Ask Lemmy

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.

This is industrialism. All tech does this. You may have also had some rose colored glasses about business.

Virt-a-Mate, in case anyone is wondering about adult VR apps.

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.

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.

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

Facebook's AR glass prototype is fire. It's too expensive to release to the public but in a few years...

Tech in general isn't accelerating as fast. Drives aren't twice as big every year at half the price. Processors aren't twice as fast. 2024 stuff is still better than 2021 stuff, but it's not twice as good. A few things have take a couple steps backward as they try to wrangle AI data capture into our lives. Up until recently, we've been able to scale thing down, so the same thing, only smaller and faster, but we're hitting the limit of that, which is why people are latching on to ML to distract us from the fact that our gaming system from 6 years ago is still fine.

No, I prefer my 2020 phone over my 2014 one... But maybe that is not entirely what you want to mean in your post.

You don't need to upgrade your "tech" yearly though.

Technology? No.

Consumer Electronics? Yes. Or at least there's a debatable transition and cutoff point.

Technology is still evolving at break neck speed. On the other hand, companies are degrading/restricting these new techs to make more money.

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.

Hell no. Fuck that shit

We had like 500 form factors for phones, now it's standardized

Resistive touch screens? Ewww

Like a billion mp3/MP4/ipod clones? Just to listen to music? A thing which now we can do easily on our phones?

Slow ass ssd/nand memory chips?

Freaking 1 core processors on phones, PCs and laptops?

Seriously someone misses their devices behaving like slowpokes?

Wireless audio devices that worked like shit unless they were extremely high end? Oh yeah wired worked great, but we were flooded with a ton of clones of those too. So no great quality from those "Skeleton Sweet" or "earpods".

Batteries that were in dire need of charge at least thrice a day?

Wireless routers that with any luck had gains that allowed to step out of the room?

Car wise, no stability control? You seriously fucking with stability control? That shit avoids like 25% of all car accidents globally

Medical wise, CRISPR? gene therapy for muscular dystrophy? Vaccines that can be whipped out in months?

Innovation slowing down? In what planet do you fuckers live on?

I'd say more but I think you get my point

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I somewhat agree: tech peaked just when it was high end and absolutely not relying on manufacturer's cloud / subscription / customer portal enrollment ... 😓