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Car stereos.
They used to have buttons and tape decks and cd players in em. From the factory.
I donβt 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 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 grandma's Phillips CRT TV input switching works the same way with all hardware.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 Assistant/Google Now (RIP).
My phone 10 years ago used to have a component called Google Now on Tap which would show me useful information like where I parked my car, when my next appointment is, what my commute looks like, what the weather is going to be, etc.
It was so context aware and good at predictive algorithms, I never really had to do more than swipe left to get what I needed. But of course now that's in the "Killed by Google" graveyard because it didn't enforce enough "engagement" with apps and services that could feed you ads.
In general, I find Google Assistant to be less helpful overall and worse at understanding what I am trying to do. It used to be a daily convenience for me, but now I can't remember the last time I ever bothered with it. Not to mention every time you use it these days, it has to throw in a "By the way,..." suggestion that just feels like an ad for itself, because it is never related to anything I want to do.
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:
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.
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
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 doesnβt 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 didnβt 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 βbasic display driverβ like tools to handle emergency situations.
It's true. It would make the whole thing more resilient.
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.
Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.
Video games. Don't get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.
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.
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.