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?
Did they have this tech 10 years ago?
I rest my case
I dunno, did they have those alarm clocks you have to chase around 10 years ago?
Technology? No.
Consumer Electronics? Yes. Or at least there’s a debatable transition and cutoff point.
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’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.
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.
Lol what? You’re dumb
I didn’t know gen Alpha was on Lemmy.
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.
I somewhat agree: tech peaked just when it was high end and absolutely not relying on manufacturer’s cloud / subscription / customer portal enrollment … 😓
Tech is better, but content is worse. I have a smart TV from 2014 that I’m gonna use until it’s dead. When a new technology comes out, it’s all about gaining market trust, so the product is built to last and has cool features (generally) without the ads and data theft. My TV doesn’t play ads, but still has all the tech I need. Anything it can’t do, my PS4 can.
Content?
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In my opinion, technology keeps improving, however that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s getting better. I think innovation in technology peaked from the 2000s to the early 2010s, after this period however, it has continually become more and more “enshitified,” meaning that features no one wanted suddenly being added. For example, “ai coffee maker” (this is real), like who asked for this? Not to mention, not only is everything more bloated, but levels of privacy have decreased significantly; every aspect of your digital life is capitalized on for advertising. The early 2010s were simpler times.
no
It really depends. Google as in the search engine is getting worse every year. Websites went from being fun and exciting to just a vehicle to show ads.
true the internet as a tool has declined in usefulness
Absolutely no. 2014 can eat my multiple TBs of SSDs’ asses.
In my opinion as an engineer, methods like the VDI2206, VDI2221 or ISO9000 have done irreparable damage to human creativity. Yes, those methods work to generate profitable products, but by methodizing the creative process you have essentially created an echo chamber of ideas. Even if creativity is strongly encouraged by those methods in the early stages of development, the reality often looks different. A new idea brings new risks, a proven idea often brings calculable profits.
In addition to that, thanks to the chinese, product life cycles have gotten incredibly short, meaning, that to generate a constant revenue stream, a new product must have finished development while the previous one hasn’t even reached it’s peak potential. As a consequence, new products have only marginal improvements because there is no time for R&D to discover bigger progressive technologies between generations. Furthermore the the previous generation is usually sold along side the next one, therefore a new product can not be so advanced as to make the previous one completely obsolete.If you really want to see this with your own eyes, get a bunch of old cassette players from the 90s from different manufacturers. If you take them apart you can easily see how different the approaches where to solve similar problems back in the day.
What? No. lol. Tech is still improving. You’re just thinking of the bad new stuff and good old stuff. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Phone’s batteries and resolutions are much better than they were in 2014. Voice assistants never really took off. Smart home stuff is maaaaybe a little better now but there are also a shit ton more brands now and most are crap. But that also means cheaper and more widespread.
I just got a new phone, and the ai voice assistant is actually good. It’s what people imagined it was going to be when they first came out. It doesn’t have access yet to a lot of things, so it can’t ‘act’ on things, but it actually gives consistently relevant info.
One thing I’ve used it for recently is I was in a game and knew there was a secret chest and it could accurately tell me what to do to get it Way better than looking up a video.
The thing is that 10 years ago the phone I had was very similar to the one I have now, the laptop I had was very similar to the one I have now, and up until very recently I still had parts from the desktop I used to had back then installed on my current desktop, I also visited lots of the same sites I do now and played some of the same games. But if you go back another 10 years it’s very different. In 2004 I didn’t had a cellphone, by 2014 I had a Google Nexus, now I have a Google Pixel. In 2004 I didn’t had a laptop, in 2014 I had a 8GB RAM 512GB dual core laptop, now I have a 32GB 1TBB 6 core one. In 2004 My desktop had 256MB RAM 10GB single core 1.6GHz processor, in 2014 it had 16GB RAM 1TB 6 core, now it has 32GB RAM 3TB 6 cores.
Obviously my computer now is much better than the one from 10 years ago, bit not by the same amount than the one form 2014 was from the one from 2004. To try to put it in perspective I would need to have around 500GB of RAM for it to be the same leap in RAM amount.
Phone screen pixel density actually went down in the last 10 years due to bigger screens.
I feel like smartphones + internet peaked about 10 years ago and has now steadily become enshittified. I have never used “google assistant” because it takes less time to just type something in to my phone or tap the setup for my alarm.
So yes, definitely feel that way. Consumer tech had less bullshit masking as improvements ten years ago.
Yes. Name one useful product Google has released in 15 years.
I can think of one (assistant/gemini) but it actually gets worse every minute so it supports the main idea that shits lame for a while now.
I haven’t adopted a Google technology since 2010 when I got my first Android phone. They haven’t made anything that lasted since; basically everything they introduce is going to be abandoned and shut down in ~3 years because they haven’t changed away from their “move fast and break things” era. “Google Wank is now Android Jerk. No Wait, Android Jerk is being sunset in favor of Play Withyourself. Wait no, users are being migrated over to Youtube Crotch.” Fuck it I’ll use my hand.
I dunno, I just upgraded my six year old phone to the latest model and it’s pretty fuckin dope. I don’t use anything Google, though, so I can’t comment on their assistant.
What did you got on that new device that wasn’t available 6 years ago?
Much more storage space, a higher-rez 120hz screen (beautiful), cameras that rival my DSLR but take MUCH better low light pictures (cats), USB-C, more speed (I didn’t need more speed, but it’s nice that it’s there), and absolutely bonkers battery life (my old phone still lasted most of a day on one charge, which is crazy… but this phone lasts FOREVER!)
