Companies need to sell stuff in order to make money. In order for a company to grow, they need to either sell more stuff than the year before or make more money some other way. It’s this simple law of capitalism that drives innovation. Hardware advances, up to a certain point, have generally benefited man. But pretty soon, when things are “good enough”, companies begin to get a little frightened because they need to figure out a way to make you want something new so they could, back to the simple rule previously mentioned, sell more stuff. Enter the birth of advertising and gimmicky garbage. We’ll talk about advertising some other day, but gimmicky garbage is what I’d like to focus on. If you’ve ventured out to your local electronics store, you’ve no doubt seen that a majority of the televisions on sale are 3D capable. Did you ask for that? Did you remember ever thinking to yourself “damn, my 1080p movies are sharp, but I want to really feel the action”? No, and that’s why 3D is gimmicky garbage.
Nintendo is jumping on the 3D bandwagon by releasing an updated version of their DS mobile games console, aptly called the 3DS. Surely our mobile phones need to catch up, right? Enter NVIDIA, who has years of expertise making graphics chips. They want a piece of the rapidly growing smartphone space and it’s why they created Tegra 2, by far the single fastest mobile processor out there thanks to the combination of two ARM Cortex A9 processors and an NVIDIA GPU. Well now there’s word that the firm is going to make a 3D version of the Tegra 2, aptly called the Tegra 2 3D, so that we can all enjoy squinting at our screens, getting headaches, and feeling superior to our friends because we own the latest gizmo, despite it not being any better than the gizmos companies sold last year.
Got to love gimmicky garbage.
[Via: Engadget]