postscript: Necessities We Can Do Without

Burlingame, Calif. -Charles Darwin would have had a field day with today's technology.

When he touched down in the Galapagos Islands in September 1835, Darwin scooped up a menagerie of finches, iguanas, rocks, plants and such. His data gathering was quick and dirty: He spent only nine days stuffing his crates with Galapagos samples and neglected to label them precisely. But he wound up with a powerful idea: Any species could mutate and evolve in response to their environmental conditions. Within the past few decades, other scientists have painstakingly documented how changing levels of food, water and other elements could cause finches to mutate in just a generation or two.

Technology, by contrast, mutates even more quickly, and we're adapting right along with it. The things we couldn't live or work without only a few years ago are now only valuable for their scrap metal. And get ready for more change. Think your laptop is essential? Guess again. Chances are that before long, you'll be tempted to give up that five-pounder for a nifty ultra-mini PC that slides into a satchel or your purse

In Pictures: 12 Necessities We Can Do Without

The managers of Xerox's famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center back in the 1970s were among the first to articulate what brought about spurts of innovation and change in technology: Pick the biggest "resource constraint"--or the most expensive component in a system--and imagine what would happen if that became virtually free. Once upon a time, transistors cost at least a few pennies apiece. Now Intel stuffs close to a trillion transistors onto a chip that sells for only a few hundred dollars. Remember when long-distance telephone calls were expensive? Voice-over-Internet Protocol has made those chats free too.

Those kinds of innovations have meant that the gear once considered essential can be scrapped. Ready to say goodbye to your old desk phone? Even your answering machine, once an absolutely essential element of modern life, is giving way to services that companies administer in the computing "cloud"--meaning that companies are willing to store your information in enormous computer farms that you'll never see and serve it up just when you need it.

Instead of paying for a word processing system, Google Docs will let you write files and save them into the great Google cloud, where you can collect them later or send them to others. Google has even added software that lets you synchronize your Google Docs on your laptop so that you can use them in places where a network doesn't yet reach--say, on a plane.

Semiconductors continue to stuff more electronics--and thus, more processing power--onto their chips. That means that the overall devices themselves can shrink. Apple's latest generations of iPods, for instance, can be even slimmer than the original because the company no longer needs to use even a tiny disk drive but can instead stuff all those digital songs and pictures into semiconductor chips.

Novel software applications can also help cut down on the number of devices that you need, or at least, that you need to manage. Many people who carry around a cellphone haven't quite given up their office phone or even their home phone. That means technology hasn't simplified their lives; it's just multiplied the number of machines they need to answer or check for messages. Here's where software can come in: The founders of GrandCentral, a Freemont, Calif.-based start-up that was acquired by Google in 2007, created a service that redirects calls from multiple phones to a single number. No matter which of your many numbers someone calls, the calls are redirected to one number. That means you only have to worry about one phone number--and one voice mail.

Other companies are trying to apply that kind of shrink mentality to software too. For instance, to find the location of a local coffee shop, you can go to your PC, pull up your Web browser, and in a half-dozen clicks or so on a search engine, you can find a nearby coffee shop. (It helps, of course, to know your own location.)

Mike McCue, who runs Mountain View, Calif.-based TellMe, now a division of Microsoft, thinks that's too many clicks. Instead, TellMe has been developing voice recognition software that uses global positioning technology to find locations. Here's how it works: Call TellMe and ask for a Starbucks. The service starts by figuring out where you are. Then it searches Web directories for what you want. Finally, it gives you a list and a map of the nearest Starbucks. No clicks involved.

From McCue's point of view, devices should have just one button--and no stacks of menus that you have page through. "You say what you want, and we'll get the information you need," McCue says.

And that's how you really reduce the number of gadgets that you once thought that you needed.