In the trenches of consumer technology, there’s plenty to complain about. Today’s cell-phone contracts are exorbitant and illogical (why has the price of a text message doubled in three years?). Those 15-second voicemail instructions still seem to last forever and use up our expensive airtime (“When you have finished recording, you may hang up”—oh, really?). And laptop batteries still can’t last the whole day.

But here and there, in unsung but important corners of consumer tech, some long-standing annoyances have quietly been extinguished. These developments deserve a lot more praise than they’ve received.

Take the megapixel race. For years the camera industry brainwashed us into believing that a camera’s megapixel measurement somehow indicates the quality of its photographs.

It doesn’t. A lousy photo still looks lousy—even at 45 megapixels. In fact, more megapixels can mean worse images because the more photo sites (light-sensing pixels) you cram onto a sensor, the smaller they get, the less light they collect and the more heat they produce, resulting in “noise” (random speckles).

The megapixel myth was a convenient psychological cop-out for consumers, who longed for a single, comparative statistic like miles per gallon for a car or gigabytes for an iPod. The camera companies played right along because it meant that they didn’t have to work on the factors that really do produce better pictures: the lens, the software and, above all, the sensor size.

In the past two years, though, a quiet revolution has taken place. The megapixel race essentially shut itself down. The megapixel count came to rest at 10 or 12 megapixels for pocket cameras, maybe 16 or 18 for professional ones—and the camera companies began putting their development efforts into bigger sensors. Cameras such as the Canon S95, the Sony NEX-C3 and Micro Four Thirds models pack larger sensors into smaller bodies.

Another example: power cords. We’ve all griped at one time or another about our drawers full of ugly, mutually incompatible chargers. Every new cell-phone model, even from the same manufacturer, used to require a different cord (and car and plane adapters), racking up another $50 per phone sale per customer.

And then, one great morning, electronics executives must have confronted themselves in the mirror, filled with shame, and decided to shut down that extortionist, environmentally disastrous profit center.

In Europe, for example, all the major cell-phone makers agreed to standardize their cords. Today every phone model uses exactly the same interchangeable micro USB power cord.

Similarly, the micro USB’s cousin, the mini USB, has been making its own conquests. Now you can charge up most BlackBerries, Bluetooth headsets, e-book readers, music players and GPS receivers by connecting a USB cable to either a power plug or your laptop. You can also use the same 30-pin charging cord on every one of the 200 million iPhones, iPads and iPod touches ever made.

Finally, it’s time to give thanks for the most important revolution of all: the simplicity movement.

For decades the rule in consumer tech was that whoever packs in more features wins. Our gadgets quickly became complex, cluttered and intimidating.

But then came the iPod, a music player with fewer features than its rivals (no radio, no voice recorder); it became the 800-pound gorilla of music players. Then the Flip camcorder—so simple, it didn’t even have a zoom—snapped up 40 percent of the camcorder market (until Cisco bought and, inexplicably, killed it). And the Wii, a game console whose controller has half as many buttons as the Xbox’s or the PlayStation’s and whose graphics look Fisher-Price crude, became a towering success, outselling its rivals year after year.

7 Comments

1. 1. JamesDavis 09:04 AM 9/27/11

   Alright! Here is a complaint and how to solve it: cell phone carriers like Verizon and AT&T charge unbearable fees for talk, text and Internet and all the other cell phone carriers follow Verizon and AT&T's lead in setting prices for cell phone use. They use these two year contracts to really stick it to you and it takes an act of Congress (and you don't even want to go there) to get your bought and paid for cell phone, which now legally belongs to you like that shirt you just bought does, unlocked. So every time you change carriers to get a better deal, you have to buy another very expensive cell phone and pay an huge fee to break your two year contract.
   
   Here is how Walmart solved the problem: they sell unlocked phones; you have to pay full price for the unlocked phones (but if you use their service, the phone can be almost free or free), and they sell their own service at $45.00 for unlimited talk, text and Internet and no two year contracts. That is not a bad price considering that all the other cell phone carriers charge close to and over $100.00 for the same service and they always have a two year contract which opens the door for them to really stick it to you somewhere within that two years (usually two to three months down the road is when they start sticking it to you). Buy yourself a really good unlocked phone and then get a carrier, who has the lowest price for unlimited talk, text and Internet, and get them to send you their sim card. If they are unwilling to send you a sim card without you first buying one of their phones...stay away from them, they are bad news. Unless you have more money than brains, the unlocked phone is the best way to go and a "NO TWO YEAR CONTRACT" is the next best way to go. This way, if those cell phone carriers hike the fee on you...drop them like a hot potato.

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2. 2. promytius 10:18 AM 9/27/11

   Television, after you bought one, used to be FREE to watch.
   Telephones used to weigh 10 pounds and cost about $8 a month, and my dad still complained it was too much.
   Text was only found in books and on signs, and reading them was free.
   Now my cable "provider" wants me to sign a 'bargain' agreement for $180 a month - almost what I spend on food a month - to 'protect' 'my' price; right... cell phones? As long as I can piuggyback on another account, OK $5 a month, but when that ends, so do my cell phone relationships.
   Roku boxes are cheap and after that free to watch - where there is a technology, there are still humans left on the planet who will act responsibly and compassionately instead of acting like little republican monsters of greed; you know, the rich and entitled, who just can't seem to squeeze enough out of the little guys to satisfy their avarice, lust and an insane need for more and more money. It's really not technology that causes all the grief, it's what has always been the problem: the limited capacity of humans to act responsibly.

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3. 3. lamorpa in reply to JamesDavis 10:40 AM 9/27/11

   You say, "cell phone carriers like Verizon and AT&T charge unbearable fees for talk, text and Internet"
   
   They're not "unbearable". Hundreds of millions of people pay them every month. It's a free market. Let the market work it out.

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4. 4. JamesDavis in reply to lamorpa 01:17 PM 9/27/11

   You are no doubt one of those greedy little republican monsters commenter #2 spoke about. The market is working it out and just because Verizon and AT&T has millions of customers doesn't mean their prices are not unbearable. When a cell phone company lowers their rate, Verizon or AT&T buys them out by an aggressive takeover and jacks the fee back up. Compare Verizon and AT&T's unlimited talk, text and Internet with Walmart's $45.00 unlimited talk, text and Internet and tell me that Verizon and AT&T's fees is not unbearable.
   
   I got a super good cell phone, Samsung T404G, from Walmart for under $60.00 and the unlimited plan for $45.00. You do the math 'lamorpa' and tell be the better deal between Verizon, AT&T or Walmart.

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5. 5. lamorpa in reply to JamesDavis 01:49 PM 9/27/11

   I'm sorry you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how free markets work and how, though they are certainly not optimal, they always end up better than controlled 'markets'. But if you believe in them strongly you may want to move to the USSR where such controlled markets are the rule. Oh, wait a minute. Too late...
   
   As far as 'unbearable' goes, people pay their bill each month. They're bearing it.
   
   As far as my political, physical, and ethical attributes go, you may want to watch out for the warpage your personal anger is introducing. You can be sure the SA forum is no place for name calling.

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6. 6. Desert Navy 02:18 PM 9/27/11

   I find it incredibly ironic the vast majority of high-tech companies are run by liberals and they get called "greedy little republican monsters".
   

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7. 7. Steve3 06:44 PM 9/27/11

   Freemarket?
   
   If anybody knows where a freeemarket really exists please let me know.
   All I see are cartels everywhere I look and buy.

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