Ask Lemmy

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 it's 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.

Its called enshitification. Its a process that's been happening in all areas of tech for a while now.

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.

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).

no

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.

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?

1998. Bang. We needed to stop right effing there!

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.

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.

I'm young enough to tell you that it's not just nostalgia. Most new tech now is like "cool but impractical" at best and "I'm worrying about how this will be used to make the world worse" at worst. Nothing to make me think it's the future.

I dunno, did they have those alarm clocks you have to chase around 10 years ago?

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.

I'm in an area that uses Waymo a lot. My head exploded last year when I watched a driverless car make a left turn in front of me. 100% impressed that day.

SpaceX catching the super heavy rocket -that was also mind-blowing. Space tech tends to be what spurs in the tech we use ourselves, so I think the privatization of space travel has been a net good. We'll have another explosion of tech over the next few years because of it