#but i want for them to be somewhat optimised for current pc system

[unsettlingcreature]

i'm not going to tag the person because i know this is me being an angry little thing and i just want to get feelings out rather than start beef BUT. I just saw someone compare the towns in BG3 to the towns in Morrowind AND Oblivion AND Skyrim, saying that BG3 towns feel like real towns and i just-

okay, first of all, those three games were all originally made over a decade ago. morrowind was over two decades ago. we cannot, in good faith, compare the games properly, not just because of their age but because the games are trying to do different things.

that aside, if we WERE to compare them. all three of those games were originally made for older systems, that typically did not have the same amount of juice that current computers have. additionally, they had to be compatible with consoles. in order for the games to run somewhat decently (at least by bethesda's gloriously buggy standards) and with the technology they had available at the time, it was probably impossible to make a game with even ONE town that compared to how busy and lively they are in BG3.

and then they tried to pull enderal into the comparison, saying it sort of makes the towns feel better like, yeah! because enderal didn't have to release on consoles or be optimised for low-end PCs! the computer I used when enderal first released would CHUG for enderal on the lowest quality settings compared to skyrim.

i'm- ouuuurrrgghhhhhhhhhh- we don't have to compare baldurs gate three to every video game in existence blease im begging u

[residentevil2remake]

still waiting on capcom to release a classic RE collection or something...

[entergamingxp]

Xbox Series X development chief Jason Ronald on power, price and that new boot screen • Eurogamer.net

Jason Ronald’s job title is partner director of program management for the Xbox platform team, but what that somewhat robotic label boils down to is he’s leading development of the Xbox Series X, Microsoft’s next-generation console due out in time for Christmas 2020. He’s played a key role in the making of the Xbox Series X, from the beginning to the present, its hardware to its software. Nobody knows Xbox Series X like Jason Ronald.

Ahead of Microsoft’s reveal of some of the third-party games coming to the system, we had an extensive chat with Ronald to quiz him on everything from power to price, from concern over Xbox Series X games being constrained by having to work on the lowest common denominator (Xbox One), to the creation of the Xbox Series X’s shiny new boot screen itself.

You have talked about obviously more powerful visuals for games, ray tracing, virtually instant loading. But does the Xbox Series X enable any sort of gameplay innovations we haven’t seen before or are not possible on any other platforms?

Jason Ronald, partner director of program management for the Xbox platform team.

Jason Ronald: The answer is kind of yes across the board. Obviously, with all the advances we have in GPU power and GPU efficiency, not only is it the raw power, but it’s also the innovations on top of that, things like ray tracing for better lighting, better reflections, higher quality shadows, as well as more immersive audio experiences. You also have things like variable rate shading. Beyond the raw power we’re delivering, we’re giving developers a lot of tools to be that much more efficient in how they use the power we’re giving them.

But the real game changers from a gameplay and a game design perspective are actually on the CPU on the IO (data transfer speed) side. Today’s current generation titles often are bottlenecked on the CPU on the IO side, and it’s really constraining what you do as a game designer. And sometimes you have to arbitrarily change your creative vision to work within the constraints. But as you think about things like more and more open world games, more living, dynamic universes that players spend time in, we wanted to remove the technology barriers and enable developers to do super creative things. And really, that innovation is going to be on the CPU on the IO side. The CPU on the IO sides are also the areas that are usually least scalable from a game engine perspective.

So it was important to invest heavily there. For example, the introduction of the NVMe SSD as part of the Xbox velocity architecture. We designed the Xbox velocity architecture to be the ultimate solution for game asset streaming. And it works as an effective memory multiplier beyond the physical memory that’s in the box because we have such superfast IO speeds, that there are entire classes of assets you don’t even need to load into memory until just before you need them. So it opens up a whole swath of new capabilities for game developers.

In The Medium, as an example, there are certain things they are doing in that game, that they’ve had these ideas for many, many years, but it’s just the technology was that barrier for them. And now with this next generation, those barriers don’t exist. So they’re able to provide true transformative gameplay experiences you would never be able to do on current generation or older generation consoles, because the technology was not at a point that allowed them to deliver on that.

Microsoft has talked about the framerates Series X will enable. But are you saying the Xbox Series X effectively ends sub 60 frames per second games, either from Xbox itself or from third parties?

Jason Ronald: I wouldn’t say it ends it, but now the creative control is in the developers’ hands. Ultimately, we view resolution and framerate as a creative decision. Sometimes, from a pure gameplay aspect, 30 is the right creative decision they can make. But in previous generations, sometimes you had to sacrifice framerate for resolution. With this next generation, now it’s completely within the developers’ control. And even if you’re building a competitive game, or an esports game, or a twitch fighter or first-person shooter, 60 frames is not the ceiling anymore. As we’ve seen on PC and other ecosystems, ultra high framerates and ultra low latency input, that is the precision they prefer to prioritise. So we’ve designed the system to put that creative control in developers hands.

Everything you’ve talked about makes the Xbox Series X sound incredibly powerful for a console, but I wince when I think about how much it’s going to cost. What should people expect?

Jason Ronald: I think Phil [Spencer]’s been pretty transparent. We designed the system with a price point in mind. We’re confident in the system we’ve designed, but at the same time, we’re going to be agile on price.

The short of it is we designed the system with a price point in mind, and it influenced the overall architecture of the system we have. You know, it’s kind of funny – as a lifelong gamer and as a game developer, we all always want more and more and more. At the same time, we know we have to deliver something at a compelling price point people all across the world are comfortable with and can afford. So it has been a key into the design of the system. And to be blunt, we’re pretty excited about what we put into that form factor.

You’ll have Xbox Series X for Christmas. What does this mean for Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox One X, and potentially even even more consoles? Aren’t you creating a confusing offering for consumers? Will you discontinue any models to make the proposition clearer? What’s your attitude running into the crucial Christmas period for that?

Jason Ronald: It’ll become more clear as we get closer to launch. We don’t think we’re going to have a confusing SKU offering. But at the same time, we have tens of millions of people who have Xbox One consoles today. And we understand not everybody is going to choose to upgrade to the next generation immediately. We still have millions of players playing on Xbox 360 today as well. So what’s important to us is we continue to support those ecosystems. Game developers will also continue to support both Xbox One and the Xbox Series X.

You know, I actually have both generations of consoles in my house. And it’s important to me I can continue to play the games I want with the people I want on the devices I want. So I don’t think it’ll be a confusing SKU lineup or customer confusion. It’s really about making sure our players have choice, and for our existing players, we provide an easy path for them to move forward if they choose to.

Given the fact all of your Xbox Series X games must work on a base Xbox One, does that not mean games will be hampered when it comes to design or fidelity because developers will have to develop to the lowest common denominator?

Jason Ronald: Ultimately, that’s a developer choice. And to be clear, there will be titles that are unique or exclusive to the Xbox Series X generation. The Medium is a great example of that. But ultimately, this is going to be a choice each developer is going to have to make. And in some cases, they will choose to make games that are exclusive to the next generation.

The exact same tools you use to build a game on Xbox Series X, are the exact same tools you use to build a game on Xbox One, or on PC. So we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for developers to ship their game across multiple devices, but then also to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the specific device that they’re on.

As an example, you might have ray tracing enabled on the Xbox Series X optimised version of the game, but you don’t have it enabled on the Xbox One version of the game. Or, you might have improved gaming experiences in some areas, and in other areas, you may choose to keep them the same. So I don’t view it as a lowest common denominator. I view it as giving developers the tools they need to build the best gaming experience possible and developers are incentivised to make a great gaming experience for their players just like we are. It’s about finding that right balance.

I know third parties can decide to release games exclusive on Xbox Series X. But what about your own games? Take Halo Infinite for example. This is a game that works on a base Xbox One right up through to Xbox Series X. Obviously it’ll look and perform better on Xbox Series X. But how can it have meaningful gameplay and design features that take advantage of what’s possible in Xbox Series X when you have to make it work on a base Xbox One in fundamentally the same way?

Jason Ronald: In some ways, it’s no different than some of the things we’ve been doing over the last couple of years with PC. We’re focused on reaching the largest audience of players possible. And developers have a whole series of good techniques, whether it’s things like dynamic resolution scaling as an example, that make it easier to scale up and scale down. Sometimes you’ll have features that are exclusive to one device versus another.

All of these devices are shared from an Xbox Live perspective. So making sure people have great communities to play with, whether it’s PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, we’re giving developers the capability to have things that work similarly across generations, and that then lean into the unique capabilities of one form factor versus another.

What we’ve seen so far from both our first-party studios as well as third-party studios is they actually prefer this level of flexibility, because they know how to tailor their experience to provide that best experience for the player.

Now the specs of both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are out in the open, how do you feel about the direct comparison?

Jason Ronald: To be honest, we’ve always been super proud of what we’ve designed and built. Seeing some of the early results from developers… like we’re really blown away by what we’re seeing even at this early stage.

The thing that’s most exciting is to see where this generation goes over the next three, five, seven, and 10 years. Because that’s the thing: when you design and build a hardware platform, and a new console generation, you are setting the direction for the next decade of games. So what we’re seeing so far at these early stages, we’re super excited. And they’re blowing us away. And I think it’s gonna go even further as we get further into the generation.

From your perspective, how important is the teraflop debate, which I assume you’re enjoying at the moment?

Jason Ronald: To me, it’s about the end-to-end performance of the system. It’s not one aspect versus another. What was critically important to us was sustained levels of performance, unlike anything you’ve seen before. And we designed the system to be a well balanced system with no bottlenecks or no compromises in any area… whether it’s the CPU performance or the GPU performance – we were at the upper bounds of what was capable with a traditional rotational drive, so we knew we had to invest in things like SSD level IO performance. We designed the Xbox velocity architecture to be the ultimate solution for asset streaming.

What it comes down to is innovation and the integration between hardware and software. Look at something like the velocity architecture. That’s a combination of the NVMe SSD, a dedicated hardware decompression block, a new file system API called Direct Storage, and then new innovation even on top of that called Sampler Feedback Streaming, which is what allows us to have an effective memory multiplier beyond what’s in the physical memory. You also look at something like Variable Rate Shading. Not only do we have 12 teraflops of GPU power, but developers can be that much more efficient in how they use it. They can actually deliver results even beyond the raw teraflops that are in the box.

So to me it’s more about how the system’s used and the integration of hardware and software that will define what’s possible in this next generation.

One of my biggest frustrations with the current generation of consoles is enormous and frequent download updates. I’m a big Call of Duty fan, and I’m constantly downloading massive updates to that game, which have effectively turned my console into my Call of Duty player. Is there anything about the Xbox Series X that mitigates that, or is that an impossible thing to do?

Jason Ronald: There is no single silver bullet that just makes games inherently smaller. But everything from the compression technologies we leverage, that actually allows the disc footprint and the amount of data you need to download to be smaller. We also give developers a lot of tools so they can be more intelligent about what assets get installed, and when. As an example, if you’re on a console that is set to English, do I need to download the French and the Spanish audio assets or the cutscenes?

Also, two years ago now we also introduced a technology called Fast Start, where we can use machine learning to understand what assets are being used and how often they’re being used, so we on the platform side can be more intelligent about what bits we install and when.

It is top of mind for us. It’s something we work closely with all the industry middleware companies, as well as developers on, and then we provide a whole series of tools to help them drive the size of those games down not only to minimise the amount of content you need to download, but also the overall size on the actual footprint on disc.

It’s definitely a challenge. It’s definitely something we work hard on. But there’s no easy button that just magically makes everything smaller. What we don’t want to do is limit these amazing worlds and universes the game developers create. We just need to give them the tools to be able to make the right trade offs.

With Xbox Series X, do you have any file size or installation footprint limits you dictate to developers or even first-party studios to try to keep those down? Or are developers free to have their file sizes as big as they want?

Jason Ronald: Ultimately, we don’t constrain it. The player experience dictates some of this stuff. How large is the game? How quickly can I get in there? How often do I take updates? How big are those updates?

We don’t arbitrarily constrain the sizes, but players have made it clear, hey, here’s what I’m willing to accept, and here’s what I’m not willing to accept. Those things change over time. So once again, it’s about providing the flexibility so we can be as sensitive as possible to players’ bandwidth and hard drive sizes, so people get a great gaming experience without unnecessarily using more data or using more storage than they need to.

Can you confirm if that’s the Xbox Series X boot sequence you just put this week?

Jason Ronald: I can confirm that is the Xbox boot animation.

Can you talk a bit about what you were going for with it? I think it’s more chill than the Xbox One boot screen!

Jason Ronald: It’s kind of funny you say chill! The word we used as we were developing it was elegant… premium. It’s always an interesting part, because this is a new console generation. I love it. I’ve obviously been looking at it for quite a long time. It feels great when I turn on my Xbox Series X, and I actually get that moment.

How long did it need to be?

Jason Ronald: Ironically, this was one of the interesting design challenges we had. The Xbox Series X boots so fast there was an open question of how long does that boot animation need to be?

I will say it took a lot of iteration to figure out exactly what the right length was. Ultimately, what the console is doing is it’s just booting. But it is quite funny – the design challenge of the console is so fast, we had to think uniquely, because we don’t want to arbitrarily slow the console down. How do I build a boot animation for something that boots as fast as the console does?

It’s funny – maybe the first time I played a game was on the Xbox Series X, and I don’t even realise the game has load screens until I play it on a current generation console.

I can’t imagine playing a game with no load times. Are you seriously saying that this is the end of loading?

Jason Ronald: You can never say the complete end of loading. But what I will say is, one of the key design principles we had is we wanted to remove all friction from the player’s experience. How quickly does the console boot? How quickly can I get in a game? When I’m in a game experience, how do I make sure fast travel systems are actually fast and not just kind of like teleporting and then I get loading screens and stuff like that?

It’s going to be interesting to see how developers take full advantage of these new capabilities. Because many of the games we’re testing internally right now, were never designed for a system at the performance level that it has. So as you start thinking about games that are designed truly uniquely for these capabilities, I will just share that we’ve seen some things I did not even think were possible. I’ve seen these up and running already at the early stage of the console generation.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/xbox-series-x-development-chief-jason-ronald-on-power-price-and-that-new-boot-screen-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=xbox-series-x-development-chief-jason-ronald-on-power-price-and-that-new-boot-screen-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[fuzz1912]

An iPod. A phone.

Ten years ago, I had the random luck of landing in New York at 6pm on June 29. Something else was happening at that time, and I wasn’t about to let the opportunity to be a part of it pass me by.

Other than being an Apple fanboy for years, I was (and still am) a tragic early adopter with a firm belief in the potential for technology to simplify and enhance our lives. Back in that PC-centric world, this translated to faith in what Steve Jobs described as the ‘digital hub’ - having a (likely desktop) computer be the central repository for your communications (email), documents, photos, music and movies, connected to other satellite devices such as a phone, laptop, camera, music player (ahem, iPod) and video camera feeding them content. It was a remarkably clear and tidy vision allowing a true digital library of your life at your fingertips (provided you were seated in front of your computer), however it relied on one being able to have any or all of those devices available to you when you wanted to acquire that content.

That’s a lot of devices to carry around, and pockets / bags have limited space within. I recall my daily morning routine of putting my phone, keys, wallet and iPod carefully in my pockets to minimise bulge, packing my laptop and sometimes camera (and, very rarely when travelling, video camera) in my bag, and feeling like I had everything I needed at my disposal (while hoping that nothing fell out or was stolen). And of course, the devices in your bag (and the ones left behind) were never easily accessible or useful, being large and unwieldy to carry on their own or together.

Email was simply inaccessible without a laptop and WiFi. Blackberries were a novelty at the time and the preserve of high-powered executives and consultants - even as someone then working in a corporate environment, only the most senior members of my firm carried them. Some particularly adventurous individuals had digital personal organisers called PalmPilots to store their contacts and calendars, but these were of little use beyond that. I’d been working at a conference a few years earlier when I observed many of the participants carrying around small PalmPilot-like devices called iPAQs that hooked up to WiFi gave them access to their conference schedules as well as their emails. I thought this was the bees knees, and couldn’t wait to see this technology filter down to the consumer market. 

The hottest things in mobile phone technology back then were polyphonic ringtones, stamp sized photos sent through MMS, and the devices getting smaller. Despite being around for some time in Australia, apparently texting through SMS was only just becoming widespread in the US - but of course was stunted by its 160 character limit (hmm, why does that seem familiar?). You’d type a text through the muscle memory of knowing how many times to press a number on the pad to toggle a particular character - and wait a few seconds if consecutive characters were assigned to the same number. The manual process of entering contacts was laborious and repetitive, especially when changing devices or SIM cards, as there was no easy way to transfer them.

Eventually, HP and other vendors started offering devices (‘Pocket PCs’) like the ones I’d seen at the conference to consumers, at fairly astronomical prices. Some had WiFi included thanks to horrendously large antennae, while others required the purchase of a separate SD card for connectivity. Most shipped with the ironically-named Windows Mobile and required a stylus and an abstract Palm-esque character system for handwriting recognition (or an absolutely tiny software keyboard that needed to be prodded by said stylus). Due to the limits of this character recognition and the resistive screens of these devices, this experience was fraught with errors and inaccuracies. Other devices had large Blackberry-style physical keyboards requiring a similar symphony of thumb presses, this time somewhat resembling the experience of using a regular keyboard but with greater potential for RSI. Palm had such a product called the Treo, as did Motorola (then-known for its extremely popular slim flip-phone, the RAZR, and less so for its clunky iTunes Phone, the ROKR) with the Q.

In 2005, once Pocket PCs finally started to incorporate a mobile phone as well, I saved up and splurged on what I thought to be one of the most elegant - the i-mate JAM. About the size of the original iPod, it was compact but with a then-decent sized screen. Its ability to recognise one abstractly-scribbled word at a time felt like a revelation, and turned the one-character-at-a-time experience of texting and writing emails into something slightly more fluid. Of course, emailing and web-browsing were limited by the need for WiFi (and I did buy one of those silly SD cards for occasional use) and the awful and very rare mobile-optimised websites (the ‘baby web’ as Steve Jobs would go on to call it). I could get useful information such as weather forecasts, but only occasionally when hooked up to WiFi through that card - forget about getting anything useful through 2G GPRS data - or download a bunch of information at a time when syncing to my computer (clunky though it was, given it ran Windows and I used a Mac). But the fact that it did sync to my computer at all, and provided all (well, most) of my contacts when I needed them felt incredibly useful - instead of having to repeatedly press a button to scroll through my contacts to make a call, I’d simply find it using my stylus. I’d occasionally even get by scribbling characters messily with my thumb or forefinger, but for most intents and purposes the stylus was the most effective method for input. 

Several years earlier, the iPod had stormed the market for portable music players and effectively killed portable CD players - despite lukewarm efforts by other manufacturers to build MP3 players or alternative technologies like MiniDisc. Ostensibly, the iPod triumphed over its competitors due to its straightforward ability to sync a library through iTunes, its non-removable hard drive for storage, as well as its simple user interface and click wheel - which, despite the steady addition of photos, videos and games, few people felt could be adapted for other purposes like a phone. At the same time, despite the ROKR flop, phones were starting to include the ability to store and play music - which posed a long-term existential threat to the iPod. Much as the hard-drive based iPod Mini was killed and replaced by the superior flash-based iPod Nano, so too would the iPod itself need to be replaced by a convergent product. Similarly, ‘3G’ phones were providing limited online walled-gardens where carriers would provide certain services or information, thereby also posing a threat to the nascent Pocket PC market as well.

I say all this because I was one of those people searching for the mythical ‘one device’ that would replace all of these others and surpass their various limitations. There had already been considerable talk and rumour-mongering of an ��iPod Phone’ which I hoped would come to pass eventually, but had no idea how soon that would be. In January 2007, I was utterly amazed to see Steve Jobs unveil just that: not just a better widescreen iPod with touch controls, not just a better mobile phone, and not just a more effective way to get information from the internet - but all three of those in one. Gone were both stylus and click wheel, replaced by a smooth capacitive touch interface that allowed you to use your always-available fingers to do everything you needed - and with barely any physical buttons, the entire screen was the phone, and the UI adapted to the needs of the specific app you were using. There was no physical keyboard simply because there was no need for one. This device was not just an iPod, a phone, or an internet communicator - it really was a computer in your pocket. 

It was the third part of the ‘device’ that spoke to me the most and I was surprised at how lukewarm its reception was at the time - being able to view whole web pages at a time and tap to zoom in on the content you were interested was absolutely mind-blowing (and now that it’s dead, we can forget the minor inconvenience of not being able to view battery-hogging Adobe Flash content). And add to that the fact that it also had maps and a limited type of GPS as well, so it could potentially also replace a Melway (our local street directory), printed directions or even those expensive in-car GPS systems. Unlike the Blackberry or even Pocket PCs before it, this was a smart phone that any consumer signing up to a telco contract could access - and to top it off, on a technological level it left those predecessors firmly in the dust. 

With that kind of tremendous change came a predictably hostile response from the incumbents and pundits, all of whom couldn’t grasp how such a device could have anything but niche appeal when it was so different to what success currently looked like and what they believed people then wanted out of their phones (see Steve Jobs’ later co-option of Wayne Gretzky’s line about skating to where the puck will be, not where it’s been). I, on the other hand, was a true believer, and wouldn’t be brought down by such negativity - even if it was reasonable or proved to be valid (happily for me, it wads neither). I was well and truly sold and, being unable to bear the anticipation of getting my hands on this game-changing device, skinned my JAM to resemble the iPhone interface and patiently waited to hear when we might be lucky enough to get an Australian release for the device - likely months or years down the track.

So you can imagine my excitement when by chance I was asked to chaperone my nephew on a vacation to New York that just happened to land on the day the iPhone was released (Modern Family’s Phil Dunphy had a similar description for how fate aligned the stars to make his birthday coincide with the release of the iPad several years later). We landed just as the doors would have opened at Fifth Avenue and the first lucky customers who had lined up days earlier would walk out with their shiny new toys. Despite the 20-odd hour journey, I pleaded with the relatives we were staying with to take me to the nearest Apple Store as soon as we unpacked. The last thing I wanted to do was go that far and find the product had sold out. Luckily, this was a mall store in Long Island, and I was completely shocked to find no queue, not that many people around, and plenty of stock sitting at the counter. It seemed not quite everyone was sold on the future just as yet. I did not hesitate, and walked out of there USD 600-odd lighter.

Of course many people then posed the obvious question to me: as an Australian, what good was a phone locked to a US carrier that couldn’t even be activated without signing up to a contract? I may have been blinded by my enthusiasm, but I wasn’t stupid about it - and luckily again, the particular circumstances surrounding the original iPhone conspired to make things work for me. Despite the lack of the ‘outright’ device purchasing model at that time in the US, the original iPhone had the carrier subsidy built into the contract, not the device itself - so while you did have to sign up to a two-year contract to use the phone, you did that after purchasing the phone at an ‘outright’ (not subsidised) price. So the sting in the tail was a USD 300 cancellation fee if you left prior to the end of the two years. Factoring this as a cost of purchasing a ‘widescreen iPod with touch controls’ and ‘breakthrough internet communicator’ I persuaded my relatives to take up then AT&T contract so that I could activate the device, and would reimburse them for the cancellation fee. But again luck struck - as the phone was effectively purchased at an unsubsidised price, the contract termination fee didn’t kick in until 30 days after purchase - so I got my device (without the phone) at its sticker price (and even better, would later be refunded USD 100 when Steve Jobs finally realised he’d ripped off all of us early adopters a little too much). When I finally made the pilgrimage to the Fifth Avenue store a few days later, I picked up another one for my (now) wife.

Using this ‘touch iPod’ (soon to be made redundant by an actual iPod Touch) during those early days was a total thrill, and completely surpassed the experience of using my not-very-old-but-ancient-feeling Pocket PC. The skeuomorphic ability to touch the device with your fingers and have it appear to respond in a physically consistent way was tremendous. Certainly it also had appeal as a novelty - its absence from the Australian market did result in quite a bit of interest from friends and onlookers after my return. I was somewhat surprised by the quality of the photographs it took, though not sufficiently to use it to regularly replace my point and shoot or DSLR. And it definitely became my full-time iPod, as the cover flow visuals and multitouch interface made up for its relatively modest 8GB storage. But, as if that weren’t enough, within a few months enterprising hackers had found the Death Star's weakness, and exploited it to allow people to jailbreak the iPhone and unlock it from its Apple and AT&T shackles. While it was by no means the easiest or risk-free process and required a bit of technical know-how, thanks to some pretty detailed instructions published by said legends I was able to carefully work my way through them and fully unlock the phone - making it almost fully functional at home and allowing me to finally ditch my other mobile phone. Of course, our mobile telco plans were then still stuck in past as far as data, and I had to switch carriers to find a 'reasonable' plan that gave me a 'generous' allowance of 50MB/month (thanks Virgin Mobile!). But for the limited purposes of browsing and checking email in that data-lite era, this was still enough for the experience to be a revelation.

It's true that it wasn't until the iPhone 3G launched (and was finally made available in Australia as well) that the iPhone started to feel more like a mature product - and the local availability of the 3G obviated the need for the various workarounds and hacks I had to employ to make use of the original. Many of the features weren't really refined or perfected until the iPhone 4 or 5. A feature film was shot entirely on an iPhone 5S, and the capabilities of today's iPhone 7 (as well as the iPad, the iPhone's spiritual sibling, on which I’m typing this post) are drastically beyond what most people can fully utilise as they can store your entire (much larger) media library locally or access it through the cloud. Our phones now no longer look like they used to then - all modern phones and tablets still have the same basic form factor and layout as the 10 year old original iPhone, which truly felt like the opening of the technological floodgates and the start of an incredible paradigm shift. Of course, that shift has had many positive as well as negative consequences since - most notably, as a function of its widespread adoption, how we communicate with others, interact socially, and work outside the office - but that is always the way with (and cost of) progress. 

Today, a 'phone' truly can be the only thing you need to carry with you - as well as those original applications (phone, media, web), it's now commonly the only camera and video camera you'll use, the only (or most common) computer you'll use (with apps that can do almost anything you would have needed a desktop or laptop for), your car navigation, your wallet, even your keys. And all of that effectively started with Apple’s 'one device', ten years ago today.