5 things we take for granted today that weren’t possible 10 years ago

To put this article into perspective, try and think back to what you were doing 10 years ago. Then think about what gadgets you used, and the capability that those gadgets had. I was about to take my GCSEs and had just set up my profile on the very newly released Facebook. I had a Blackberry and I used BBM. Steve Jobs was just getting started and hadn’t quite taken over the world yet and Tony Blair was Prime Minister (!).

Now, the world moves at a different pace. New stuff is released on an almost daily basis, and each time it’s bigger and better than the last release. We then become accustomed to having everything at the click of a finger and readily available to us at any and all points of the day. We’re all guilty of becoming spoilt by technology and in turn taking these incredible things for granted. So to bring you back with a bang, these are the things we’re pretty sure you’d be stumped without.

Can you imagine a world where you couldn’t just arrive to the right tube station and input your address into Citymapper and be told exactly how many miles it will take you, how many calories you’ll burn and what percentage of your daily recommended walking distance you’ll cover? What about a world where you had to change to three different tube lines and didn’t get told the exact section of the tube that you should sit in to make the whole journey just that bit smoother?

Believe it or not, the first generation iPhone didn’t come out until 2007. That year, Steve Jobs announced that the goal for Apple was that the iPhone would make up approximately 1% of the worldwide cellphone market. Now, it makes up for somewhere between 20% and 40% of the market. In March 2015, 700 million people worldwide owned an iPhone. Can you imagine a life without yours? A life where your phone couldn’t practically manage your personal and business life? Yes, the screen cracks easily and yes, the battery life is dire. But can you genuinely imagine being separated from your iPhone?

I had a pretty vivid and extreme imagination when I was younger, and pictured 2016 being filled with flying cars and with robots in every home. With rumours of a drone that can fly humans potentially released in the next few years and the first at-home robot coming out this year, those dreams may soon be coming a reality – but not before drones take over the sky. Amazon is this year releasing Prime Air, where any package you order can be delivered within 30 minutes by a flying machine and all of the best videos and photos are now mostly always taken on a drone.

I don’t know about you, but the online banking app is a genuine lifesaver. Imagine having to go into an actual bank and talking to an actual person when you wanted to check your balance or to transfer even the tiniest amount into a friends account? There’s no question that banks will never become redundant, but the advent of the iPhone, the app store and online banking apps has certainly changed the way we bank for good – and we can’t ever imagine going back.

The advent of electronic maps has meant a lot of things for the world and although one of those may be a generation of people who struggle to read an actual paper map, it’s hard to imagine arriving in a foreign country without being able to input any address you like into your phone and get going at the click of a button. The app serves 5 billion requests a week – and if that’s not a stat to blow your mind, we don’t know what is.

All images from Google