When you connect a new device to a ‘smart’ tv, you must pay homage to the manufacturer with a ritualistic dance. Plugging and unplugging the device. Turning them on and off in the correct sequence like entering a konami code.
Every time you want to switch devices, the tv must scan for them. And god forbid you lose power, or unplug something. You are granted the delight experience of doing it all over again.
I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.
What is some other tech that used to be better?
I don’t know if it counts as tech per se, but phone calls. It used to be the case that many if not most phone calls people received were important, so they would have a good reason to answer the phone. These days most calls are spammers or scammers and a lot of people don’t answer the phone because of this. With spoofing, even calls that appear to be from a legitimate number can easily be a scam, and it’s hard to trust any calls these days.
Doorbells. I had to replace a relative’s doorbell recently and the old one that lasted 60 years was built 10x better than the incredibly cheap model that all the hardware stores carry.
The options are either a cheapo doorbell that has an LED in it for no reason, a Ring surveillance doorbell, or a very expensive reproduction doorbell sold on some random website.
Going with MacBooks. Used to be you could upgrade RAM and other components. Now, you have to get a new machine.
I think radios the fact the digital ones use much more battery and just break all the time. I think FM was higher quality as well at least in the UK.
They can pry the radio from my 15 year old car from my cold dead hands. I want analog controls not a touch screen! Tuning should be done with a knob. Nothing more.
I’d agree and broaden this to lots of controls. It’s nice to have physical inputs with tactile feedback. Especially in cars. I don’t want to use a fucking touchscreen to adjust the radio or the climate controls. And universally the touchscreens lag occasionally. Yeah. Don’t want that when adjusting volume or temp. Thanks.
I had a crank powered am/fm radio, no bigger or heavier than a pack of cards, that used a pair of wired headphones as the antenna. About a minute of cranking got you about 20 mins of surprisingly decent quality radio. I used to use it all the time for years, until it got water damaged camping one time. No chance of doing that with digital radio (or Bluetooth headphones).
FM > DAB
well, radio was better back in the day. now it’s bland pop crap for the 5 minutes per hour that isn’t shitty ads
My dad got and refurbished a vintage receiver and was showing it off to me. I asked if he was listening to a CD or a record because I’d never heard clearer audio. Nope, it was an FM station.
Blew my mind.
I have a smart TV and, while I hate that fact with every fiber of my being, I’ve never been through any of the particular bullshit you’re describing. I absolutely can just plug a thing into it and it works when I switch to that input.
I’m going to go with video game console disk trays. Back on the PS1 and GameCube, you just hit a button to release a lock and then a spring popped the lid open. Now, I’ll admit these newfangled interior conveyor belts we’ve had for checks calendar almost two decades have never actually broken on me, I resent the fact that if they were to break then I’d have no actual ability to get disks in and out of the machine.
That is, of course, assuming your console has an option for physical media at all, which is a very troubling direction in itself.
- email. Before Microsoft fucked it up with html and “some asshole would like to recall this email” type bullshit.
- web search, obviously.
- any fucking software that you have to rent.
- so, so much more.
Yo just turn off that TVs version of HDMI control. (CEC, magic remote, etc) To avoid the scanning bullsh. (Sounds like Samsung)
Outside of that I kinda miss old copper phone lines to a certain extent. Analog stuff in general
Everything being digital removes any possibility of a signal being able to still be discerned even if it’s not absolutely perfect.
Old tech would be subject to static of course, but you could possibly still make out the TV channel or radio station, even if it’s not perfect.
These days, you hear or see a little tiling for a second and the media is gone until a good enough signal comes back.
So much. So, so, SO much.
Websites in general. More bloat, more CPU usage, worse design, less content. This is even worse for shopping sites, USAians probably only know Amazon, but people from other countries definitely know a big local name that used to have a much better site years ago compared to today.
Smart TVs are the worst. You’re better off buying a shitty china android tv box than a smart tv, both will suck up and sell all your data, but at least the latter can be kept off when you don’t need the “smart” part.
Smartphones. Not only the whole “LETS COPY APPLE” on hardware and software design, but also on how fast it’s doing a lot of the stupidity that followed PCs: phones keep getting more powerful, programs keep getting slower and more resource intensive because
fuck you“new features”Ad tech. Yes, I’d glady go back to shitty popups over clickjacking, infinite redirects that don’t show up on the “back” button, annoying anti-adblocks, 70% of pages being advertising and fingerprinting bloat, javascript/css having control to FUCKING HIDE AND DISABLE MY SCROLL BAR
Tinder. It was good 10 years ago, enshittification accelerated aroudn 2017. Free accounts have had a hard time getting any matches as far back as 2019, as I recall from experience. Nothing like having received “41” likes, going through 300 profiles with “nope” and not losing a single match.
javascript/css having control to FUCKING HIDE AND DISABLE MY SCROLL BAR
That sounds like something you could definitely turn off in browser settings. It never happens in Tor Browser, which is just souped up Firefox.
Also:
TinderEvery widely-used dating app.They’re all trying to be Tinder, because it’s good business. It turns out, making an app for someone to delete is exactly as commercially self-defeating as it sounds.
Other dating apps weren’t good back then, that’s why I singled out Tinder. I remember that, before tinder, every app/site was all about charging premium subscription to read and send messages
Honestly I’d prefer long-form profiles and pay-by-message over a slot machine filled with faces. I guess we just like different things.
Considering both cases must have >50% fake or inactive profiles, it’s wasted money either way
but people from other countries definitely know a big local name that used to have a much better site years ago compared to today.
No, that one was always slow. While the other has an atrocious product search.
One wheel
The original
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easy to replace batteries,
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easy maintenance,
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most important: highly customizable
(I mean, yes, you could blow yourself up with the gigantic lithium pack in your garage, but the community around one wheel has a lot of rich guidance to prevent you from doing that)
Entered version 2
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batteries are now locked to the device.
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hey! Ride carefully! Battery pack unplugging (even by accident) bricks the device 😆
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uuuh, I bricked the device. What now? Send the device across Atlantic ocean to HQ in the US to plug it back in 🤣 🤣
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I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.
Dunno what kind of TVs you’re using, but my Sony OLED pretty much behaves exactly like this. The Smart TV features are laggy and shit as usual, but those are still features that didn’t exist in the old days so it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison.
But with regards to just plugging in a blu ray or PS5 and hitting the input button, that’s exactly how my modern TV works.
In fact, I don’t even need to turn it on or hit the input button… Since they’re both Sony, all I need to do is press the button on my PS5 controller and it turns on my TV and PS5 and switches to the correct input, without having to touch the remote. And vice versa (can turn on/off and control PS5 menus with the TV remote).
Autocorrect on smartphones. Arguably, smartphone keyboards in general. The old iPhone keyboard was second to none in my opinion, but it feels like they’ve all got worse.
I miss a slide out landscape keyboard - but even Swype I feel like has gotten worse with time. I just can’t shake the feeling when I use it that I spend half my time or more deleting and trying again to get the words I want.
Somehow, T9 worked better than basically anything we have now.
And the phones actually had hardware keys and weren’t a laggy mess on anything older, than 4 years.
Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.
- Facebook.
- OKCupid.
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime Video
- iTunes
- Patreon
- Everything Adobe
- Google Voice
- YouTube
- Most search engines
ALSO
- MySQL
- Redis
ALSO
- Wordpress
ALSO
- Vacuum cleaners
- Refrigerators
- Every power tool ever
- Most cars
- Airplanes (looking at you Boing)
ALSO
- Apple products
ALSO
- The fricken Artemis Program vs. the Apollo Program. (I consult with the space industry a lot, so this makes me feel things)
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Sure, that was overly broad. But I’ve got a BUNCH of tools in my garage and they’re fine, but my dad’s got a bunch of the same tools in his workshop he had when I was a kid, and they still work just as well now as they did in the 80s (I think his drill press actually used to belong to HIS dad and it’s never failed me). Also, his table saw and band saw rock. I remember using them to cut things for silly projects when I was a kid and I just used the table saw the other day… same saw, great results.
My take was all centered around “solid” and “built to last”. I don’t have any faith that the tools in my garage will outlast his tools. Don’t see it happening. I think me inheriting his tools is more likely than my tools outlasting them.
My dad has an old Makita cordless drill from 1995 which he used for everything from assembling Ikea furniture to drilling holes in cement walls. Complete metal innards, full metal case, battery that’s big and heavy enough to bludgeon somebody to death with.
Until one day I bought a fancy new Bosch cordless screwdriver with Li-ion battery, brushless motor and 1/4 the size and weight of the Makita.
At first he laughed at me for buying a toy, then he tried it. He ordered one as well the week after and uses it pretty much exclusively since then.
Still keeps the Makita box and drill around purely for the retro look but even with fresh batteries the amount of torque they put out is not even in the same league.
Obviously that is the exception rather than the rule and most technological advances went into making companies more profits instead of building better products, but there are some advancements that made power tools better. Li-ion batteries and brushless motors being two of the big ones.
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And yet I do not think I will be using my Bosch in 25 years because some cheap internal plastic part will have broken down while the Makita would still run.
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You’re kind of an asshole for like completely no reason aren’t you? That’s now what this conversation is about. By all means, continue.
You really summed it up. So much good on that list gone poorly wrong. But hey, they made a few increments for the shareholders.
Pandora. I remember when it was a “music experiment”
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Ive never paid for subscription on pandora. The ad version isnt that bad, but I also dont listen to it for more than an hour at a time. I would say on average I get 5 -15 second ads an hour.
Boing!
Printers
Business phones with humans who answered them.
I’m fine with that. I don’t want to talk with people - I just want an email address to write to.
I don’t really want to talk to people either, but sometimes you need help right away. I usually try chat first. It’s a little less frustrating.
Here, have this useless chatbot instead.
This is only going to get more pervasive with the corporate AI craze.
I agree overall, but it is usually much quicker to talk with a human on the phone than it is to deal with an automated system.
Tbf in many countries you still get this. The Nordics is night and day compared to the U.K. where I live now. You get a local number, a local email and someone who works at that office actually responds and is enabled to make decisions.
It’s a trust thing.
I hate this so much. I had to call a clinic the other day to ask about medical test results. None of the options on the menu were for that. So I clicked 1 for appointments. Then my options were to reschedule an appointment or to cancel an appointment. No option to go back. I clicked 0 and it hung up on me. Called back, clicked schedule an appointment and it told me to hang up and go online. Fuck me.
CVS has a speech recognition system that just won’t forward me to a damn human.
And the nerve of them to constantly berate you about using the app, when I’m calling because the apps not working.
Have you tried calling the IRS? I think it’s the worst.
