>'Am I the one in a bubble here or are the writers of this article in some strange feedback loop?'
It's not just these writers...
When's the last time you saw something that wasn't described as beautiful or revolutionary? You know it's bad when Silicon Valley spends an entire scene on the breathless "change the world" superlatives of startup culture [1].
I don't think you're the one living in a bubble. Tech journalists of all kinds tend to surround themselves with other tech journalists, and generalize their tastes/experiences across the entire population.
Well fuck, why wasn't I invited to the revolution?
Journalists should know better than throwing around weasel phrases like these. Consumer devices like the Pencil are outside the scope of interest, let alone work, of most hardware and embedded software engineers, and it has changed exactly nothing about the field in general, thus hardly making it "revolutionary".
For this blog post, although a journalist (in training) may have written it, it is on the firstround blog and the purpose appears to be both educating companies that first round invests in as well as getting traffic which can bring first round investment prospects. Hence the link bait title "software is eating hardware". Made me take a look. Simply "lessons for building magical devices" wouldn't have.
I'm not seeing any attribution at all as far as who put together this post, could have been a summer intern. Hard to believe (because of no attribution) that it's anyone at first round of any significance.
Edit: Just saw carbocations comment re: bylines below.
The author and the technology/finance circle jerk he feeds off are most definitely conspiring to put the reader in their bubble. The only thing bubble based software is eating is available capital, which could be used to research and develop more robust, long term solutions by advancing hardware and software together.
After going to their page, I see a carpenter's pencil made for tablets. I don't get the beautiful part. Carpenter's pencils always felt like crud in my hand.
It is? Am I the one in a bubble here or are the writers of this article in some strange feedback loop?