How Close Are We To The 2015 Of Back To The Future?
2. Where Are The Smartphones?
One of the most glaring omissions from BTTF is the obvious lack of smartphones, or even mobile phones of any sort. They even, rather sweetly, have Marty use a payphone at one point. Well you know, fair enough, you cant predict everything apart from the fact that the mobile phone was definitely a thing in 1989 when the film was made. Motorola had already produced the first proto-mobile phone way back in 73 and the Motorola MicroTAC, by all accounts a modern mobile phone, was on the shelves in the same year as the films release. The 2015 of BTTF isnt completely offline though and does feature video calling. Perhaps they thought that we would have already moved on from making audio-only calls like a bunch of peasants by now and, to be fair, theyre not completely wrong considering that we could be a year or so away from being able to Facetime from our goddamn watches for gods sake. However, maybe we're just caught up in our own technology just like the makers of BTTF, but a future without something that looks even remotely like a smartphone doesn't seem likely to happen for some time.
