The media reports on science and technology is flawed, first at all reporters are ignorant, they have no idea about what they are speaking, they have never studied some scientific and many times are complicated subjects, if they have done they never should have been reporters.
In second place comes economical interests, you have a company and want to sell again a forgoten 30 years old product, you make again this product with a new case and name and then you call the reporters, you pay for this, this is not for free and then people watch in their TV the marvelous 21th technological revolution that exist in this products (nobody knows that is 30 years old.
In third place comes the politicians and politics, so you will be amazed, scared or whatever the goverment wants.

Advances do exist, people have new ideas and experiment them some has success other are a fracass, maybe 20 years later be a success or still continue to be a fracass, but in general real advances are very small and many times instead of advance, decadence happens.
What is happening today is that things are becoming more cheaper and so public can become aware of their existence, they think that is something new, but is old and the only difference is that they can purchase it now.
Things are becoming smaller just because is cheaper, a lot of people buy it and you can have a mass production.
I can design an electronic product, but if the sale volume is small (not popular product) the product will be made with discrete components, almost the same as 30 years ago and it will not be small. Until I have not enough demand it will be in this way. When I have a demand of 50,000 or more a month, I can put all the discrete components inside a chip, reduce its size and cost and produce it in China.
Computers are becoming cheaper and powerful, but are better that those 40 years ago? Yes and No.
40 years ago 100K of memory was a lot, it was big and very expensive, to add more 100K was almost economically impossible. Today add one more GB cost very little. WE have much more resources available and accessible to every one than had 40 years ago, also are thousands times more faster, but this is only consequenece of reduction in size and cost. Speed is inverse proportional to size. But today's computer architecture is better than 40 years ago? No!
Some years ago AMD introduced as a great technological advance 64 bits, but forty years ago computers were 64 or 48 bits....
Of course that are tecnological problems to be solved and were solved to reduce the size, there was the one micron barrier that was hard to solve some years ago, once solved, computers become smaller, faster and more powerful.
Today is another barrier, this time more difficult to solve: heat. Heat is proportional to speed that is inverse proportional to size. As more heat is needed to dissipate in a smaller are the heat problem increase with the square of speed, so don't expect to see much increase in speed next years. It's much easier to multiply the processors (cores) than increase its speed.
The other side is decadence: Software.
30 or 40 years ago the available resources were very small and computers slow too and many things were done with very few kilobytes, the software was very well done, efficient and fast.
Today is just the opposite, softwares are huge, very slow, inefficient and very badly done, all is compensated by a faster computer.
With every new Windows release you have a computer that is several times more faster and powerful, but the overall speed and performance remains the same, faster computer compensated by a worst software. Even with Vista Microsoft managed to make a computer top of line much slower than an older computer with an older Windows.

Stupidity also evolves!