Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone else feel like technology - specifically consumer tech - kinda peaked over a decade ago? I’m 37, and I remember being awed between like 2011 and 2014 with phones, voice assistants, smart home devices, and what websites were capable of. Now it seems like much of this stuff either hasn’t improved all that much, or is straight up worse than it used to be. Am I crazy? Have I just been out of the market for this stuff for too long?
Yes.
Computers are the worst in my opinion, everything is tens to hundreds of times faster by specs and yet it feels as slow as it did in the 90s, I swear.
Network speeds are faster than ever but websites load tons of junk that have nothing to do with the content you’re after, and the networks are run by corpos who only care about making money, and when they have no competition and you need their service, why would they invest in making their systems work better?
That was when innovation slowed down and rent-seeking increased, once the big players started exploiting their oiligopolies in earnest.
Not really peaked. More like we entered the era of diminishing returns which btw is great if you are not blinded by the marketing. Mid to low range phones are fairly cheap and more than adequate for almost anything . Do you know how shit even mid range phones were 10+ years ago and how fast they were getting too old to be usable. Right now its more than reasonable to use any smartphone for a 3 to 5 years and probably even longer ( before only champions like samsung Galaxy note 4 could even hope to match that ). Everything you talk about is cheaper and more afforable than ever before( if you do the usual and not buy overpriced brands beacuse of a brand like apple , galaxy phone , roomba robot vacuums etc… ). The only thing thats a shitshow right now are websites and computer prices precisly beacuse right now the current hype is LLM( which makes graphic cards really f expensive and kinda hits website by ricoshet due to the negative LLM influence ).
Actually even as smartphones go there is a progress. Folding phones. Coincidently they are less relaiable and not as long lived . Exatcly as smartphones were 10 years ago.
Also smartphones were something much grander than a simple tech innovation. They were truly a society changing innovation like cars, trains , planes or a computer. They just peaked much faster than cars , trains or planes. In fact they probably had bigger impact on society than computers.
I’ve been saying this for a while, and have estimated a similar 10-year time frame.
Most new tech (except for medical advancements) doesn’t really benefit the average person. Instead, it just gives corporations and governments more data, more control, and the ability to squeeze more money out of us. They don’t represent actual improvements to society as a whole or to individual users.
Did they have this tech 10 years ago?
I rest my case
Where can i buy this?
The device called novint falcon, you might find it in eBay. You can get other haptic devices but usually the price range is higher.
Is that a dick under the boobs?
No it’s a banana cleaner for husband.
Are you kink shaming?
I never heard of dick scissoring
I just had to book a flight.
Frontier forces you to download an app now to check in (there is a well hidden option to do it on web, but the page never loads on laptop nor mobile in multiple browsers).
I tried to rent a parking spot, and 2/4 places would not load quotes at all (again web and mobile and multiple browsers). I probably would’ve used one of the two that didn’t load if their sites had worked. Their loss I guess.
I’d just like it to not feel like each interaction I have with technology, and I guess by extension the world, is becoming increasingly adversarial. The tech itself seems to keep getting better though.
Technology? No.
Consumer Electronics? Yes. Or at least there’s a debatable transition and cutoff point.
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
Yeah but Facebook was invented when I was a teen and I knew pretty quickly that shit was evil.
At 15 the thing i wanted most in the world was an escape hatch from all these other assholes I had to spend my time with everyday at school. Right around that time Facebook arrived ensuring they would have more access to me and the people around me more then any other time in history.
You must have been very mature for your age, and very cool.
How did you feel about pop music that came out when you were young? Born in the wrong generation at all?
This is the answer.
This is the answer.
I beg to disagree. The answer is 42. The real issue being: to what question? :p
would be nice, but isn’t true according to Douglas Adams himself:
Inspiration for the number 42
Douglas Adams revealed the reason why he chose forty-two in this message .
“It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’”.
personally, i think it’s way funnier that it is actually, completely, deliberately meaningless ;)
Fucking hell it’s true. This is exactly the kind of obscure nonsense I love, how did it take me 30 years to learn this?
That’s very cool
What about things that are invented when I’m younger than 15?
That’s number 1.
Man, the toys invented around that time are the best… But that’s probably all you’re really paying attention to at that point.
And for kids now? Well they have things like Skibidi Toilet to keep them occupied.
But for a more serious answer I think that’s when they’re in their most creative mindset and everything is new to them and they’re learning how things work.
Obviously the exact age at which someone starts to take an interest in tech is going to be different from person to person. For me, I was a fan of reading popular science magazines at a younger age as well as manuals on all of the different setting/functions/features of operating systems…
Yes you are correct, it’s worse now. At first it was creative, innovative products that made things more convenient or fun, or at least didn’t harm its users. Now all the new things are made by immature egotistical billionaire techbros: generative AI which has ruined the internet by polluting it with so much shit you can’t get real information any more, not to mention using up all our power and water resources, the enshittification of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 that was pure shit from the get-go, IOT “smart” appliances like TVs, doorbells, thermostats, refrigerators that spy on you and your neighbors, shit “self-driving” killer cars that shouldn’t be allowed on the roads, whatever the hell that new VR Metaverse shit is, ads, ads, ads, ads, and on and on. It’s a tech dystopia.
I work in VR and AR. I traveled to a conference this week to showcase demos of my work.
I have in my backpack a headset that’s costing few hundred bucks and can spawn in front if your eyes 3D models you can directly manipulate with your hands or a pen.
It just works.
I even use it offline while flying.
This didn’t exist 10years ago. It’s amazing.
It always amazes me how much professional uses VR/AR has, and what kind of stuff has been created for it by all sorts of industries. Some see it as a failure because the consumer variants have not seen revolutionairy improvements over the past years, but the industry around it is quickly growing. So many companies use it, that the technology doesn’t need games to survive.
This is industrialism. All tech does this. You may have also had some rose colored glasses about business.
Technology is still evolving at break neck speed. On the other hand, companies are degrading/restricting these new techs to make more money.
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.
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.
Personally I just really love the fact that there are some easily affordable cars that in my very subjective opinion look nearly timeless. Easily affordable only because I live in Europe and do my own repairs: Mostly they are 15-20 year old German cars that WILL bankrupt you if give them the chance. W211 Benz and E60/61 BMW come to mind. W221 too, but I’m a bit scared of that one.
I was going to name some Japanese cars too, but I just realized that those are no longer affordable. God damn Fast and Furious movies lol
And the infuriating thing is that there’s nothing about electric cars that inherently requires constant internet access. Built-in GPS is easily replaced with a Bluetooth link to the GPS on your phone. Anything else can be enabled when it’s actually needed, which is almost never.
Well the gaming industry was killed by mobile games in my opinion. They make so much money from micro transactions on shitty games that are just designed to keep us addicted. When the PS2 era was around, even the PS3 era there are games coming out all the time. Now it feels like big games come out every 5 years instead of 3 a year. I’m sure I’m just missing a lot of games because I’m not in the environment that keeps me up to date as much, but I feel like I’d still catch wind of something.
Why make an epic game that with in depth detail and good story lines when you can make 10x as much money having no story and half the work.
The key is to ignore AAA and focus on indie. Look at the last year: Helldivers, Hades 2, Terra Nil, Deadlock, Planet Crafter. Deadlock is the closest to being AAA, but Valve isn’t exactly EA.
The quality required to launch a successful AAA game now just takes more, but the prices don’t go up significantly so same staff more work…
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.
Steam deck: am I a joke to you
I actually hope Steam Deck’s success does force Nintendo to take them seriously, but at the moment their market share is much less overlapped because the Deck primarily offers PC games, even though Switch emulation is possible too.
Also the $400 entry model price would sound even more appealing if the Switch 2 comes put with a similar price. At that point Steam Deck is a steal lol.
3M Steam Deck users vs 100M+ Switch users: Yes.
I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade
Agree. 15+ years ago tech was developed for the tech itself, and it was simply ran as a service, usually for profit.
Now there’s too much corporate pressure on monetizing every single aspect, so the tech ends up being bogged down with privacy violations, cookie banners, AI training, and pretty much anything else that gives the owner one extra anual cent per user.
Aka “enshittification”
Enshittification was always a thing but it has gotten exponentially worse over yhe past decade. Tech used to be run by tech enthusiasts, but now venture capital calls the shot a lot more than they used to.
What’s crazy is that they were already making unbelievable amounts of money, but apparently that wasn’t enough for them. They’d watch the world burn if it meant they could earn a few extra pennies per flame.
You know this happened with cars also, until there is a new disruption by a new player or technology - companies are just coasting on their cash cows. Part of the market cycle I guess.
[off topic?]
Frank Zappa siad something like this; in the 1960’s a bunch of music execs who liked Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong had to deal with the new wave coming in. They decided to throw money at every band they could find and as a result we got music ranging from The Mama’s and The Papas to Iron Butterfly and beyond.
By the 1970s the next wave of record execs had realized that Motown acts all looked and sounded the same, but they made a lot of money. One Motown was fantastic, but dozens of them meant that everything was going to start looking and sounding the same.
Similar thing with the movies. Lots of wild experimental movies like Easy Rider and The Conversation got made in the 1970s, but when Star Wars came in the studios found their goldmine.
But even then, there were several gold mines found in the 1990’s, funded in part due to the dual revenue streams of theater releases and VHS/DVD.
You’ve got studios today like A24 going with the scatter shot way of making movies, but a lot of the larger studios got very risk adverse.
Just saw Matt Damon doing the hot wings challenge. He made a point about DVDs. He’s been producing his own stuff for decades. Back in the 1990s the DVD release meant that you’d get a second payday and the possibility of a movie finding an audience after the theatrical run. Today it’s make-or-break the first weekend at the box office.
Lots of the privacy violations already existed, but then the EU legislated first that they had to have a banner vaguely alluding to the fact that they were doing that kind of thing, and later, with GDPR, that they had to give you the option to easily opt-out.
The question op is posing is:
Which new tech?
In the decade op’s talking about everything was new. The last ten years nothing is new and all just rehash and refinements.
ML, AI, VR, AR, cloud, saas, self driving cars (hahahaha) everything “new” is over a decade old.
AI is not technically new, but generative AI was not a mature technology in 2014. It has come a long way since then.
Well it is literally not going as fast.
The rate of “technology” (most people mean electronics) advancement was because there was a ton of really big innovations at in a small time: cheap PCBs, video games, internet, applicable fiber optics, wireless tech, bio-sensing, etc…
Now, all of the breakthrough inventions in electronics have been done (except chemical sensing without needing refillable buffer or reactive materials), Moore’s law is completely non-relevant, and there are a ton of very very small incremental updates.
Electronics advancements have largely stagnated. MCUs used 10 years ago are still viable today, which was absolutely not the case 10 years ago, as an example. Pretty much everything involving silicon is this way. Even quantum computing and supercooled computing advancements have slowed way down.
The open source software and hardware space has made giant leaps in the past 5 years as people now are trying to get out from the thumb of corporate profits. Smart homes have come a very long way in the last 5 years, but that is very niche. Sodium ion batteries also got released which will have a massive, mostly invisible effect in the next decade.
Electronic advancement, if you talk about cpus and such, hasn’t stagnated, its just that you don’t need to upgrade any more.
I have a daily driver with 4 cores and 24GB of RAM and that’s more than enough for me. For example.
It has absolutely stagnated. Earlier transistors were becoming literally twice as dense every 2 years. Clock speeds were doubling every few years.
Year 2000, first 1GHz, single core CPU was released by nvidia.
2010 the Intel core series came out. I7 4 cores clocked up to 3.33GHz. Now, 14 years later we have sometimes 5GHz (not even double) and just shove more cores in there.
What you said “it’s just that you don’t need to upgrade anymore” is quite literally stagnation. If it was a linear growth path from 1990 until now, every 3-5 years, your computer would be so obsolete that you couldn’t functionally run newer programs on them. Now computers can be completely functional and useful 8-10+ years later.
However. Stagnation isn’t bad at all. It always open source and community projects with fewer resources to catch up and prevents a shit ton of e-waste. The whole capitalistic growth growth growth at any cost is not ever sustainable. I think computers now, while less exciting have become much more versatile tools because of stagnation.
“Mores laws dead” is so lame, and wrong too.
Check out SSD, 3D memory, GPU…
If you do not need to upgrade then it doesn’t mean things aren’t getting better (they are) just that you don’t need it or feel it is making useful progress for your use case. Thinking that because this, it doesn’t advance, is quite the egocentric worldview IMO.
Others need the upgrades, like the crazy need for processing power in AI or weather forecasts or cancer research etc.
GPU advances have also gone way way down.
For many years, YoY GPU increases lead to node shrinkages, and (if we simplify it to the top tier card) huge performance gains with slightly more power usage. The last 4-5 generations have seen the exact opposite: huge power increases closely scaling with performance increases. That is literally stagnation. Also they are literally reaching the limit of node shrinkage with current silicon technology which is leading to larger dies and way more heat to try to get even close to the same generational performance gain.
Luckily they found other uses for uses GPU acceleration. Just because there is an increase in demand for a new usecase does not, in any way, mean that the development of the device itself is still moving at the same pace.
That’s like saying that a leg of a chair is reaching new heights of technological advancement because they used the same chair leg to be the leg of a table also.
It is a similar story of memory. They are literally just packing more dies in a PCB or layering PCBs outside of a couple niche ultra-expensive processes made for data centers.
My original comment was also correct. There is a reason why >10 year old MCUs are still used in embedded devices today. That doesn’t mean that it can’t still be exciting finding new novel uses for the same technology.
Again, stagnation ≠ bad
The area that electronics technology has really progressed quite a bit is Signal Integrity and EMC. The things we know now and can measure now are pretty crazy and enable the ultra high frequency and high data rates that come out in the new standards.
This is not about pro gamer upgrades. This is about the electronics (silicon based) industry (I am an electronics engineer) as a whole
Dude repeat it all you want, mores law still rules lol.
