There's definitely a big divide between tech levels and production abilities between prior editions and 4e that wasn't explained. Lost tech is still lost tech and has to go through the same reintegration period when it's rediscovered. People are use to using what they have. It would be like switching back to the original keyboard setup instead of using the QWERTY setup (I can't think of the name at the moment). By all studies it's faster and we don't have to worry about jamming up our keyboards by typing too fast, but no one's using them... Change is slow and sometimes never happens! Roll-up keyboards have been around since the early 90's, but there isn't a demand for them. They've been using the tech more recently to make keyboards thinner.
You have to remember that people that wanted matrix access walked around carrying their phones, cyber decks, and all the other accessories they wanted. Now commlinks include the previous stuff, but also the equivalent of rc decks, signal boosters (previously a kilo per increase and requiring an external power source), satellite dishes, and a bunch of other things that were shrunk overnight into a single package that's phone sized. Don't get me wrong this new tech fixed some glaring gaming problems, but it really wasn't explained.
Compare the Fairlight Excalibur cyberdeck @ 1,500,000¥ vs the Fairlight Caliban commlink @ 8,000¥, 9,500¥ with the high-end stock OS, the low end mass-produced deck was still 14,000¥. If the Excalibur were still being sold a decade later I'd expect a lower price, but not that low, and the Caliban has all the perks of the older model plus all this new tech. There's a huge unexplained gap in production ability or so I would guess (and ¥ possibly appreciated a lot) for this package to be this small and this cheap.
You could insert a deck into your head at the cost of 1.9-3.5 essence, not including all the goodies you would normally tack on vs the 0.2 essence for a commlink (by those number the commlink is ~10-18 times smaller than a cyberdeck).
Electric and Ethanol aren't leaps forward in efficiency, new tech was explored and it benefited other fields more than the intended areas. Ethanol will always be the cheaper, less powerful little brother. Whereas electric isn't disposable or recyclable, isn't as safe, jaws of life can't be used on the car, you can be electrocuted more easily than you would think when under the hood, they have the nickname of 'road flares' because if something happens in the battery compartment the car will be a pile of molten slag in under two minutes (there are plenty of records of it happening in fender benders), and it has a larger footprint than petroleum based cars. They don't sell like they should to be sustainable in business models, they're purely a political statement (and manufacturers make their money back through political deals). The company that was selling the cool electric cars back in the 90's, they could do 200 MPH, went belly up before the turn of the millennium (they were all over Popular Science magazine back then).
There's a lot of factors involved and I would love for a multifaceted back story on how all this came to be... Or is this like when you turn on the new season of your favorite tv show to find the all the characters have different actors playing them and there's changes to the back story (previous seasons) to play to the new actors strengths...
I understand that the guys in charge of SR weren't necessarily the same group when 4e was being brewed... Are there any insights from the current El Jefe('s) on this topic?
