Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
It all went downhill when the expectation of an always-on internet connection became the norm. That gave us:
- “Smart” appliances that have no business being connected to the internet
- “Smart” TVs that turned into billboards we pay to have in our homes
- Subscription everything as a service
- Massive zero-day patches for all manner of software / video games (remember when software companies had to actually release finished/working software? Pepperidge Farm remembers)
- Planned obsolescence and e-waste on steroids where devices only work with a cloud connection to the manufacturer’s servers or as long as the manufacturer is in business to keep a required app up to date
- Every piece of software seemingly sucking up all the data it can about you and feeding it back to the mothership so you can be profiled and sold to advertisers
- Pretty much everything Apple does is designed to further lock you into their ecosystem and/or remove a port that’s standard in order to pocket the savings and sell you a dongle for $29.99
- Dwindling / disappearing availability of physical media you effectively own forever in favor of digital libraries that you only have a flimsy license to access at the company’s whim (even though you “bought” the title for the same price it would have cost on physical media). Those have been ruled non-transferable (e.g. if you want to leave them to someone in your will) and the company going under leaves you with no rights or ability to get a refund or physical copy of things you supposedly bought but can no longer access.
Other than hardware getting more powerful and sometimes less expensive, every recent innovation has been used against us to take away the right to own, repair, and have any control over the tech we supposedly own.
Edits: I keep thinking of more things that annoy me lol.
I’m not sure about the touch displays on cars.
How long does a Chinese tablet last, 10, 12 years ? If you keep it safely stored and don’t drop it.
The things in cars seem to be even cheaper, they only use phone uPs designed to last no more than a few years. And they’re roasted in hot weather, frozen and shaken to bits.
Good luck finding one of them in a few years, assuming they can be taken out at all without ripping up the dash.
Kangoo 2014 gang checking in!
I also have knobs on my stovetop for heating my food thankyouverymuch.
I hate touch screens in general, so don’t get me started on how much I hate them in cars lol.
Not discounting anything you listed, but I overcome lots of this by being patient. I find it best to let the dust settle on everything now. I don’t even see new movies till like, the next year. Why be a beta tester for enshittification
One of the good things about the internet is you can watch videos about whatever the thing that you’re interested in is. Get your “fix”, and then patient-gamer it.
Before the net you had to actually buy the thing.
Same. Most of my media collection (TV series, movies, console video games) came from yard sales where I’d find the DVD/Blu-ray box sets for $10 or less. I’m just salty that streaming / digital distribution is chipping away at my frugal media habits lol.
And to force subscriptions, ads and tracking, the tech is getting more and more locked down.
Not just flashing phones and wifi routers, but you may not even watch high quality video, even though you’re paying a subscription if your device’s HW and SW don’t conform.If something gets discontinued, it’s not just that it may be unsafe to use or be too slow for modern use, no, look at cloud-managed network gear. The company decides it’s a paperweight, and it is. And this is going to just extend further.
Nah new tech is great. Flippers, steam decks, nano drones. Bluetooth was a joke a decade ago. Now we can do devices over wifi! Much of the tech from that era barely worked and was practically DIY levels of reliability. Rose colored glasses etc…
Which isn’t to say that somethings haven’t gotten outright shitty (M$, apple products, etc…). But widely, things are much much better. I think it depends how “mainstream” you are shopping. But if you were shopping “mainstream” then, it was just as shitty as it is today.
Tech has definitely become worse since megacorps killed the little guys & sucked the fun out of everything. Open source & self hosting is becoming/has become the only way. So glad I taught myself how to do it
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To quote one of my favorite authors:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
This is the answer.
This is the answer.
I beg to disagree. The answer is 42. The real issue being: to what question? :p
Fucking hell it’s true. This is exactly the kind of obscure nonsense I love, how did it take me 30 years to learn this?
That’s very cool
would be nice, but isn’t true according to Douglas Adams himself:
Inspiration for the number 42
Douglas Adams revealed the reason why he chose forty-two in this message .
“It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’”.
personally, i think it’s way funnier that it is actually, completely, deliberately meaningless ;)
What about things that are invented when I’m younger than 15?
Man, the toys invented around that time are the best… But that’s probably all you’re really paying attention to at that point.
And for kids now? Well they have things like Skibidi Toilet to keep them occupied.
But for a more serious answer I think that’s when they’re in their most creative mindset and everything is new to them and they’re learning how things work.
Obviously the exact age at which someone starts to take an interest in tech is going to be different from person to person. For me, I was a fan of reading popular science magazines at a younger age as well as manuals on all of the different setting/functions/features of operating systems…
That’s number 1.
Yeah but Facebook was invented when I was a teen and I knew pretty quickly that shit was evil.
At 15 the thing i wanted most in the world was an escape hatch from all these other assholes I had to spend my time with everyday at school. Right around that time Facebook arrived ensuring they would have more access to me and the people around me more then any other time in history.
You must have been very mature for your age, and very cool.
How did you feel about pop music that came out when you were young? Born in the wrong generation at all?
- Bang. We needed to stop right effing there!
Yes.
Computers are the worst in my opinion, everything is tens to hundreds of times faster by specs and yet it feels as slow as it did in the 90s, I swear.
Network speeds are faster than ever but websites load tons of junk that have nothing to do with the content you’re after, and the networks are run by corpos who only care about making money, and when they have no competition and you need their service, why would they invest in making their systems work better?
Its called enshitification. Its a process that’s been happening in all areas of tech for a while now.
Yeah, I’m not sure why the top comments are seeming to ignore this. Stagnation and greed is the problem here.
Feature per dollar possibly yes. Technology itself not necessarily.
The issue is the market was much more competitive 10+ years ago which led to rapid innovation and the need for rivals to keep up.
Today that no longer exists in so many areas so a lot of existing tech has stagnated heavily.
For example, Google Maps was a very solid platform in 2014 bringing in a ton of new navigation features and map generation tech.
Today, the most solid consumer map nav is probably Tesla’s map which utilizes Valhalla, a very powerful open source routing engine, that’s also used on openstreetmap and OSMAnd.
This is a very huge improvement from 2014 Google Maps.
Except the most used map app is still essentially 2014 Google Maps because Google cornered the market so they no longer have any need to innovate or keep up. In fact it’s actually worse since they keep removing or breaking features every update in an attempt to lower their cloud running costs.
You can apply this to a lot of tech markets. Android is so heavily owned by Google, no one can make a true competitor OS. Nintendo no longer needs to add big handheld features because the PSP no longer exists. Smart home devices run like total junk because everyone just plugs it into the same cloud backend to sell hardware. The de facto way to order things online is Amazon. Amazon is capable of shipping within a week, but chooses not to for free shipping to entice you into buying prime, and because they don’t have a significant competitor. Every PC sold is still spyware windows because every OEM gets deals with Microsoft to sell their OS package.
Even though the hardware always improves, the final OEM can screw it all up by simply delivering an underwhelming product in a market they basically own, and people will buy because there is no other choice or competition to compare to.
Steam deck: am I a joke to you
3M Steam Deck users vs 100M+ Switch users: Yes.
I actually hope Steam Deck’s success does force Nintendo to take them seriously, but at the moment their market share is much less overlapped because the Deck primarily offers PC games, even though Switch emulation is possible too.
Also the $400 entry model price would sound even more appealing if the Switch 2 comes put with a similar price. At that point Steam Deck is a steal lol.
Technology? No.
Consumer Electronics? Yes. Or at least there’s a debatable transition and cutoff point.
I work in VR and AR. I traveled to a conference this week to showcase demos of my work.
I have in my backpack a headset that’s costing few hundred bucks and can spawn in front if your eyes 3D models you can directly manipulate with your hands or a pen.
It just works.
I even use it offline while flying.
This didn’t exist 10years ago. It’s amazing.
It always amazes me how much professional uses VR/AR has, and what kind of stuff has been created for it by all sorts of industries. Some see it as a failure because the consumer variants have not seen revolutionairy improvements over the past years, but the industry around it is quickly growing. So many companies use it, that the technology doesn’t need games to survive.
I dunno, did they have those alarm clocks you have to chase around 10 years ago?
Maybe? I remember seeing an alarm on Think Geek back in the late 00s that would fire off a helicopter that you’d have to bring back to the base station to turn it off. I was debating between that and the ninja boom alarm clock (which I think had a disk to vibrate the whole damned bed) for a good while.
They had them 20 years ago
Not really, one of my favourite games of all time came recently and it wouldn’t be possible to exist without more current tech plus I like modern phones more and more
no
Absolutely no. 2014 can eat my multiple TBs of SSDs’ asses.
It really depends. Google as in the search engine is getting worse every year. Websites went from being fun and exciting to just a vehicle to show ads.
That’s the classic example of enshittification.
true the internet as a tool has declined in usefulness
This is industrialism. All tech does this. You may have also had some rose colored glasses about business.
