people love to juxtapose "real" hardware innovation as separate from the fake economy software/computer innovation. but much of the advancements in this generation of hardware tech is downstream of computing and the improvement of various data and control planes eating the machine world the first and foremost being the cost curve of small modular li-ion batteries, made possible in part by battery management software, and demand pull from the laptop industry. this led to the advent of electric cars, in home battery electric devices (shoutout impulse stove), ebikes and escooters that have transformed urban landscapes. (better chemistries ofc mattered, but manufacturing scale and BMS hugely important) deep learning vision techniques developed to better classify content on social media platforms, rank and moderate all the videos on youtube, led to autonomous end to end driving creating waymo, tesla FSD, etc. not to mention the gigantic computer gaming industry that led to the mass manufacture of highly parallel matmul machines that are the workhorse of modern machine intelligence reusable rockets are made possible at least partly by massive improvements in control-planes of rockets, modular engines that you can thrust-vector & path plan with much better flight computers, model-based controls. Saturn V flew with five huge f-1s; the SpaceX Starship stack flies with 39 raptors across two stages, and lands because flight computers can juggle them. the starlink constellation is so profitable as a byproduct of the enormous bandwidth demands of the modern internet, and is itself impossible without fleet orchestration, phased array DSP beam-forming, autonomous ground terminals swiveling around that needs complex software amazon, walmart, temu etc have redefined physical logistics, created miracles like the same-day everything delivery for free, based on better predictive loops, software defined warehousing, guessing what "people like you" are going to need at the last mile long before the idea even pops into your head the last 20 years of hardware are largely software-defined machines running on cheap compute, designed in simulation, built by automated lines, and improved by data we cannot draw a distinction between "frivolous" improvements in the massively profitable internet infotainment technology and everything else, because it is fundamentally impossible to predict the way these cash cow research engines pave the way for the rest of the technology tree. in today's world AI chatbots are reaching the level of ubiquity where people are passing them off as more of the same infotainment, digital sycophants, somehow "not real". i would bet the house on it not being true