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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Gee, now that’s just crappy work. It should be able to add (or remove) a “wall” without assuming away the rest of the house.
Overdesigning is one thing. Missing obvious functionality while doing it is quite another.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
- The fricken Artemis Program vs. the Apollo Program. (I consult with the space industry a lot, so this makes me feel things)
You obviously don’t know shit about tools. They are waaay better now.
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.
No that’s not the exception cordless tools will kill anything from even 10 years ago in torque and speed and weight. This idiot doesn’t know anything. A cheap brushless hercules drill from HF will absolutely destroy a nicad professional grade 10 year old Milwaukee or dewalt.
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.
Again, you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Tools have improved significantly. I’ve been in the trades for a long time, I started at 14 years old working for my step dad remodeling houses and doing roofing and plumbing and electrical over 25 years ago. I know what tools were like back then, and the tools we have today. And the tools and processes are night and day better today. Just stfu, you have no clue.
The power tools today kill anything from 10 years ago in torque and speed and weight. Lmao… you think the brushed motors with nicad batteries were better than the brushless motor with lithium we have today? The cordess circ saws could barely make it through a 1/2" sheet of plywood 15 years ago and now tgey rip through it like a corded saw. Fucking please buddy. Ratchets and wrenches have significantly improved with less back drag and more teeth meaning less degree of swing. Wrenches with ratchet ends. All kinds of specialty tools that didn’t exist Processes in plumbing and electrical with pex and other types of clamp and crimp fittings have significantly improved. I can go on and on across multiple tools and processes. You are a moron.
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”
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!
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.
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.
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
Android “swipe” keyboards in general are almost all terrible right now. We had it, I would get the correct word most of the time and I could do it fast. Now, no matter which one I try using - Google, Samsung, Microsoft, that FOSS one - nearly every sentence i type has some word that it gets wrong.
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.
- 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.
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.
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)
I’m eyeing a fairphone or a pixel (graphene) when Europe makes swappable batteries the standard. Until then, I hope my phone keeps on working, I don’t change phone unless my last one dies.
I kept using my LG G5 for years after I might have upgraded just for the swappable batteries.
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.
Being able to swap a battery to keep a phone working well for a few more years makes sense.
Oh you mean replace. Swap means (for me) to switch from one battery to another on the go. Of course, replacing batteries in any appliance should be easy and cheap. Maybe not necessarily being performed by the customer.
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.
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.
TVs
Buttons.
Everything used to have buttons and switches for things. You knew when you activated something because you could feel the button getting pressed.
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.
That’s the main reason I stick with OnePlus. The notification slider is a feature the I need on every phone.
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.
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.
Does your car have the rocket launcher button directly next to the volume knob or what do you mean with life and death?
I mean looking down at a touch screen that offers no tactile feedback is dangerous. And feeling a button click that your muscle memory can intuitively find is not.
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.
He only wanted to make sure that no one else could fly his shuttle.
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.
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…
