , it too will pass into the history of products that only incrementally enrich human lives … not transformationally.
Sudarshan Madabushi