What’s next?

3-setting seat control: warm, hot, sear.

Products often tout “New!” and “Improved!” versions of themselves. It’s the nature of marketing and commerce to always look for the next new thing to bring in revenue.

My nature is to favor reliable go-to products—things I consider tried and true. Even so, I find myself smitten by things I never knew I wanted and now don’t want to be without.

My car is a prime example.

• I once laughed at heated seats. “I don’t drive naked, so why would I need them?” Now I know. They feel wonderful, especially on chilly days.
• Heads-up display? Brilliant! I didn’t know this existed until I test-drove my late-model car. The information I want to see is projected onto my windshield. I can keep my eyes on the road and still have in my line of sight info on speed, navigation directions, and radio station.
• Mastering the stick shift is a badge of honor, but I’ll take hill hold assist every time. Now there's no reason not to drive a manual transmission car. Hill hold adds the few seconds needed to go from brake pedal to gas, without fear of rolling backward when stopped on an uphill.   

Less technically oriented innovations have also captured my loyalty. Take Greek yogurt, for example. I used to live on the regular kind, with lots of sweet fruit filling on the bottom. But one bite of the creamier, protein-packed, and tastier Greek variety, and I switched for good. Most mornings I share a spoonful with the cat, who also is hooked.

I’ll share one final discovery, this one mine. Like many eureka moments, it was accidental. I woke a little groggy one morning and began pouring a glass of vanilla soy milk when I really wanted orange juice. So I decided to top off the milk with OJ and, voilà, I now had a Creamsicle. What could be better than mixing two tried-and-true beverages to create something even better.

No one would ever accuse me of being an early adopter of New! Improved! things. But once I stumble upon the next thing I really like, I can be the most loyal of customers.

How did they know?

We may think we’re seeing pretty amazing new stuff these days, but there are fingerprints of the past on everything.

The question is: How did “they” know? Was it precognition…connecting dots…reading tea leaves.

• In “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” by William Gibson, Colin Laney uses “bulky, old-fashioned eyephones” to view streams of Internet data. Eyephones? More than an iPhone, think Google Glass – but a generation of Google Glass not even possible today.
  [This book was first published in 1999.]

• “I will follow you. Will you follow me?”
  Well before Twitter cemented a superficial social-media context to this exchange, it was a romantic expression and pledge of faith. “Follow You Follow Me” was a hit single for the British rock band Genesis in 1978.

• Wearable tech is supposed to be the next big thing, with the Apple iWatch and with Sony and other smart watches. But watches with some form of smarts have been around for decades. Seiko has several brands that, back in 1982, began to smarten up with data storage, docks and thermal printers, and memory slots. There was even a 1982 Seiko TV watch that was smart enough to allow viewers to see live broadcast TV (albeit on a teeny LCD screen on the watch face.)
   

Maybe there’s truth to the saying “everything old is new again.”

Only this time, the new stuff seems to be much, much cooler.