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?
In my opinion as an engineer, methods like the VDI2206, VDI2221 or ISO9000 have done irreparable damage to human creativity. Yes, those methods work to generate profitable products, but by methodizing the creative process you have essentially created an echo chamber of ideas. Even if creativity is strongly encouraged by those methods in the early stages of development, the reality often looks different. A new idea brings new risks, a proven idea often brings calculable profits.
In addition to that, thanks to the chinese, product life cycles have gotten incredibly short, meaning, that to generate a constant revenue stream, a new product must have finished development while the previous one hasn’t even reached it’s peak potential. As a consequence, new products have only marginal improvements because there is no time for R&D to discover bigger progressive technologies between generations. Furthermore the the previous generation is usually sold along side the next one, therefore a new product can not be so advanced as to make the previous one completely obsolete.If you really want to see this with your own eyes, get a bunch of old cassette players from the 90s from different manufacturers. If you take them apart you can easily see how different the approaches where to solve similar problems back in the day.
What? No. lol. Tech is still improving. You’re just thinking of the bad new stuff and good old stuff. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Phone’s batteries and resolutions are much better than they were in 2014. Voice assistants never really took off. Smart home stuff is maaaaybe a little better now but there are also a shit ton more brands now and most are crap. But that also means cheaper and more widespread.
I feel like smartphones + internet peaked about 10 years ago and has now steadily become enshittified. I have never used “google assistant” because it takes less time to just type something in to my phone or tap the setup for my alarm.
So yes, definitely feel that way. Consumer tech had less bullshit masking as improvements ten years ago.
Design wise, absolutely peaked in the 90s/2000s. Now everything looks like a copy of each other with uninspired designs across the board.
In terms of what it has to offer, I personally don’t think so. Couldn’t imagine going back 10-20 years ago and not having a device like my Steam Deck that can play computer games on the go (laptop not included since when are you realistically pulling out a laptop on a drive when heading out for errands?) or having a laptop not as thin as my current laptop or even just the touchscreen feature. I also couldn’t imagine going back 20 years ago and not having a 1 or 2 TB portable external hard drive (or if they were out, being a lot more expensive than now).
The PSP is 20 years old now. Absolutely massive game library, and definitely on par with the console and PC games at the time.
The game library is well worth revisiting on something like a retroid pocked with upscaling.
As someone who didn’t have a PSP back then or even now, I’ll take your word on it.
You’re not crazy. I feel that even when the tech is slightly better the trade offs make the overall deal worse.
More RAM but its soldered in on laptops. More storage on phones but no micro sd slot. No headphone jacks, the overall obsession with inferior wireless audio. Streaming services suck for anything that is not a live event and I think eventually more people will realize that. Especially as they keep hiking prices. Clearnet internet has been destroyed. The gaming industry is a joke nowadays. Charging full price to play betas.
What’s wrong with wireless audio? I’ve often had the problem that my audio jack was full of dirt so the jackplug couldn’t properly connect anymore. I don’t have that problem with wireless. Worst problem is that the connection sometimes stutters when I’m walking through the train station during rush hour
Depending on the surroundings you might have a spotty connection if using Bluetooth to stream your audio from let’s say your phone to a plugged in wireless speaker. I’ve personally had to pair and unpair failed connections and replace several wireless headphones because their batteries don’t last longer than 4 or 5 months from unboxing. I’d much rather rely on a high quality pair of headphones that don’t need charging and last me years at a time with no issue so long as I keep the headphone jack clear of debris.
I have never had that issue with a jackplug. Stuttering connection and one more thing with batteries that you need to manage. Also, most of the wireless headphones that I’ve tried have much smaller cups than the wired variety. I haven’t found a pair of wireless in-ears that are as comfortable as my preferred IEMs. In general, they might be okay for movies but not for music with an overemphasis on bass that I hate. The few options that don’t sound bad are wildly overpriced.
I imagine wireless headphones are more expensive by definition. So cheap wireless headphones (say 10€) are by definition worse that cheap wired headphones of the same price. I’m willing to pay 50 to 80€ for decent quality, I’m sure that’s not the most expensive, but it might be too expensive for some. I’ve had philips in ear headphones that were just a perfect fit. I sadly lost them recently and now have cheap ones that suck. I’m not much of a sound snob, but these cheap ones have bad sound quality and don’t cancel out any outside noise.
I haven’t purchased any cheap wireless headphones, certainly not that cheap but the wireless headphones that cost $300 sound significantly worse than a pair of wired headphones that cost half that much, sometimes even less. Same for the earbuds that sound bad and aren’t as comfortable.
- Bang. We needed to stop right effing there!
TV resolution peaked about 10 years ago with 1080p. The improvement to 4K and high dynamic range is minor.
3D gaming has plateaued as well. While it may be possible to make better graphics, those graphics don’t make better games.
Computers haven’t improved substantially in that time. The biggest improvement is maybe usb-c?
Solar energy and battery storage have drastically changed in the last 10 years. We are at the infancy of off grid building, micro grid communities, and more. Starlink is pretty life changing for rural dwellers. Hopefully combined with the van life movement there will be more interesting ways to live in the future, besides cities, suburbs, or rural. Covid telework normalization was a big and sudden shift, with lasting impacts.
Maybe the next 10 years will bring cellular data by satellite, and drone deliveries?
3D gaming has plateaued as well. While it may be possible to make better graphics, those graphics don’t make better games.
I haven’t played it, only seen clips, but have you seen AstroBoy? It’s true that the graphics aren’t really too much better than the PS4, but there’s like a jillion physics objects on the screen with 60fps. It’s amazing. Graphics are still improving, just in different ways.
Strong disagree about the 4k thing. Finally upgraded my aging 13 year old panels for a fancy new Asus 4k 27"and yeah it’s dramatically better. Especially doing either architectural or photographic work on it. Smaller screens you’ve got a point though. 4k on a 5" phone seems excessive.
Couldn’t that be just overall quality?
Source bought a lot of fullhd screens, some were just so bad, I only go with iiyama today.
I mean for television or movies. From across the room 4k is only slightly sharper than 1080p. Up close on a monitor is a different story.
It’s significantly better if you’re actually in the optimal range. Rest of article for image. HDR is fantastic on a OLED. Some cheap sets advertise HDR but it’s crap. I’ll also mention 4K from a disc is massively better than any streaming service I’ve come across. Netflix caps 4K streaming at 25 mbps and most of my disc are like 75-90mbps.
Sorry to make you feel old but 10 years ago 4k was already mainstream, and you would have already had difficulty finding a good new 1080p TV. That is roughly the start of proper HDR being introduced to the very high end models.
Also, maybe you’ve only experienced bad versions of these technologies because they can be very impressive. HDR especially is plastered on everything but is kinda pointless without hardware to support proper local dimming, which is still relegated to high end TVs even today. 4k can feel very noticeable depending on how far you sit from the TV, how large the screen is, and how good one’s eyesight is. But yeah, smaller TVs don’t benefit much. I only ended up noticing the difference after moving and having a different living room setup, siting much closer to the TV.
I wouldn’t call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.
I didn’t have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we’d gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a “dumb” TV.
Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I’m almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.
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
There was a lot of pioneering in the 70’s. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70’s. Most people ended the 70’s living like they did in the 60’s but now there’s cool shit like the Speak n’ Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.
There was a lot of invention in the 80’s. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80’s. We emerged from the 80’s with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren’t that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90’s. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren’t a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system…it’s the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user’s life. An N64 is exactly what you’d expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it’s still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it’s the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won’t take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven’t embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it’s not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000’s. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It’ll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010’s. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don’t notice; you buy a new phone and it’s so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they’ve converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren’t there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you’re probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020’s where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010’s, it’s older than 4 years, but we’re days away from the halfway point of the decade and it’s becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term “enshittification” because it’s got the word shit in it and that’s hilarious, but…I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20’s represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
From an old geek; spot on.
Feels the same with lot of other tech too: space voyage, cars & motorcycles, robots, most are just like last year with some small cosmetic change or 7% more of this or that.
Sure, things are getting better but it doesn’t feel like it does any more.
Edit: hey, Lemmy & the decentralised fediverse is quite cool new tech.
Dial-up could still be pretty exciting. Or at least for me.
I am just amazed by data transfer via sound. When I found SSTV I was amazed by the ability to transfer analog images by sound. I was playing around with it for hours for months. I can get amazed by random crap like that. I can hear the image as it’s being transferred. So cool!
But recently I was playing around with QSSTV and found HamDRM. Same thing, but digital. And it’s not only for digital images, it can take any binary file. Sadly, no Android apps for HamDRM unlike analog SSTV. So, I just saved it as wav, moved it to my phone and played it to my laptop.
Holy shit! I transferred a 55kB document in 5 minutes using sound! It just feels so crazy and awesome. It sounds basically like random noise, static, but there’s real data in it. If only there was an Android app to do this, I could play around it for hours transferring small data back and forth over the air, using sound waves!
But hey, I can even be excited by a large QR code. 2 seconds of 8kbps MP3 in a QR code, pretty cool!
Any websites or projects showing the 2 sec of audio in a QR code? Sounds cool!
Oh, I just simply used the data URI with base64-encoded MP3. It can be pasted directly into browser.
However, you could get far more with codec2, although it’s very much a speech only codec. It goes as low as 700bps. So… roughly 20 - 25 seconds the same way, although you’d have to use the codec2 decoder instead of browser.
Sample: https://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts2a_700c.wav
“These days a chicken is a rare dish”Anyway, back to the MP3…
Just paste it into a browser.
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.
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
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 ;)
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
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…
I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade
The question op is posing is:
Which new tech?
In the decade op’s talking about everything was new. The last ten years nothing is new and all just rehash and refinements.
ML, AI, VR, AR, cloud, saas, self driving cars (hahahaha) everything “new” is over a decade old.
Well it is literally not going as fast.
The rate of “technology” (most people mean electronics) advancement was because there was a ton of really big innovations at in a small time: cheap PCBs, video games, internet, applicable fiber optics, wireless tech, bio-sensing, etc…
Now, all of the breakthrough inventions in electronics have been done (except chemical sensing without needing refillable buffer or reactive materials), Moore’s law is completely non-relevant, and there are a ton of very very small incremental updates.
Electronics advancements have largely stagnated. MCUs used 10 years ago are still viable today, which was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, as an example. Pretty much everything involving silicon is this way. Even quantum computing and supercooled computing advancements have slowed way down.
The open source software and hardware space has made giant leaps in the past 5 years as people now are trying to get out from the thumb of corporate profits. Smart homes have come a very long way in the last 5 years, but that is very niche. Sodium ion batteries also got released which will have a massive, mostly invisible effect in the next decade.
Electronic advancement, if you talk about cpus and such, hasn’t stagnated, its just that you don’t need to upgrade any more.
I have a daily driver with 4 cores and 24GB of RAM and that’s more than enough for me. For example.
Agree. 15+ years ago tech was developed for the tech itself, and it was simply ran as a service, usually for profit.
Now there’s too much corporate pressure on monetizing every single aspect, so the tech ends up being bogged down with privacy violations, cookie banners, AI training, and pretty much anything else that gives the owner one extra anual cent per user.
Aka “enshittification”
Enshittification was always a thing but it has gotten exponentially worse over yhe past decade. Tech used to be run by tech enthusiasts, but now venture capital calls the shot a lot more than they used to.
What’s crazy is that they were already making unbelievable amounts of money, but apparently that wasn’t enough for them. They’d watch the world burn if it meant they could earn a few extra pennies per flame.
[off topic?]
Frank Zappa siad something like this; in the 1960’s a bunch of music execs who liked Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong had to deal with the new wave coming in. They decided to throw money at every band they could find and as a result we got music ranging from The Mama’s and The Papas to Iron Butterfly and beyond.
By the 1970s the next wave of record execs had realized that Motown acts all looked and sounded the same, but they made a lot of money. One Motown was fantastic, but dozens of them meant that everything was going to start looking and sounding the same.
Similar thing with the movies. Lots of wild experimental movies like Easy Rider and The Conversation got made in the 1970s, but when Star Wars came in the studios found their goldmine.
You know this happened with cars also, until there is a new disruption by a new player or technology - companies are just coasting on their cash cows. Part of the market cycle I guess.
Lots of the privacy violations already existed, but then the EU legislated first that they had to have a banner vaguely alluding to the fact that they were doing that kind of thing, and later, with GDPR, that they had to give you the option to easily opt-out.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I’m 22 and I feel the same way. 2012-2014 PC hardware was better and I do not care what anyone says. It’s probably the software that was better but damn nowadays my 6 core 12 threaded CPU feels so ass in any task compared to my old ass Pentium. I have 32 gigs of RAM and shit can still be slow and unresponsive. Games are poorly optimized because they just focus on making it pretty but it barely looks better. Best example is counter strike 2 vs CS:GO. I played csgo on integrated graphics then on a 1050ti game was always smooth and looked good. Now CS2 looks blurry even with taa off. Runs like shit and sure it looks better but not that much better for it to run how it does.
Edit: another example is vermintide 2. I upgraded my hardware since I played the 1st one but it runs way worse than the 1st one.
I used to customize my desktop like crazy with the dumbest 3D effects. I was on a Pentium using Ubuntu 14.04, integrated graphics. Now I can’t run discord and 3D effects without noticing the difference in performance.
Software is getting worse. Because it’s getting more and more complex. Now even basic things back then are rough to do now.
I don’t have proof or know enough to prove it but I can feel it.
Your BS radar has simply improved I’m guessing. Go through a few hype cycles, and you learn the pattern.
Hardware is better than ever. The default path in software is spammier and more extortionist than ever.
The technology has not peaked, the user experience has peaked
The default user experience maybe. Get better software, enjoy the better hardware.
