While SSDs have been around for a while, they have only been commercially viable (for both home and enterprise use) for maybe 10-15 years.
Today, even a 300 dollar desktop 3d printer (especially a resin printer) will beat even the best industrial printers from just a decade ago.
For less than 50 bucks per month I can get an internet connection at home that’s 16000 times faster than what I had in 2004. Back then, I had to wait minutes to load a single photo, today I can stream three dozen 4k videos at once and still have bandwidth to spare.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated vaccine research a lot. We finally got mRNA vaccines to work and are now applying them to other diseases as well.
Ten years ago, the idea of fully reusing rockets was laughed at. The first time a first stage was reused was in 2017. Today, most new rocket designs are planned as fully or at least mostly reusable.+
First mass market VR headsets came out in 2012. We are are just now at a point where untethered headsets are reaching usable resolution and framerate. New headsets add features like eye tracking, finger tracking, external cameras for augmented reality…
And those are big changes, but consider some of the changes from 1994-2014:
Laptops went from a premium item for classy business people to a common household item
most households didn’t even have an internet connection in 1994, in 2014 most households had broadband
wifi
the birth of online commerce
the birth of social media
literally Google
we went from CD Players to iPods to having all the functionality of an iPod in everyone’s phone, to streaming any music we want from cloud-based services
we saw the birth and (relative) death of internet radio
while we’re on that topic, podcasts came into existence
we went from independent video stores to Blockbuster to Netflix DVD to Netflix streaming and Hulu as a competitor
furthermore, video streaming over the internet did not exist in 1994. Hell, we hadn’t even started pirating music online at scale yet. You still had to record the radio with a cassette deck in '94.
video games went from SNES and Genesis to PS4, XBOne, and WiiU. We’re talking Super Metroid vs Dark Souls II, or for handhelds, compare the Gameboy/Game Gear to the PS Vita/3DS. If you look at 2004 vs 2024 you’d be looking at KOTOR vs Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s a much smaller contrast. Likewise if you look at 1984 vs 2004 it’d be from King’s Quest I to Halo 2. And just for fun, 1974 to 1994 would be dnd to Final Fantasy VI
hybrid cars were invented
hydrogen fuel cell powered busses came into existence
video calls went from highly expensive, borderline sci-fi (see, e.g. Back To The Future Part II and the Pokemon anime) to being built into peoples’ smartphones, tablets and laptops
You may be looking at the wrong things then:
And so on…
And those are big changes, but consider some of the changes from 1994-2014:
Ten years ago the falcon 9 was running flights to the ISS. 9 years ago was the first successful booster landing.