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?
I somewhat agree: tech peaked just when it was high end and absolutely not relying on manufacturer’s cloud / subscription / customer portal enrollment … 😓
You grew up in a time of huge technological innovation, so you see anything else as unusual
Boomers grew up in stagnation, and expect tech to keep progressing at the same rate.
Both are 100% normal ways for our brains to expect shit to go, but neither fit modern society.
Its called enshitification. Its a process that’s been happening in all areas of tech for a while now.
It all went downhill when the expectation of an always-on internet 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
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yeah but Facebook was invented when I was a teen and I knew pretty quickly that shit was evil.
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?
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.
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?
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 ;)
That’s very cool
What about things that are invented when I’m younger than 15?
That’s number 1.
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…
yep, and then tech companies began the big cull, taking all the free services and beginning to squeeze, at every level, all the time
No. You mean AI has not at least wowed you?
I suppose my intent for this question was a little more nuanced than what I posted, so my bad. Generative AI wowed me initially, but it very quickly lost its appeal to me the more it became anti-consumer. As I learned more about the models and saw how it just aggregates and plagiarizes human created content it all really soured on me. I suppose it’s still technically impressive, but I really struggle to see how the benefits outweigh the cost.
What about the privacy invasion that are voice assistants?
Same tbh
We had a chatbot based on Markov chains like 20 years ago in a friend’s group chat that ran on a potato, so no. LLMs are mostly the same thing only wasting astronomically larger resources.
And those principles were formulated at the start of the 20th century and partially in the 19th.
Markov chains are way worse and nearly always fail to preserve the illusion of reasoning. Markov chains also haven’t generated them deepfakes.
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.
I might be simple to please but I think 1080p or 2160p is just peak to me. I find it very difficult to notice differences between 1080p and 2160p but moreso with 2160p and 4K. When Blu-Ray came out, they were of course hamming up Blu-Ray as the shit and DVD was now seen as inferior. I never really cared for what Blu-Ray had to offer at the time of it’s debut. Because DVD quality was more than efficient to me, better than VHS which the comparison between VHS and DVD was night and day.
People tend to like tricking others into going into the more premium and expensive options of the latest tech with dishonest comparisons. You see this all the time with graphical comparisons with games and movies. Where they’ll deliberately pixelate what they see as an inferior visual and sharpen the later options. It’s just dishonest and operates on an extreme bias.
Nah, people always think thing “peaked” during their era. Its probably nostalgia. Tech back then is, in my opinion, terrible.
I was born around 2000-2003 (not giving exact year for privacy reasons)
Examples:
When I got my first phone (like around 2015 or so), it was an android phone that didn’t have great encryption. You had to manually enable encryption and its not File-Based encryption like in today’s android phones, its Full Disk Encryption which mean alarms dont work if you reboot your phone. And it takes like an hour or 2 to first set up the encryption.
Phones have so much vulnerabilities. Stagefright, Blueborne, etc. Luckily, I never got hacked (or at least not that I’m aware of) but it was just unsettling to know your phone is vulnerable, and you’re even already on the latest update. Also there was a lot of screenlock bypasses. Updates typically is only 1 year OS update and 2 year security updates, if even that. Updates were also very slow to get rolled out.
Security was so bad, I can root my android phone with a random app I downloaded by searching “Android Root”, don’t even need to connect to a pc. Like can you imagine a random app being able to just take root privilages on your phone.
Nowadays, phones are much more secure, even the cheapest samsung phone has 4 years of OS updates, 5 years of security updates. With better encryption.
Phone plans were expensive AF, well I was a kid, but the normal plans had those “Unlimited Data” but with a huge asterisk, data slows after like a certain amount like 5 GB or something, I was unlucky, my parents were a bit cheap so the family plan that I was on only had 30MB of 4g internet, then throttled to 128kbps. Unusable unless you are at home and have wifi.
Nowadays, unlimited plans have become the norm, the plan that I was on even got a free upgrade to unlimited high speed data.
Oh and HTTPS wasn’t default in most sites, some didn’t even have it. And no HSTS as far as I remember.
Back then, there were no such thing as Airtags or Samsung Smarttags that are so cheap and allows tracking misplace items or even your pets. (I mean there are privacy concerns… still, very useful if not misused)
There were no smart watches that can detect a heart attack. (They’re not exactly accurate, but still…)
There were no phones that detect a car crash or even use satelites to make a sos call. (I’m talking about the iPhone 14)
I mean yes we have so much enshittification today, but that’s not really a tech problem, its a corporate greed problem not doesn’t just affect technology.
Technology isn’t bad, its just the way we use it.
Like nuclear technology can be use to build bombs to destroy, or used in power plants to create energy.
Older nerd, just fyi: problem is that tech is just keys. They unlock the gates, positive for society or negative, sometimes simultaneously.
It’s just interesting how the bags of cash are always behind the “bad for society gate”…
For some, yes. Automotive is one that comes to mind. I miss dumb TVs. I’d say laptop, but then I’m rocking a decade-old Thinkpad, so I might be a bit biased here. I also miss phones that aren’t as locked down. I hate what the current streaming service industry have become, and how social media is filled with AI trash.
I’d say that our personal needs for shear computation power have peaked within the last ten years. Yes, people have been saying this since the dawn of personal computers. Yes, servers keep getting more powerful. However, the fact that some schmucks just released a thousand dollar laptop with more or less the same RAM & CPU specs as my decade old Thinkpad kinda proves that.
Other than that, a lot of things are getting better. As an open-source enthusiast, I see things keeps improving, FreeCAD 1.0 just got released, more improvements to Linux kernel, LibreOffice handles MS Office files better, etc. Manufacturing techniques keeps getting more advanced, like 3D printing metal, and for us mortals, faster FDM printing with better plastic material that’s more UV resistant. Radio technologies comes to mind; with SDR, one can achieve what people from last decade would need expensive specialized equipments for, yes you can get your hands on these for cheap.
Last but not least, don’t forget this very platform where you’re reading this very comment ;)
Tech has advanced technically (for lack of a better word) but yeah, it’s being used against us more than to our benefit a lot of the time.
I blame the big tech companies. 10-20 years ago they were not that big so they didn’t buy every competition to kill them. Now any time we get a new company or product that could change the world, one of the big 3 (apple, amazon, google) will buy them to keep the tech, code, or people for themselves.
Wanna see what not being bought by big tech is like? Look at what FOSS is doing. Look at Home Assistant, Jellyfin, AOSP is doing, it’s making huge leaps without big tech.
Highly disagree, everything is better now, and the things that have not changed a lot are instead refined. Stuff doesn’t need to change just for the sake of change. A good example of this is smartphones, we’ve found a good basic model that the vast majority of people are comfortable with, all that needs to be done is to update the various parts as the years go by. Obviously smartphones aren’t as exciting as they were, but that’s not a bad thing at all. So much stuff was so bad in the early days, people are great at not remembering that. Try going back to like an iPhone 4 and you’ll quickly realise how bad it is compared to what we have now. Bad screen, shitty camera, worse UI and UX etc.
I really doubt you put even a second of thought into this post, you just felt nostalgic and remembered only the good parts. If you did sit and think about it for a while, I got bad news about your basic comprehension, critical thinking and memory.
I sure hope not. Building a new PC this weekend.
