Ask Lemmy

I'm roughly the same age as you and I feel the same. In my adolescence and 20s it felt like some new, life-changing gadget was coming out almost every year. Now I feel like there's been incremental changes at best.

I mean I kept the same gaming PC for a decade before building another. The new one runs the exact same games; the only difference is that I can run them at 4K ultra now instead of 1080p medium. Games look better but it's a subtle improvement at best. Not the major leaps in graphical performance I was seeing every 5 years back in the 90s.

Same goes for phones. 10 years ago they were black slabs running Android or iOS, and today they are the same. Very consistent, unlike the constantly evolving and various designs of the 90s and 2000s.

Other than going electric, cars haven't changed much, either. 20-year-old cars that were well-maintained still look new to me, and can be easily modernized with things like aftermarket parking sensors and stereos with Android Auto.

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.

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I somewhat agree: tech peaked just when it was high end and absolutely not relying on manufacturer's cloud / subscription / customer portal enrollment ... 😓

Tech is better, but content is worse. I have a smart TV from 2014 that I'm gonna use until it's dead. When a new technology comes out, it's all about gaining market trust, so the product is built to last and has cool features (generally) without the ads and data theft. My TV doesn't play ads, but still has all the tech I need. Anything it can't do, my PS4 can.

In my opinion, technology keeps improving, however that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s getting better. I think innovation in technology peaked from the 2000s to the early 2010s, after this period however, it has continually become more and more “enshitified,” meaning that features no one wanted suddenly being added. For example, “ai coffee maker” (this is real), like who asked for this? Not to mention, not only is everything more bloated, but levels of privacy have decreased significantly; every aspect of your digital life is capitalized on for advertising. The early 2010s were simpler times.

no

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).

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.

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

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.

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