2024年4月8日发(作者：丽讯d508投影机参数)

高考英语外刊精读人与社会智能手机时代正在消亡

导读：如今几乎人手一部智能手机，智能手机集通讯、娱乐、购物、出行于一身，

极大地方便了人们的日常生活。而在科技日新月异的今天，智能手机未来发展的

趋势如何呢？会不会被新的科技产品代替？下面读一篇相关科技报道了解一下

科技前沿吧！

一、文本泛读

Fifteen years ago Steve Jobs announced three new products: a music player, a mobile

phone and an internet communicator. As Apple’s then-boss gave his presentation, his

audience slowly realised that the three products were in fact a single gadget: the

iPhone. Cue applause, cue Apple’s renaissance, and cue a new era in technology as

the smartphone overtook the desktop PC as the centre of personal computing.

Today even Mr Jobs might be surprised by how many uses have been found for his

versatile device. The small screen has come to handle banking, networking,

map-reading, gaming and much more. Apple and other phonemakers have been

enriched not only by hardware sales (worth $530bn last year) but by controlling what

happens on the platform, from app stores (which raked in $135bn) to mobile ads

(worth nearly $300bn).

Yet there is mounting evidence that the smartphone era is fading. Phone sales have

been in gentle decline since 2016, as slower technological improvement has led to

people upgrading less often. In rich countries, already saturated, the decline is

especially marked. So tech innovators and investors are on the hunt for the next big

thing, in hopes of winning not just a juicy hardware market but the potential to control

the platform on which everything takes place.

The current big idea is virtual-reality (VR) headsets, spurred on in part by pandemic

lockdowns. More promising, but further off, are glasses for experiencing augmented

reality (AR), in which computer graphics are overlaid on the real world. Most of

America’s big tech firms—among them Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft—as well

as Asian giants like ByteDance (TikTok’s Chinese owner) and Sony, are developing

or already selling VR or AR headsets. What has so far been a niche market is about to

become very crowded.

Any claim to have discovered the next big platform deserves caution. There have been

plenty of false starts. Tablets were proclaimed as a rival to the smartphone, yet Apple

still makes six times as much money selling iPhones as it does from iPads. Smart

homes were seen as another possible mega-platform, but so far Alexa and her like

serve mostly as jukeboxes and egg-timers. In-car tech is another platform that has

proved useful and valuable, but hardly threatens to become the centre of anyone’s

digital life. It is easy to imagine headsets, which are now used mostly for gaming,

getting stuck in a similar niche.

What does seem to be under way, however, is a gradual movement by consumers

towards a constellation of new wearable devices. These include voice-activated smart

headphones, which can make calls, read messages and more, and smart watches,

which handle scheduling, navigation and fitness. A growing array of health-tech

gadgets measure everything from blood sugar to sleep patterns. In America unit sales

of these “wearables” are already close to sales of smartphones.

These gadgets are more like accessories for the phone than replacements. But as

computing shifts away from the pocket and towards wrists and ears, a growing share

of consumers’ attention and spending is seeping away from the phone, too. As VR

and AR glasses become lighter and cheaper, they could form the most powerful part

of the wearable cluster.

People are not about to ditch their phones, any more than they threw out their laptops

a decade ago. But as they interact more often with earphones or, soon, glasses, more

of them will come to use their phone as a kind of back office, primarily there to

provide processing muscle for other gadgets. As chips get even smaller, phones may

not be needed even for that.

Don’t expect any of this to happen right away. Internet-enabled phones were launched

in the late 1990s and failed to catch on outside offices. AR headsets—bulky, pricey