What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now?

Cars.

mechanical, no software bugs
physical buttons, no touch screen
everything just worked, no need to license the heating of your chair
freaking lane assist

You get it..

Much safer now though. Traffic accidents are much less lethal nowadays (except SUV/Truck vs ped)
- Over the past 5 years the monthly road deaths here in aus have been going up, because of the prevalence of those massive cars
- The bigger problem is, being ALLOWED to plug in your laptop and delve through the logs.
  The right to repair has died with manufacturers following in Tesla footsteps, who is following the guidebook from apple.
- The original Volkswagen Beetle was specifically designed for literally anyone to work on it.
  While cars have had computers in them since the 1970s, they were still easily diagnosed by almost anyone with a basic education (most people took a basic automotive class in high school). If you could fix a lawnmower, you could fix a car.
  Now cars are just rolling computers. Mr. Nerd, how often do you upgrade your computer? And how long do you anticipate Teslas remaining on the road? Aren’t they all doomed to the scrap yard in 10-15 years?
  You can still work on older cars. They may be less safe, they may cause more pollution. But in the context you’re arguing, I can’t say you’ve presented a compelling case.
  Moreover, consumer demand for distraction has driven (so to speak) the popularity of cars and other gadgets to do the thinking for us. A brief example is how often my Uber driver takes a wrong turn into another state because he’s unfamiliar with the city and relying on his phone. A taxi driver would never make that mistake because they’re knowledgeable and able to think for themselves.
  I’ll pick a dumb device 9 times out of 10.
- This is just the beginning...
Cars are one of the first thing I would use as an example of something that's gotten better. Heated seats, heated steering wheels, better safety ratings, better comfort, power windows, power steering, ABS, backup cameras, adaptive cruise control....
- Uh cars now have subscription services for various features. You dont just get whats in the car when you buy it second hand, you still have to pay to use those features.
  Repair costs are stupdily expensive in comparison, and require significant diagnostic tools to do simple things because everything in your car has a sensor in it.
  And cars are now spying on you to your insurance company because you dont actually get to decide if they are allowed to use your data or not
  Sure cars have a lot more features, but they used to just work
A lot of the modern tech is really good, though.
Cars are way more reliable than they were. They get way better gas mileage. They have a shitload more power (this is actually a con due to how everyone else drives these days). They're way safer in both accidents and just general driving with traction control and lane departure warnings.
So it's a real mixed bag. But I'd rather have the cars of today.
- The only thing that used to be better was more physical buttons. And it looks like the EU will be pushing for that to return (requiring more physical buttons for the highest security rating).
I have a car with a touch screen and some few physical buttons and it just works. Here, I proved you wrong.
- Not sure why you are getting down voted. I have a Tesla and agree. Now if you had that piece of shit Toyota EV (bzssrt?) then maybe I would agree with OP.
And also:
No exhaust filters
Leaded fuel
No crash safety because rigid frames
Wat is errbeck?
Yeah no sorry, as shitty as the software side of cars has become, the hardware is much advanced. And overall cars have become much better, though the recent trend towards SUVs gas removed a lot of those gains as we needlessly buy pricier and less safe cars that use more energy. 🤷 But that's on us consumers, tons of non-SUVs to buy, we're just not buying them.

Buttons.

Everything used to have buttons and switches for things. You knew when you activated something because you could feel the button getting pressed.

That's the main reason I stick with OnePlus. The notification slider is a feature the I need on every phone.
- Switched to OP after LG dropped out. I'm basically pro "anything but apple and Samsung" but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by my Pro 9. Hands down the best phone I've ever used. My only real complaint is that after 3 years, the battery doesn't make it all day every day, but its easy enough to carry a battery bank, or just pop it on the charger for 10 minutes and get 40% of the battery back.
Retrofuturism, fuck yeah. I have a major soft spot for stuff like that because of movies like Aliens and Star Wars.
- Not even that, I just want a fucking keyboard on my phone again, and for actual buttons in my car so I can feel when I change the song on the radio or whatever.
- It’s not just a “soft spot” thing though - the tactile confirmation of a button press is life and death if you’re driving a car.
- In Star Trek Voyager, pilot Tom Paris creates a custom shuttlecraft called the Delta Flyer. Tom's a history geek who spends his holodeck time repairing antique muscle cars from the 20th century. So naturally, he designs the Delta Flyer with lots of analogue switches and dials instead of the usual Starfleet Okudagram touch screens. He thinks they're much better.
- Dystopian retro futures were so much better back then.
Oh yeah when the click hit just right. Soft touch buttons on a 1990s Sony tape deck mmmmm
- Kia gets this right with their window controls Just the right clickyness.
Whoever thought a touchscreen is the optimal way to interact with a wearable fitness device while running and drenched in sweat is really dumb. Just give a couple buttons, I can't fucking swipe while moving like that.

I know this is a cop-out because of the vast number of other improvements to devices and infrastructure, but I really liked having a seemingly indestructible phone with a removable 10-day battery and an absolute death grip on that 2g/3g network.

I really hope swappable batteries make a comeback to ditch the portable batteries and just swap a fresh one.
- I kept using my LG G5 for years after I might have upgraded just for the swappable batteries.
- Have you tried the fairphone?every component, including the batteries are easy to swap. Only issue is that it's a midperformance phone costing the price of a high end Huawei/Sony (Samsung and Apple prices are just straight robbery)
Why swap a 10 day battery anyway? What's the use case here? I mean in the last decade I had not a single phone die on me with an empty battery. That's one day battery life or more, so why 10 days and have it (hot) swappable? I understand that on a hike or while camping outlets and wall chargers are off limit. But there are so good alternatives to having an immensely dense battery in the phone that you don't also have to carry all the time.

Business phones with humans who answered them.

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.
I'm fine with that. I don't want to talk with people - I just want an email address to write to.
- Here, have this useless chatbot instead.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.

Instant messaging.

20 years ago, there were half a dozen competing major platforms (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc), like today.

The difference is that you had your choice of half a dozen clients that could each talk to ALL of the platforms. Adium, Trillian, Kopete, etc.

Today's kids have no idea what we lost to the god of profit.

I feel like AIM was the de facto god-emperor of IM platforms and the rest were just also-rans.
Maybe that was just my experience tho, but I feel like ICQ and IRC were older but more clunky, MSN and Yahoo were newer or contemporary but less dependable and had less buy in from the community.
- Maybe it's just my personal era, but MSN/Messenger was used solely in the group I grew up around. With maybe an addition of trillium eventually

iPods

Google search

Netflix/streaming

Windows

I still regularly use my iPod. Going on 20 years old! I’ve replaced the battery and swapped the hdd with an sd card.

I feel like the problem is less with the technology itself and more with some of the stuff within and around it. So let me list my favourite bugbears:

Buttons!

Here's the thing about buttons and knobs: they are definite. When you press them, you KNOW you pressed them, you can use your finger to feel for them without activating other stuff by accident. Back in the day with my cheap-ass chinese MP3 player, I could change tracks and playlists without taking it out of my pocket just by using tact and muscle memory.

Nowadays with my smartphone even something as basic as skipping a track requires me to take it out and unlock the screen. It's like. Sure, the phone does a lot more stuff, and can stream stuff from the internet so I don't have to download every track (even if I keep a local library for my favourites in ogg format), it has bluetooth for wireless headphones, a lot of good shit -- But that little bit of user experience is just dead and buried.

Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact! It may not be the ideal user experience, but holy shit, it was possible! Try doing anything even close to blind typing on a modern smartphone.

Another point: when something goes unresponsive on a device with just a touchscreen, you experience a confusing and annoying experience as all you have feedback-wise is the screen and sometimes it freezes and you're swiping and tapping and just praying something happens.

When a computer with keys and buttons goes unresponsive you can do the three-fingered-salute and that usually gets it to do something, and because the keyboard is a physical object, it can't be hidden from you by a crashed OS.

Nowadays even kitchen appliances are dropping buttons and knobs. My parents' dishwasher is all touch-buttons, sometimes they brush against it while walking around the kitchen and lo and behold, their butt pauses the washing cycle. Something that wouldn't be an issue with a much cheaper set of regular-ass buttons.

To say nothing of cars and the horrid security issue that fusing a tablet to the dashboard and replacing every control with just that has proven to be.

Customization!

Used to be, Windows 9x let you change every colour of your UI right from the built-in settings app and came with a dozen colorschemes built-in, and Windows XP came with three built-in themes and could with just some changing around (you replaced like ONE dll file, a single copypaste), support themes that totally changed the look of the OS. Nowadays you get "White" and "Black" and that's it.

And like, that's windows, a corporate-ass proprietary system for corporate jerks -- But even Linux -- Linux! the darling of nerds who like to change everything in their computers (like me!) has caught this illness -- And you'll see people defending this. Saying that having no theming support and only having users be able to change highlight colours if even that is the "right way" to do it.

On the note of customization -- In the back-then times, chat applications let you set fonts and colours to give your messages "your look", and your friends could do the same. -- Fuck! The application me and my mates used for playing RPGs by text back in the early 10s supported not just font colours, but also complete rich-text, and would let you set different colours for like, things said by a character vs. narration, resulting in an utterly beautiful formatted text.

Don't get me wrong, we use Telegram/Discord for that now and having a fully searchable archive of everything that we did and talked about is great and I wouldn't trade it for the world. But the most customization you get is -- Setting a profile picture. The most formatting you get is bold/italics.

Webforums would let you have an avatar, a user title under the avatar (that many forums let you customise!), and a signature. Nowadays with things like Lemmy you have to squint to see a person's username.

And like, it's not like there is something about the modern technologies unto themselves that prevents these bits of customisation: Computers are better at drawing shit on screen than ever, internet connectivity has only gotten faster, and we figured out 'sending some markup codes to make rich text' as a thing way back in the 80s. We lost all that simply because the people making the applications don't want to have it.

I feel like for every neat thing that new technology provides us, it takes three steps back for entirely human and not at all technological issues. ^read: ^capitalism

Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact!
I got a car with a T9 input and I was pleasantly surprised at how good I still was at typing without looking
Wait a dishwasher with buttons on the outside? I have only seen ones that had them on the inside. Physical and touch.
- Odd.
  All the ones I've seen have the interface on the outside. Like on the door. Usually at the top.
Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn't even support graphics much less customising them.
But if you wanna actually blame someone, we'll need to know which software youre talking about - could be OPPO's ColorOS for all we know.
That being said a big name in the Linux world is KDE, and they have one of the best theming engines Ive ever used. Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn't even realise how ugly some apps look on windows (like prism launcher not matching my file explorer?? Eww)
That being said I couldn't agree more with the first part, and in linux specifically I wish we had more 'basic display driver' like tools to handle emergency situations.
- Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn’t even support graphics much less customising them.
  I think we all realise that when someone says "Linux" in casual conversation on the internet, they mean existing well-known distros that include far more than just the naked Kernel, because no one who uses Linux is using just the Kernel, even headless servers aren't "just the kernel".
  ANYWAY, I mostly am bitching about Gnome, but other DEs and WMs caught that bug as well to varying degrees. As have a dozen unconnected libre programs. Just for one example try finding a Matrix client that DOESN'T look like a shittier version of Discord (... And doesn't run on the Terminal)
  There was even a collective of libre application developers that got together specifically to chastise people for using themes and to beg DEs to disable all theming by default because "muh app's branding and identity!"
  Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn’t even realise how ugly some apps look on windows
  Unless you're using Flatpaks. Then you have to spend an afternoon metaphorically beating your computer with a metaphorical hammer to get the apps (not just qt, gtk too) to look like the rest of the OS.
  and in linux specifically I wish we had more ‘basic display driver’ like tools to handle emergency situations.
  It's true. It would make the whole thing more resilient.
- "I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU Coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux." The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows were compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won't be for long." With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death. Here is a quick text about GNU/Linux:
  "I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
  Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
  There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!"
  Understood? No? Here then:
  "I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn't matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can't even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated."
I got my first dishwasher a few years ago and decided to go sort of all in and get a solid mid range one instead of the cheapest option because I was so excited to not have to do dishes.
The fucking touch buttons are the worst fucking god damn bullshit pieces of shit I've ever experienced. From the jump even when they worked 'properly' it just felt weird, but a couple years later and half the time the touch doesn't register. Sometimes there's the slightest but of crud or water on there and the thing goes crazy and becomes super sensitive all of a sudden, usually I spend 5 minutes loading the dish washer and 10 minutes trying to get it to register which button I pushed.
I want real physical buttons.
Also while I'm on the topic I was highly disappointed to learn that you still have to wash food and stuf off of dishes before you put them in. I don't know why I thought I could throw a plate with crusted lsagana on it the dishwasher but I did. I thought all dishwashers had some sort of garbage disposal thing built into it. They do not.
- You shouldn't need to wash food off. Was that in the manual or something that someone told you? Just scrap off what you can. Too much gunk can clog the filter and also end up filling the base with water and tripping an E15 error.
- Obligatory Technology Connections video. Might help with your dishwasher woes: https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0
- 30 mins of a German professor who all his life studied doing dishes and how dishwashers work. (in juicy German accent English).
  The answer is soaking.
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001xdbx
Touchscreen in cars are so bad for safety. Buttons mean you don't have to take your eyes off the road
- Literally what I said.

Google keyboard before they went all in on machine learning for spelling and grammar. It was freaky good at correction, then immediately fell off a cliff. It still replaces my son's name, which I type multiple times a day, with a less common name even when I type it correctly. I've removed the wrong name from the dictionary but no dice, still gets it wrong.

Everything Google has done was better before they inserted machine learning. Google Maps used to give accurate lane-specific directions, then they switched to using approximate traffic data to determine directions, and since most drivers are morons, Maps now tells you to turn right in a straight-only lane and make an illegal left turn in 150ft after crossing 4 lanes.
- Everything Google has done was better before
  There. Google up to 2014 was still mostly decent, with some notable stupid decisions. Anything since feels like shit on top of shit
- yep. Swype was like a mind reader. now none of the keyboards seem to have any idea about what I'm writing. random capitalization, suggesting completely obscure words instead of perfectly common ones that makes sense in context, the smallest hitch leading to inserting five completely irrelevant words instead of the one I'm trying to type...
- I'm using heliboard without any trouble. In three languages. It takes a bit of time but if you stick with it the keyboard learns your preferences.
I use it without Internet connection (disable network permission on grapheneos) so it works great for me.

Facebook.
OKCupid.
Reddit
Netflix
Amazon Prime Video
iTunes
Twitter
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)

Pandora. I remember when it was a "music experiment"
- Hey now, Pandora still pays 0.133 cents per play to the artists like they always have!
  Surprisingly, it's more than Deezer pays (0.11 cents).
  So on a good month, 10 to 15 cents of my $5.00 subscription will go to the artists.
  ...I think I just talked myself out of paying for this subscription any longer.
Boing!
- 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.

Car stereos.

They used to have buttons and tape decks and cd players in em. From the factory.

I don’t want to do a complex install of some aftermarket thing. I want a car stereo with buttons, knobs, a tape deck, cd player, am/fm and aux input that looks like it belongs in my cars interior and is designed with the same ideas as the rest of the cars controls.

I still feel touchscreen controls are such a bad idea in cars. Old stereos have dots and grooves on them so you can operate them without having to take your eyes off the road.
- Honestly, just have both. I've got physical buttons for basic controls (think volume, power, seek, skip..etc) and touchscreen capabilities for maps, connecting phone, managing car settings. Also, my car has a physical pointer stick that you can use to move the selection around on the screen, so you can even interact with soft buttons using a physical interface.
- I'm on the fence about this as most (all) modern cars also have steering wheel controls so you don't even really need to move your hands much. My car is from the mid '10s and the touch screen is absolutely slow garbage but I was just in a friend's 2020ish Sienna van and her touchscreen is lightning fast like a smartphone which was fine to use comparatively. I do agree that having all the control on the touchscreen sucks but hers still had physical buttons for the HVAC and other commonly used items.

Swords are kind of crap now compared to the Renaissance. These days they come out of malls to be put on walls.

With the ever growing HEMA and reenactment scene, there are a bunch of really good forges/manufacturers putting out fantastic training equipment, replicas and custom work, sharp and blunt.
With our machining and material science I'd guess that a high end sword now would blow the originals out of the watee
I mean you can still buy good quality swords, you just don't buy them from the mall.
- Where else can mall ninjas get their gear?
Mall swords? That’s an apples and oranges comparison.

You bought a samusng tv didn't you?

I feel this deep inside

Roomba. It got better in ways that made it worse. Really just want to put it in a room and let it wander around and vacuum. It doesn't need to map the house and then get confused if a door is closed. It doesn't need to tell me the filter is old. The old ones you could just put them wherever and close a door or put a box in the way to keep it corralled where you want it.

Better and smarter are two different things. Sometimes they intersect, other times they don't.

IMO both features mentioned sound good, but they shouldn't be a showstopper if they don't work as intended. Can you jailbreak a roomba?
- I don't know. It's interesting tech, but just not useful. I don't need to start it from my phone when away from the house, and it loses its maps and makes new ones that don't have the whole house if it encounters closed doors; if you then put it into the room it forgot and start it, it just sits there confused. It gets confused when furniture moves too. We have to close doors a lot to keep dogs separated, teens close their doors all the time, my house is not static enough for this detailed mapping function. I tried giving it zones but even then the closed doors break the maps.
  There are things I like about the app. Getting the details on what an error message means, finding it more easily when it's hiding. But overall losing the ability to just set it down anywhere and let it run without mapping was a bigger loss than what was gained.
The new ones can do what you want too though. Just press the "clean" button on the roomba twice. Or the "clean everywhere" option in the app, if you've set it up.
In both cases, it goes wherever it can and returns to the starting point.

The assistant used to be able to translate any app on the fly. It was great when living in a foreign country and trying to figure out what those text messages I got meant.
It was truly the only thing I used assistant for. I've had it disabled since they dropped that feature.
Miss now on tap a ton.

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.

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.
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:
~~Tinder~~ Every 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

Analogue TV was much faster with much lower latency than digital TV.

If there's one thing I don't need from a TV, then it's low latency. The pause, rewind, and skip functions are some serious stuff, on the opposite.
- It was funny during the transition period. You could hear through the timing of cheers during football matches who in the neighbourhood was analogue and who was digital.
  But yeah, recording features were really nice for the transition to streaming.
- Latency doesn't matter if you're just watching television, but it's very important if you're trying to hook a game console up to it.
Speaking of analog: Light Guns don't work on modern televisions due to the high latency relative to CRT screens (which had essentially zero latency).
- Mostly because of the timing of the electron beam. That let the game see which target you hit. Otherwise you could hit everything by shooting any bright light.
Oh man, remember when you just had to press the channel number on the remote.
Now you gotta use menus in a Smart TV that takes 2 seconds to process an input event.
- Reminds me of the time I had to make an interface for a set top box by Deutsche Telekom. It was severely underpowered and I had to work with some very quirky browser. I think the browser was based on Internet Explorer.
  It was super slow and couldn't handle anything asynchronous. Which meant that it would lock up for even the simplest operation. And they insisted on their buttons having button down animations. Which meant that I had to slow down the incredibly slow machine artificially so that you could see the animation. And it wasn't enough to slow it down just for the animation duration. You had to give it some extra time because it was so damn underpowered. I think in the end a button push took a whole second extra time.
  And it was still faster than what they had produced themselves before that, even though their thing didn't have any animations.
  The worst was that those machines actually did have a fancy hardware accelerated interface one could use. But for some reason they weren't ready yet for that. So everything I had done was just a placeholder anyways.
Analogue TV
I mean, the vacuum tubes will take quite a while to warm up at the start.

Dude. Everything?

I’m exhausted with how much stuff I can’t use like I used to because a dev or manufacturer updates software. Granted, the speed of things is much improved thanks to chip technology. Software, in some cases - many cases in my experience, is getting worse.

A big one for me is music. I prefer FM radio and my own music library (digital, iPod, cd, vinyl). Because, as it’s increasingly becoming the case with everything else, you’re relying on someone else or some algorithm to do the thinking for you. And when you finally get used to something, they break it or add needless complexity.

Another one is cameras - they just do way too much crap now. Lots of people might find added features and improvement but for me it just gets in the way of iso, aperture, shutter speed. And then they’re outdated in five years anyway.

I still have a dumb tv from ~2012. The back lighting is starting to go and I’m terrified of getting a new one.

The camera thing i always find kinda funny. I bought a "good camera" back in like 2006 and a bible on how to use it. I never really hot into it, because guess what, it's pretty hard.
Kinda the same goes for mobile phone cameras. I have a friend who always huys the new flagship phone because of the CaMeRA. He only uses auto everything and just hits the button. One day we went on a bicycle tour and he took like 100 pictures because instagram. I took one, because we were on top of a skilift and i have never seen it in the summer. We went directly to a birthday party and he showed off his pictures. The only picture he didn't take was from the skilift, so he pointed at me and said that i took one. The guy hunched over and was like oooooh, holy shit what a picture, what kind of camera are you rocking? It was a 250 dollar phone.

Hi-fi stereo systems with amplifiers, speakers and cables.

I could be wrong, but I think that old stereo systems generally have way better sound quality than Bluetooth systems, soundbars and the like. Physical media such as CDs or even Flac files (etc.) are of course impractical compared to streaming, but the audio quality is much higher.

However, since you can also stream audio without any problems, I would recommend every music fan to buy a used stereo system with high-quality speakers from the 2000s or even from the late 90s - in my opinion, excellent audio quality at a low price.

Bluetooth is low bitrate. The audio codecs need to use a lot of compression. Old audio equipment are analog which is better because it doesn't have so much digital conversions to completely wreck sound.
Bluetooth is still reliant on its original SBC codec from the early 2000s or something. 20 year old tech. Due to this nobody really took BT audio adoption seriously until the past several years when the zeitgeist finally tipped. Suddenly wireless headphones were every where.
I think maybe it was when Apple got rid of headphone jack. So the rest of the industry caved. And we all just handwave away how bluetooth audio has always sucked.
For compatibility every device maker sticks to that 20 year old common denominator. There are proprietary codecs that are supposed be better quality but then you get all the joys of cross compatibility hell. If your devices aren't inter-compatible they'll fall back to the common denominator. The basic SBC codec. Even with better quality codec they can only do so much with limited wireless bitrate.
Fun fact. There is higher quality configuration for the SBC codec but nobody configures it in software when making their device. People say it's indistinguishable from the highest quality proprietary codecs. But audio can subjective so eh...
Even if you were to enable the better configuration for SBC. All the devices out there in the world are built with the default configuration. No two devices sender/receiver will ever both use the better config. So it's impossible to fix this.
It doesn't matter anymore since all this in the process of being superseded by Bluethooth 5 audio. Which throws away all that and tries to do it all over again. It's still reliant on low bitrate wireless protocol though. So they can use whatever algorithmic trickery so they can claim produce perceptually indistinguishable from CD quality or lossless quality or whatever.
I'm sure there will always be people that say they can tell the difference. I don't doubt people can because it's simply not the same audio but a disassembly into bits for wireless transmission. Then reconstituted on the other-side as near as possible to the original.
- Oh, wow. Thanks for the in-depth explanation - very interesting. I had never really looked into the technical details. Well, I suppose I'm lucky that my reasonably new smartphone still has a 3.5mm audio jack, so I can continue to use my now rather old, but in my opinion still pretty good, headphones. It wasn't that easy to find a new smartphone with an audio jack, but then it looks like I've actually done everything right when it comes to listening to music.
They haven't gone though

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.

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.

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.
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.

Anything with asbestos in it. It's just a truly amazing material, with the one catch that it happens to dangerously irritate lung tissues. Relevant XKCD.

Video games. Don't get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.

The inclusion of obnoxiously long, often unskippable, intro sequences with studio credits and such. There used to be maybe a logo, maybe a very short sequence at worst, and almost always skippable.
Most of the big budget games are intended to be a grindy slog, often to get you to spend more money on micro transactions. Fun takes a back seat to intentionally addictive but objectively less enjoyable experiences.
Others are intended to be cinematic experience. Some of that can be fun, but sometimes I just want something like the old Sonic or Mario games that I can just pick up, play for a bit, and put down.
Enjoy a game? You could talk to friends about it at school, or buy a magazine that talks about it. The experience now is largely an unregulated online wasteland... If you find a community, it may quickly be beset by people that you really don't want to associate with, posting crap that no magazine ever would have published. Except for some of the funnier magazines, which may have published it just to rightfully mock the person.

The graphics have improved. In some cases the gameplay has improved. I don't want to downplay those. I'm just annoyed with how the overall experience has gotten worse on average.

Funny, I think video games, on the whole, are approaching a real golden age. Sure (like you said) if you stick to the $70 titles produced by big studios you're going to have an increasingly bad time. But the quality of ""Indie"" (but not even really since Indie studios are legit full companies now) games is rising damn-near exponentially. I personally haven't felt a need to choose an ""AAA"" title over an indie title in years and not only am I saving money but I'm enjoying my time with video games more than I ever have (including childhood!) in my life.
AAA games used to work when released.
- Anarchy Online.
#2 is a very good point, at least regarding the AAA space. This was my experience with Fallout 4.
Best example Battlefield. How can you manage to just get worse and worse with every title. And for many games you need to implement new story or major game mechanics etc. but for this one it would be brilliant if they would have only updated the visuals every 5-10 years

The physical aspect of laptops - the old ThinkPads were fucking amazing and while their specs may not be much to look at today they were equipped with adequate cooling and could take a fair amount of beating.

I don't want a light thin laptop that I could snap in two with one hand... I want a laptop that isn't going to overheat and can survive a few tumbles when someone trips over the power cord.

This is a funny one for me because I actually burned my lap on a ThinkPad back in something like 2003.
That’s an interesting example. Around 2010, I had a MacBook Pro (granted, before they were super thin) and I’d regularly pick it up by the screen. I then had a thinkpad for work and did the same thing and it cracked in half.
MacBook Air is rugged AF.

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.

Oh

I for-real misread this, as asking what is an example of tech that actually has gotten better, because the general rule is that things become more shit over time, as capitalism gets its hands on them

I was gonna say programming languages. Having come up in the time of C++ and Java, having Python and Go and Rust around is fuckin fantastic. Even Typescript is… well… it’s not JavaScript! See, things are getting better.

Literally everything else is getting worse over time.

Yeah developer tools have gotten easier and better. Never a better time to get into software. Even if its just to unlock your own devices. And repair things.
- Dude, it's fuckin magic now
  I was used to emacs + gdb + valgrind. That's actually pretty significantly powerful if you know how to use it, but I sort of bit the bullet really not that long ago and forced myself to learn VSCode, assuming that it would be a big over-feature-packed bunch of bullshit, and it's gold. It can debug any language. I can edit and run and debug code that's on the other side of an ssh connection in a git repo and all the different plugins and stuff just work (well, you know, for the most part, enough to be pretty massively useful).
  Plus I can have GPT spit out boilerplate for me and it does it all semi-instantly, and it can teach me libraries and idiomatic patterns in environments I'm unfamiliar with way faster than I could do it myself from the documentation.
  Fuckin magic man

My knees

Spend some money get an rpi or those cheapish intel boxes with an N95 or N100 processors. Install Kodi. Use smart TV as dumb TV!

Thanks. I'll look into it, but tvs are one of those things I expect to 'just work'. I swear my toaster is probably next 😮‍💨
- Oh i completely understand that sentiment. I think due to enshittification i feel that its a pipedream to have things work as intended unless you do stupid research about the product. Maybe time to create a lemmy slice for unshittified products!
I get computer monitors as tvs now. While its a tiny bit more expensive (in some cases), you get a pi and your just as good. Everything is HDMI now anyways...
- Ooh interesting. And you get TV sized monitors? That would be kinda awesome!

Depending on your definition of 'better' . In terms of repair ability and ease of maintenance, pretty much all old tech. In terms of price... There is no chance, it's insane how cheap tech has gotten.

The power consumption of old stuff is also extremely bad compared to now. So yeh you can have fridges, washing machines, or whatever appliances from the 70's that still work and are easy to maintain.. They use way, way, way too much power for what they do. In an ideal world where energy is free, sure that stuff is better. We don't tho.

Also, basically everything that uses software while it shouldn't, has a worse user experience than before.

My grand parents had a fridge in their basement from the 50s until they died 2010. That thing was built like a tank
Engineers of the past had very limited design knowledge, so generally subscribed to the "I don't know how to do this. Oh well, more good, morer bettererer."
Even fridges, washing machines, and whatever else from the '00s was better than now. It's really been the last 15ish years that literally everything has been "Big Mac-ified" to the disposable products that we now have to deal with.

Connectivity or rather the lack of it...

I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don't know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor's to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn't disable that my TV doesn't even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn't even connected to the internet.

Oh! I just remembered that I can control my neighbor's fan! I got tired of the constant notification that I could see it/set it up. So, I connected to it and the notification finally went away. But yeah: I can see when it's on/off and turn it on/off whenever I wish. I've never abused this power, they are old and will probably think their house is haunted or something. I just wanted the stupid notification to go away.
Fucking fan that turns on only for car chases.
- Get like some sort of turbine or like a dozen super loud shitty 90s PC case fans.
  Would make fast and the furious more interesting for sure.
  Edit: oh shit I just remembered those snowmobile arcade games with the fans, those were the best when I was a kid.
If I had a fan that did that I'd open it up and clip off the Bluetooth antenna.

XMPP > Matrix | Slack | Telegram

How is XMPP better than Matrix?

Tupperware. Grandmas stuff is still around. It’s probably unhealthy to use but modern stuff doesn’t last.

Get glass containers and silicone lids. It lasts and you don't have to deal with micro plastics.
- I also (re)use mason jars... I wonder if the lid is tight enough...
Old Tupperware has lead in it IIRC.

Holy shit rose tinted glasses all up in here. Let me be straight with you guys, televisions are definitely better, cell phones are much better, I don't think there's a single (consisting mostly of) electronics (some coffee grinders, maybe some other kitchen appliances) device that existed in the 90s/naughts that I would take over it's current iteration.

Food processors. Washing machines.

Printers

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).

My smart TV does some weird AI frame interpolation. It can be hard to tell in live action content, but it absolutely butchers things like anime. I had to dig through the settings to turn it off but it sometimes decides to turn it back on.
- that's the wrong kind of Weird Al :(
  I prefer Frank's 2000" TV.
- I hate when manufacturers put those settings on by default. I'm already someone who, when they get a new TV, will go through every settings menu it has to tune it to how I like it before I even start watching anything, so I catch those weird settings before they affect me.
  I guess I do this with all hardware (and even software, including video games), that is, fiddle with every possible setting until it's exactly how I want it (or as close as the thing will let me get).
  Which is why I don't own anything Apple.
Since they're both Sony
This would very likely work with most modern TVs that support HDMI CEC. Manufacturers like to put their own name on it, but Sony Bravia Link, Samsung Anynet+, LG SimpLink, Roku 1-Touch, and several more, are all just different names for the same control protocol.
My grandma's Phillips CRT TV input switching works the same way with all hardware.
- Some of us remember the days of RF-adapters and old school A/B switches that definitely were not as straightforward as turning it on and switching the input.
  I guess that's what I think of when I think of those days.

Just don't connect your TV to the internet and plug in a raspi. All the "smart" you could ever want without the bloat

Is it possible to connect an Ethernet cable to my TV, but only have it connect the local network, not the Internet? I.e., just a LAN connection. I have very little desire to watch YouTube on my TV, but I do have a personal Emby server that is not connected to the wider net but is accessible locally.
- If your firewall can set outbound rules, and you can control DHCP on your network so that you can reliably know the TV's IPv4 address, you can block the TV from reaching beyond the local network there with a "deny all from source address of TV" type rule.
  If your router/firewall is handling IPv6 though, it gets a lot more complicated, since the TV could have any number of addresses that change often.
That's the thing though it isn't. I don't need my TV reporting back to the mother ship how often I slug on the couch
- Oh it's fuckin nonsense. Which is why you run the pi and control what does and doesn't phone home.

Smart TVs and cae infotainnent systems, for sinilar reasons. Full of bloat, so many bugs and unreliable functioning.

My old Panasonic TV had a fugly but extremely speedy OTA guide. It would load, display and start accepting (rapid) input in 0.2s when you clicked “Guide”.
My new LG - I mean, for Darwin’s sake, it’s like no one gave two shits about OTA programming. The guide takes 1.5s to load, then each channel row loads in, sloooowly, and scrolling is like shuffling clay tablets.
I’d take my old TV back if I could.

You can bring it back!
Or just use a mechanical (200$+) keyboard!

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.

Keyboards. They had way better and more innovative switches back then. You'll be hard pressed to find anything today that doesn't use cherry, or cherry clones.

Happens to everything that becomes a commodity.
But Model Ms and Model Fs are still in production, and the MK ecosystem has never been so vibrant

I remember back a decade or so ago when phones had a fully customizable ringtone option, wouldn't constantly tell you they're overheating when it's only thirty degrees out, had a block function that actually worked, didn't dump spam calls on you, wasn't always spying on you, and didn't cost so much per month, often coupled with the possible fact you don't actually use it everyday and maybe only have it to keep your overworried parents pleased.

I don't know about you, but for the unforeseeable future, mine is, for the large part, ghosted. I remember being in a dispute with someone where they asked what my number was as a form of feeling secure about me. "What age do you live in" he bitterly asked, "everyone uses a phone, are you a fake zoomer who is BSing me". This is the pedestal the existence of phones thrives on. Imagine if I was Amish, do you think I would survive past the job interview stage of finding a new job?

Even when I had high hopes, the way people would market the thousand-app aspect of it was absolutely fierce, you couldn't go tech shopping without the person selling you stuff going on and on about the smallest nook and crannies in each extra feature like they were Steve Irwin trying to teach you the beauty of whatever animal you just happened to step on (RIP Steve Irwin), and you couldn't do so much as go to a festival without a business person from the phone stall running up to you asking to pay for new plans like a Jehovah's Witness on a leash (always stood out to me because they were the only ones who would operate like this).

Phones today are borderline what they are in Futurama.

One wheel

The original

easy to replace batteries,
easy maintenance,
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

batteries are now locked to the device.
hey! Ride carefully! Battery pack unplugging (even by accident) bricks the device 😆
uuuh, I bricked the device. What now? Send the device across Atlantic ocean to HQ in the US to plug it back in 🤣 🤣

VGA just worked. HDMI and DP aren’t nearly as reliable.

Roads. Used to lay down concrete and they’d last for a decade. Now they put down asphalt on top of a concrete base. Granted they cost less in the long run to maintain.

The amount of times I've struggled when setting up monitors over the past 5 years with HDMI and DP...only to have them eventually work in a way I had it previously when it wouldn't...is too damn high.
My workplace still uses VGA monitors. They just don't die.
My city has been putting plastic in the asphalt. Apparently makes it last longer and way smoother. Hopefully doesn't create more micro plastic waste. (It probably does)

Books and authorship in general. To make a living these days many feel pressured into using closed source corpo messaging systems like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc to promote some bs brand to sell books because the market is flooded with so much garbage from AI generated to auto translates to just poorly written unedited gibberish.

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.

Going with MacBooks. Used to be you could upgrade RAM and other components. Now, you have to get a new machine.

To be fair, MACs are fast (sometimes too fast), and efficient; the perks of having RAM soldered millimeters away from CPU.
But they went and shat the bed, locking the SSDs to the machine and charging $200 for an upgrade. Stupidly absurd corporate BS

Analog cable with a cable-ready TV was better than digital cable. No set-top box with bullshit rental fees, no weird lag waiting for it to "boot up" or change channels, no interactivity so they couldn't easily try to upsell you, etc.

user friendly 'self installs' in many places.....

TVs

Movies. You used to be able to just buy them and own the data.

Now you have to pray the other party doesn't 'alter the deal' and if you are proactive about safekeeping the stuff you own you're a 'thief'.

Alternatively, everything is now digital which makes it super easy to pirate and keep forever in a universal format. The main exception is music since spotify and the like make everything so easy that most people don't bother to upload albums.

Yeah ok having both makes sense as it allows easier controls for the passenger to use or while being stopped