One slab of glass ate the whole drawer
Count what a SMARTPHONE replaced and the number gets silly. A CAMERA, a music player, a CALCULATOR, a road atlas, a torch, an alarm clock, a voice recorder, a phone — eight objects that all had to be bought, carried and charged separately, now one rectangle that fits in a back pocket. Nothing else has swallowed so many products so fast.
It did not start small. Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile call in April 1973, on a Motorola prototype that weighed over a kilogram and gave about half an hour of talk time for ten hours of charging. And the pocket CALCULATOR, when it arrived a couple of years earlier, cost several weeks' wages. Both are now things you would struggle to give away.
What the phone has not swallowed is just as revealing. A games CONSOLE and its GAMEPAD survive because thumbs want real buttons. HEADPHONES and a SOUNDBAR survive because moving air properly needs something bigger than a phone. A PROJECTOR survives because no pocket screen will ever throw an image across a room. Convergence stops wherever physics or the shape of a hand gets in the way.
Why the remote is still called a clicker
Older relatives call the REMOTE a clicker, and there is a proper reason. Zenith's Space Command, sold from 1956, had no battery and no electronics in the handset at all: pressing a button struck a small aluminium rod, which rang at a pitch too high to hear properly but produced an audible click, and the television listened for the tone. The name outlived the mechanism by seventy years.
Names like that are scattered through the drawer. A STYLUS borrows its name from the Roman writing tool; a JOYSTICK started life in early aircraft; a DASHCAM is simply a CAMERA that never stops watching the road. Working out what a device is named after is a surprisingly good way to work out what it does.
Smart means it talks to the others
When a gadget is sold as 'smart', it almost always means one thing: it has joined a network and can be reached from elsewhere. Kevin Ashton coined the phrase 'Internet of Things' for this in 1999, and it is now how a THERMOSTAT learns your routine and warms the house before you get home, and how a DOORBELL shows a caller on your phone while you are two hundred miles away.
The engineering squeezed into the small ones is the genuinely impressive part. A pair of EARBUDS holds a battery, a MICROPHONE, a wireless radio, a tiny amplifier and a processor inside something lighter than a coin — and does it twice, once per ear, while staying in sync. Pulling a device apart in your head, asking what it must contain to do what it does, is the useful habit here: a POWERBANK is a battery with a socket, a SOUNDBAR is several SPEAKER units in a line, an EREADER is a screen that only redraws when the page turns.