Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

I was watching a programme about Nokia which mentioned how Apple came along with its massive touchscreen, which sacrificed battery life and durability i.e. we all now accept that a phone battery will need charging at least every night and if we drop the phone the screen will shatter, which wasn't the case before. There must be tons of these?

My own personal bugbear is how you used to be able to change the TV channel with a remote instantaneously rather than having to wait a couple of seconds after pressing the button and now that's seemingly impossible.

On a larger scale it's probably a backwards step that everyone is expected to have a recent smartphone to conveniently do loads of things (show your boarding pass, or whatever) and shit stops being supported within a few versions. Music compression too. But I guess I'm thinking of specific annoyances that shouldn't even be problems.

I was only half-watching the Nokia programme so please feel free to correct my comprehensive history of Apple there.

the original gameboy lasted about eight years through new release support and actual durability of the hardware

Everybody's landline used to work in a blackout.

^^ good one, also you can no longer get DC power from landlines

taking the headphone jack away

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too.

sez you, "Telecom"

:)

at my gym i have to log in on a giant touch screen to run on the fucking treadmill. the other day it asked me if i wanted to install updates. hl;kjalkjh;asgdhl;kasgd

My own personal bugbear is how you used to be able to change the TV channel with a remote instantaneously rather than having to wait a couple of seconds after pressing the button and now that's seemingly impossible.

― kinder, 14. august 2019 00:14 (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Wait, what?

oh god please just go away

iPod clickwheel RIP

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too

Right? It used to actually be enjoyable to talk on the phone (not to mention that handsets were much more ergonomic/comfortable/seemed less likely to induce brain cancer), no wonder phone calls seem like an intrusive nuisance now.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/the-us-navy-says-no-to-touchscreens-maybe-automakers-should-too/

I realized too when I got an iPhone for xmas how much it suffered from an absence of the trackball on my old phone.

The iPad was a bit of a stumble
-techno beaver

remote control thing is a great example. that drives me crazy any time i'm in a hotel or something and just want to enjoy the mindless zone-out of channel surfing. related: TVs coming with "motion smoothing" turned on by default and sometimes with no option to turn it off.

* many websites/apps/etc. have gotten slower and junkier as they've added features, loaded up with data-draining graphics and videos and scripts. like, just trying to see what the hourly weather forecast for tomorrow is involves a lot more clicking and waiting than it did a few years ago. google maps is another one that's gotten a lot shittier.

* new laptops with only USB-C ports so that to make this sleek, elegant thing fully functional and do basic things you need to buy an expensive dongle and have it hang awkwardly off the apple lust object.

* also in general, laptops replacing desktops for a computer that remains at a desk at all times --- massively worse ergonomically and less computer for your money.

* not to make this a physical media thread but def all the downsides of the streaming world belong here. but obv there are many tradeoffs.

* general trend of offloading labor onto unpaid customers (self check out, surveys, pressure from amazon to answer support questions for products you've bought, etc.).

* death of big-budget 2D animation (in hollywood anyway).

history is littered with these of course, cf. invention of agriculture and human health/life expectancy/society. or cars replacing transit networks, all of those stories. or at a pettier level, all the changes in shaving since idk the 1960s or 70s.

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too.

i hung onto my landline for longer than most people and in the early days of cellphones it was infuriating talking to anyone on theirs because the audio quality was terrible. it's better now but still not as good as landlines were.

the substitution of plastics for paper, cloth, wood, and metal (not as acceptable as it used to be but never more pervasive)

Color printer/scanners are a now an everyday cheapish appliance but their rate of malfunction makes them barely worth the trouble.
A black and white laserjet that couldn’t scan shit would cost you an arm but you could be sure that sucker would turn out pages for ages, iirc.

A lot of fast fashion type stuff bugs me, like having to actually look for cotton underwear.

as someone who lives in a country where you wear gloves several months out of the year, i daily cursed the engineer who introduced thumbprint unlock as the default on the iPhone

the default of ‘pick up your phone and look at it before we reveal the content of a text’ on the iPhone ten also a v stupid idea

A black and white laserjet that couldn’t scan shit would cost you an arm but you could be sure that sucker would turn out pages for ages, iirc.

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, August 13, 2019 5:02 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Brother still makes products of this caliber and they aren't disturbingly expensive.

at a pettier level, all the changes in shaving since idk the 1960s or 70s.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, August 13, 2019 4:26 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

development of laser hair removal is a big improvement tbh

Color printer/scanners are a now an everyday cheapish appliance but their rate of malfunction makes them barely worth the trouble.

Not to be a commercial but after years of having problems with inkjet printers and generally feeling like they were the most unreliable piece of technology in existence, I bought an Epson Eco-tank and it has been life-changing. I actually love my printer now and wouldn’t trade it for anything. 100% reliable, scans and prints great, I haven’t had to refill it yet and I’ve had it for... 2 years? No more of the seemingly constant cartridge replacements. /commercial

Of course, that’s the opposite of what this thread is about.

I just had a 1958 Grundig tube radio repaired, it sounds amazing; finding someone who could work on it was the hard part

it wasn't really so long ago that devices like radios, TVs, stereo components, and even personal computers were designed to be repaired and kept in service for many years; now the same kinds of devices go directly to the landfill as soon as they fail, if not sooner; the fact that the replacement devices are cheaper and more capable than the junked ones is not a particularly impressive sign of progress

The loss of institutional knowledge about how to build heavy-duty, reliable liquid propellant rocket systems has had a massive impact on space programs around the world.

Now somebody tell me they have a way to get to the moon just fine.

I’m gonna be really anxious when the time comes to buy a new TV because the one I have has been so good for so long *raps on wooden table*

i was curious about buying a new tv - i haven't had one since the mid 90s, a portable black-and-white model from the 80s passed on to me from my parents - and the enormous variations in crazy features and too-good-to-be-credible prices just made me give up

I started with the knowledge that I wanted a Sony of a certain size with a certain number of HDMI inputs and went with that, I think?

i recently had ceiling fans installed, and we got the ones with lights built in

too late i realised that to turn the lights on and off we now need to fumble around with a dinky battery powered remote

curse a society that no longer understands that light switches should be easy to find in the dark

(also every button press is accompanied by an annoying beeping sound that can't be muted)

that everything has a remote is ridiculous.

Wait, I've never turned lights on or off with a battery-powered remote. That is not a backward step I accept!

Landlines, though. Still had one until 2011. I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person who finds it physically difficult to converse satisfyingly on a smartphone.

i hate talking on the phone now, it makes me antsy and eager to get off the phone. but i don't know if that is something abt the phone itself, or how my expectations and practices around phones have changed, esp thru texting taking the place of calls for almost all the things i used to make calls for. and the ppl on the other end feeling the same way and distracted and eager to get off the phone too.

everyone hates talking on the phone now.
it's social anxiety and because we have so many job related activities where one is on the phone all the time.

although my mom still chats away like she is teenager of the year.

It used to be that after CRT and plasma declined, televisions were a forced compromise: backlit LCD or nothing, which suck for watching films (bad shadow levels, motion smoothing, etc etc). I white-knuckled the gap between plasma and OLED by self-repairing my plasma when the power supply failed, and then buying a used plasma which got me through (barely, with lines on the screen and driver failures) just until the OLEDs came down enough for me to consider an end-of-line clearance price.
Now of course I have the best TV of my life - it's kind of ironic because my film library is worth probably 5-10 times as much as the screen I watch them on.

Landlines were easier to have a conversation on because it was in real time. Cellphones have gotten better, but they're still bouncing audio off of metal towers like a pinball machine. Landlines were the technological final product of an evolution that began with two cans and a piece of string, and worked just fine.

I have the same tv remote problem with my microwave.

Are there really cars out there that combat drowsiness by not letting itself drift over any white or yellow line unless the blinker is on?] Because I will lose my shit, that's all there is to it.

things have gotten a bit better, but even as the early playstation era was happening i remember thinking "wow it sucks that i have to wait 15 seconds for every other screen to load". that was in stark contrast to the near-instant load times of the cartridge based systems at the time and of the recent past.

of course, we were all more than willing to wait as long as it took to gedda load of them polygams

https://i.imgur.com/KKf0O1X.jpg

When you buy a new video game and it has to spend an assload of time downloading "updates" before you can play the fucking thing.

Also Denny's getting rid of the Breakfast Dagwood

“like, just trying to see what the hourly weather forecast for tomorrow is involves a lot more clicking and waiting than it did a few years ago”

(since you’re not opposed to using google:) google “(city) weather” once, ctrl+h “wea” for every instance after

P much any form of watching tv now.

Are you guys saying landlines don't sound as good as they used to, or that cellphones don't sound as good as landlines? I agree with the latter, but as for the former, my landline still sounds great. I would never have a conversation on my cellphone unless I was away from home.

We have a landline so we can put the number on paperwork, and for “just in case.” I think we turned the ringer off two years ago. It sits behind the dehumidifier in our master bedroom.

xp saying that cellphones don't sound as good as landlines.

Coca Cola Freestyle machines. Ok...i love em. But...

Soda fountains in the past, usually your biggest problem was the soda came out flat because the bag needed to be changed. So maybe your number one choice isn't available, but other stuff is. Also, multiple people can fill their shit at the same time.

But with these fuckin machines, if you are unlucky enough to go to a store with only one machine, you gotta wait behind the dummy who can't figure it out.

Then when you get there, sometimes they're out of like every diet product, but you don't find out until you click on it and try to pour it, it stops, and greys out.

And then sometimes the shit just malfunctions and nobody in the restaurant knows how to fix it because they gotta call some help line. And if none of the machines work, you gotta wait in kine and get someone at the counter to pour you a drink

iPod clickwheel RIP

Oh and inspired by Neanderthal’s post just now! Automated airport bag drops - just an awful scourge and take far more time than having someone check the suitcase and slap the sticker on it for you. Goes double if you’re stuck behind people who are confused by this (naturally). Waited fifteen minutes behind a family checking in three suitcases the other day - there should have been staff to help them.

xp to koogs: this looks like hasura permissioning, which is my current high-water-mark for "wow there's an even worse way to write logic than in SQL"

yeah the volume control thing is a bummer. I like using these old Koss headphones, because among other things, they have an analog slider thats like a trim for the final level. So I can adjust down if need be. 100% of my home movie watching though I run the audio through a little mixer, so I can very precisely control level both downward and way upward, compress the audio to make dialog more even, etc...

I was watching this video, which I adore, and thinking about what an absolute horrorshow it would be, if it was made now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V726_HShyY

(I love all the background George and Marys who aren't singing, especially "quietly nodding and having a drink George" around 1:35-45)

yikes to me who's somehow *not* seen that before, on first sight it's totally been contaminated through no fault of its own! It's giving me really queasy vibes, probably from exposure to various ai rubbish.

but knowing and overcoming that; yeah agree the video's fantastic, I love the background barstool thing at 3:06+ where Mary appears to explain some slapping thing to a grinning George. Thanks for tip, this is definitely going into the "rewatch for details" list.

i have to sign a digital form on an iPad every time i go to the dentist. but the form scrolls so instead of a graceful capital A, the whole page just goes up and down a bit and i just get a dot.

I don't think I've actually signed my name on paper or on a screen for over a decade, I just scribble

it is like signing your name with a bratwurst so you have to dumb it down.

signing for packages is usually fine but the scrollable dentist form is just another layer of broken

took my kids to the dentist this week, and after I'd signed I ticked the "are you signing for someone else" box and filled out my details, then when I went to submit, it had helpfully deleted my signature so I had to start again and remember to fill in my details at the bottom, scroll up and sign, then scroll down again to submit.

apps seem to need to need me to connect to the website and log in every second day now

i get logged out of dropbox literally every few hours it’s infuriating

I get unpaired from one of our Bluetooth speakers, and then have to “forget” it in my list of paired devices, then add it again…. every…single… time

i think it's a backwards step that nothing really turns off anymore. you used to be able to flip a switch and the thing would immediately just go completely dead. incredibly satisfying.

also nothing has switches anymore. this is bad for the human condition.

yeah the off button on my TV remote stopped working but the TV itself doesn’t have an “off” button on it, or a menu choice to shut down the TV. I have to unplug it.

Another related problem is when there are too many ways to turn something off and then you have to hunt for the right way to turn it back on. I'm thinking specifically of the ringer on my smartphone. Why isn't it ringing? Is it the volume control? If so which volume control and how do I access it? Is there a notifications setting? Do I have some do-not-disturb setting enabled? Finally after trying everything, I just power off the phone and restart it and then it starts working, because apparently something somewhere got into a bad state.

^^^ been there too. my iphone still kind of responds to the old “turn off wait 20 seconds then turn on” trick

lightswitch vs navigating through multiple alexa screens and being met with "device unresponsive"

i think i mentioned it upthread but one android update removed the 'phone' capability from my phone app somehow. it would ring but i couldn't answer it. not sure how long it took to realise given that the only people who phone me are the dentist.

the other thing that is no longer a physical switch is the earphone socket in my phone. used to be you would plug something in there and it would immediately cut the sound. these days it seems a signal to the software that sometimes cuts the sound a bit later, sometimes pauses what's playing.

(just then it stopped the thing i was listening to on the speaker and switched back to what i was listening to yesterday morning when i last had the earphones in. Which may or may not be what i wanted)

Having a new car is an absolute pain in the hole. There are six bits of "assistive" technology I have to turn off every single time I start the car: no, I don't need you to brake for me when there's cars in front of me, I can see them. I also don't need the steering wheel to turn by itself and scare the shit out of me because a bit of greenery is poking out onto the road. I don't need you to flash lights at me when there's a speed trap up ahead. And so on. But my favourite one is the noise that tells me I'm over the speed limit. This is especially fun in Ireland, where exactly NOBODY drives within the speed limit, and also where sometimes the speed limit has been incorrectly entered into whatever database the car is using, so it thinks the speed limit is 50, when in fact it's 60.

And it's backward because it's a brand-new electric car. I should be able to sit in, buckle up, and seamlessly glide away. Instead I have to spend five minutes waiting for the car to connect to the internet so it can welcome me and I can sign in and then turn off all the shit I never asked for.

if i had one superpower it would be the ability to make these amazon light bulbs teleport into bezos' urethra

xp wow that is annoying. We can disable most of those by default - it will still beep for front collision detection which is slightly annoying but not nearly as much as actually braking. We don't have auto steering, that's truly wtf. The only vaguely annoying one we can't turn off by default is making the speed limit sign in the dash flash when - i'm not even sure when, but it's distracting.

Oh yeah, the other great one is "Attention assist", which flashes up on your dashboard at seemingly random points (out of nowhere, scaring the shit out of you on the motorway, which seems ill-advised) to suggest you take a break or get some coffee.

if i had one superpower it would be the ability to make these amazon light bulbs teleport into bezos' urethra

― brimstead, Tuesday, May 19, 2026 8:48 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

fully support this. god grant this to brimstead please thanks.

I was at a fast food place I am not super familiar with this weekend and trying to find what to eat on a menu displayed on a screen that changes every 12 seconds is so much more annoying than it used to be when it was just a fixed printed or written out menu. I do realize it's been like this for 15-20 years and quite possibly already mentioned somewhere upthread but whatever, still annoyed at this.

I was probably the one who mentioned it and it still pisses me off.

https://i.ibb.co/zWcznDSm/Screen-Shot-2026-05-19-at-3-53-27-PM.png

"How can I give you my order when the menu keeps changing before I can read it?"

I am just a few ticks away from becoming a Boomer meme. I blame society.

I walked into a Tmobile and greeting me was a sign asking me to download the tmobile app and sign in to get a place in line. I stood there until someone asked me if I’d been helped.

We have an app to pick our kid up from Sunday school. It’s a small congregation, everyone knows each other, why in god’s name do I need a fucking app to acquire my own flesh and blood

yeah I went to the DMV awhile back (I had an appointment) and I had to scan a fucking QR code to get in the queue... so annoying

it's insane how much of actual going out into the world requires you to have a working smartphone. if i get a dumb phone and go to certain restaurants am i going to be prevented from seeing the menu?

My Kroger ditched those heinous cold drink screens a few months ago. Why does everything have to be a screen

I was a late adopter of the smart phone (like maybe 2015?) and I honestly think my life was better back then... now I'll start flipping though instagram or youtube and an hour will just vanish into the ether, nothing to show for it

someone made the right decision at my gym and i could actually get a new plastic keychain tab with my member number barcode printed on it last year.

i see people stopping outside, pulling out their phone and presumably waiting for the app to load just so they can get in all the time. i walk past them.

I don't know why they can't introduce some code into smartphones which accepts that I clearly meant to tap the thing that was there 0.5 seconds ago, not the thing which suddenly appeared / moved under my finger 0.1 seconds ago.

I was at a grocery store last week and this young woman (teen actually) was trying to pay with her phone and it was a big fucking ordeal... like she had to call her mom to get the PIN or something? it was definitely not making MY life faster or more convenient

nothing makes my heart skip a beat like tapping on my banking app and seeing the 'app loading' graphic. is the install going to fail on my old-ass iphone? that's what happened with venmo a few months ago. i just need to keep depositing checks. why do they have to upgrade everything every 3 months. apparently i need to dish out for a new phone just to be functional at a basic level. christ. you have to tend to your own daily lobotomy to think this is progress.

the new Amoeba location in Hollywood is worse than the old one, not just because of this but *mainly* because of this -- unlike the previous spot, which had a parking garage plus a back lot for free and unlimited time, their new location has a parking garage with 75 min free validation with purchase. when you check out, they ask for your number and text you a URL, you open it in your browser, it leads to a QR code, which you hold up to a camera as you're exiting, and out you go.

You should be able to validate parking at Amoeba simply by ranking your top five Fela Kuti albums in the correct order.

ha my buddy works at the Berkeley store, I'll pass along your valid criticism

Marc Maron saying the new Hollywood Amoeba is better than the old one is the funniest thing he's ever said

Your Amoeba buddy isn’t Raymond, is it?

No

> Why does everything have to be a screen

so you can update things and not have to get everything reprinted. they are even using epaper price tags in stores now.

the No Digital Id stickers stuck everywhere around here (probably by the same people who littered the place with anti-vax stickers a few years ago) contain a QR code which feels very digital and contradictory

i tried to message a friend about "Duck Amuck" and autocorrect changed "duck" to "fuck"

I MEANT TO SAY DUCK

less benign, it used to be when i mistyped "like" (the "k" key is next to the "l" key, if you've never made the typo i'm talking about i envy you) autocorrect USED to fix it. now it actually _recommends_ that slur to me. that slur is not a word in my vocabulary.

so you can update things and not have to get everything reprinted.

a lot of bullshit in the name of saving paper.

I wake up and I look at my modem
One of the lights is orange instead of green
A light is flashing blue when it should be solid blue
It started doing this yesterday
I have to call some company and spend half an hour laboriously going through the diagnostic process
Doing the routine tests to figure out if there is a problem on my end
It's unlikely that the problem is on my end
Before anybody will do anything, though, they always have to make sure the problem isn't on my end

There are things I was supposed to do yesterday
I didn't do them because the light was orange
I know my life isn't going to get any better if I don't keep doing those things
I know whenever the light turns orange I need to stop what I'm doing and talk to someone and figure out why it is orange and not green
I'm so tired
I'm so tired proving to them that the problem isn't the nut behind the keyboard
I'm so tired of explaining the same things to people over and over and over again

I feel like every time I open my mouth I'm _explaining_ something. When I talk, I talk a lot. I talk infrequently. I'm not sure if people feel like I talk infrequently. When I open my mouth I often talk for quite some time. The internet, these days, is a "high-context" medium, which is difficult because I don't have the same context as most other people these days. Unless I provide reams of exposition, very few people will understand what I'm saying. Infodumping bores me. I'm tired of hearing the sound of my own voice. I guess the "right people" will understand without needing things explained to them at length, but who the fuck are _they_? Where the fuck are _they_?

There are a lot of things I want to say, important things, that I don't ever seem to quite get around to saying.