Every waking day of every waking use of the devices I have, I find myself constantly fighting a lot with the shitty input and recognition of said input. Things I swore I clicked once but having to click twice or sometimes three times. Such lag input between the last time I clicked and to the time the function of whatever I had to click fucking functioned.
With phones it is obviously worse, with finger input being either too sensitive or too dulled to register, inquiring more touches just to get somewhere or to type something, along with the separated frustrations aside trying to type on awful keyboard interfaces.
Edit:
For clarification’s sakes, people are bringing up old computers and how you’ve had to go extra steps to make it work. That’s not what I’m talking about and I thought I had made it clear as possible.
I’m talking about with the way things have been with technology over the past 15 years. You would think with all of the millions and billions that get invested into making things snazzy, crisp and shiny, that they would function similarly. Except, no, things got lots of wrenches thrown into their design phases to make them laggy, drag and otherwise shitty.
Phones, Tablets, Site Interfaces .etc
We moved fast and broke things.
Nobody came back later and fixed things. We were too busy breaking other things.
My favorite one is when you tap something on a touchscreen, the item highlights/reacts visually showing the device recognized your input, but it doesn’t perform the action you tapped on. (it works just fine the second time you try though)
I presed the button…
You know I pressed the button…
I know you know I pressed the button…
WHY are you not doing the thing??
I say it every day: “Nothing works any more.”
You pay for an item, and you get the absolutely least quality they can get away with. Customer service is disappearing quickly. Now it’s like “Here’s your thing, you got your thing, why are you still here, go away.”
Like my son says: “America is getting dumber and meaner.”
Customer service has been relegated to AI chat prompts, HUBs and automated servicing that don’t cover all of the problems you may have.
It’s just extra steps of extra steps.
Shit just working doesn’t make money.
*doesn’t make enough money.
Things that mostly work with occasional minor problems that are easily diagnosed and fixed are still profitable… they just don’t maximise profitability.
That’s the problem. Capitalism isn’t happy with making a decent profit. It needs to maximize the profit by cutting everything else.
Yep, good old planned obsolence
Not everything is that bad. My instance just works, for instance ;)
Absolutely brilliant!
Take my upvote and this crown: 👑
And a hot plate!
And my axe!
👈(❛ ᗜ ❛👈)
to all the people saying it never worked: there was a period from about 2006-2016 when it worked a helluva lot better than before or after.
Thats what I keep saying about Windows 10.
When it dropped it was fucking amazing. Every last thing just worked and they werent trying to milk us for every last cent or scrap of personal info just yet.
Windows 10 was absolutely not a miracle on launch, it had its own host of problems that got fixed or ‘features’ removed over time. I distinctly remember the indexing and search being completely worthless for the first year. Forums were filled with posters declaring they’d hold onto Windows 7 until their PC crumbled to dust, and then they would finally switch to Linux. Such is the cycle of Windows releases.
I also remember Windows 10 being annoying at first, but I think it mostly gets overshadowed by how many issues I had with 8/8.1
Maybe I do have some rose tinted glasses because I hated 8 oh so fucking much.
I remember the Windows 7 launch more vividly. IIRC they released a free public beta before launch. I immediately downloaded and installed it. Light as a feather and it ran like a top, everything worked.
You did still have to install a third-party app to get the start menu not to take up the whole screen, though
that’s windows 8
No i never had windows 8. Unless they retroactively updated windows 7 to go fullscreen it had to be 10
windows 10 never had a fullscreen start menu (enabled by default). 7 never had it in any way.
If the start menu was fullscreen on 10, it’s because you explicitly enabled it. It’s not the default.
“agile development”, “AI generated code”, “early release”, “corporate greed”.
There was a schism where all of a sudden profit became more important than quality. That’s when capitalism started showing it’s purely destructive roots. We rode that train for a while though but now it’s time to get back to being the best we can be, not fucking our brothers and sister up for a token that represents some sort of vague value.
There is the aspect not many are talking here.
When previously people released software, there was no easy way to release patch. This means that the first release is the release most of people are going to use forever.
Nowadays you can very easily patch after release, which means that you can be quick to release, and fix later. This means that you can never install anything .0 version, because they are buggy as hell.
When did shit ever work? Only reason I’m a programmer is because I had to figure out how to get janky drivers running or how port forwarding worked before I could play vidya as a kid.
Back then it was just buttons and they usually did what it said on the manual, but now devices have to connect to the internet and have unlimited privileges Then you have to deal with unintuitive UI, agree to multiple ToS and EULA, agree to give them access to your data, just to initialize.
Most people have no idea how to do that.
I agree that it’s harder to find tech that doesn’t require EULA acceptance, service subscription upsells, or other modern BS, but they’re out there. I just remember how difficult getting a lot of stuff working was 20-30 years ago.
I would like google to work like it used to. Youtube search is freaking useless nowadays also.
Google is evil and hopeless. We all got bamboozled by the big G.
YouTube has been enshittified so badly it’s barely usable these days.
I find Duckduckgo, specially lite.duckduckgo looks like the old Google search.
As far as I know those days have never arrived.
In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..
In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!
It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?
It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.
It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.
I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today’s money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.
My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.
When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.
Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.
Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.
At the same time tho, our ability to shrink dies, to create displays of millions of pixels flipping perfectly day in, day out for decades - I recycled a Dell LCD monitor at work from 2003 yesterday, still working - to build cars that are more dependable than ever in history with actual moving parts - we take for granted the things that become dependable, even in ways that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago, because we’re always on the bleeding edge of tech where it isn’t working perfectly, because we’re shipping the minimum viable product, and now on a yearly schedule.
I think we could just chill with having smartphone wars for a few years, since there’s not a huge need to upgrade often, and people can’t afford to eat right now, but they’re releasing more and more foldable phones, making them standard as folks adopt. People will complain about how the hinges don’t work, how they fail a lot more. But that won’t stop them from buying them, from kids demanding them at Christmas, etc. And you know what? Aware of all this, and being chronically broke myself, I have still been subconsciously noting the intro prices for next year’s folding phones because part of me wants the cool little toy first.
I’ll dissent here: early technology didn’t just work. Computers in the 80s and 90s (at least early 90s) required quite a bit of technical know-how to use competently.
We had a computer sitting for like 3 years in the mid 90s, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.
Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.
Turns out, someone, or some program, messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.
It never “just worked”.
it just didn’t display it
Wait, what? From what I remember CRT monitors might display something weird when set to an unsupported resolution or refresh rate… scrolling partial lines and whatnot… but they wouldn’t go black, it’d be pretty obvious they were trying to display something they couldn’t…
Also, the monitor would’ve worked perfectly when booting and displaying the BIOS POST, and when running DOS…
Wow is that ever a pointlessly nit-picky challenge of a story from when I was a kid, over 30 years ago………. Almost like memory isn’t perfect or something, omgno!
I don’t know if there were some little lines or something; I remember it being a black screen. But little lines would give the exact same impression of a dead/infected machine so it barely matters outside of pedantry. It didn’t display an interface, that’s the important part. As for the boot up, maybe, but also very possibly not. They had some Monty python suite of software (themes taken to an extreme, very 90s) that may have made the system function differently than you, some random techbro with absolutely zero information about the computer itself, expect. It replaced literally everything with Monty python stuff and was installed from iirc 12 2.5 floppy discs! Did it replace the boot images, causing them to not display properly when booted in the wrong resolution? Maybe, idk. Wouldn’t be surprised. But even if it did go through the boot sequence and then land on a black screen, the result is the same. Non-functional-looking computer, because no interface. As for DOS boot, we never ran dos on it so genuinely don’t know.
The only sign of life we had from it as far as I can recall was when the screensaver would go on after 5 min, it would play the Klingon national anthem, which is a big part of why they assumed virus. It was one that used an escape key to exit because it was interactive. We didn’t know until much later that was what was happening, or that my sibling changed the screensaver and maybe other stuff, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place, but the other software may have covered up those signs you are talking about, or maybe we all just still didn’t know what to do with it with the boot images and stuff showing up, which… idk if you know this, but even today most people don’t know how to troubleshoot or fix their computers, and don’t even know what a BIOS is… My parents were not tech inclined, my sibling and I were around 10-11, and it’s not like they could just look up how to do these things when their computer wasn’t working… which is exactly what my sibling did when they got a computer of their own.
Eh, it was fine once you got your autoexec.bat configured with the proper IRQs and whatnot, and telling DOS to load in high memory, and set up to ask you on boot if you wanted extended or expanded memory (and knew which one the software you wanted to run needed, but, I mean, just RTFM like a normal person, we at least had good manuals back then!), and which drivers you really needed to waste memory on…
Nope, in fact I got good at IT shit because it seldom worked and I had to do the work of troubleshooting and figuring things out. And times were better because we had that ability.
There’s been this stupid drive of “user friendliness” = removing useful power features from software.
Now everybody just expects things to work, and they don’t care about having any ability to learn about it or fix it, and we’re all paying for it. Things are likely getting shittier over time specifically because of people refusing to learn and accepting “If it doesn’t work, I guess I need to buy a new thing”. Fuck that line of thinking - if it’s digital, it can be done eventually. It’s just a case of figuring out how, or waiting a bit for hardware to get to the point where it can be done.
Reminds me of my Samsung phones. I got a new battery for my Galaxy S5 and one for my S22. One from around 2015, and the other released in 2022. You can take the back cover off the S5s and replace the battery in a few seconds. By 2022 they disabled serviceability to the point that removing and replacing the back cover alone took an hour to do, just so people will buy another rather than use a heat gun and learn about proper adhesive removal and reapplication. They just made it a monumental pain in the ass so they could sell more phones.
Yup, and you’ll see the idiots I droves coke to defend it, too - “but the water resistance!” As if they’re swimming with their phone or something. The S5 was fine for using in the rain and getting splashed.
When they removed SD cards from the more recent phones, the idiots were out there in droves telling me how nobody uses SD cards but me. Crazy what some people are willing to store on somebody else’s computer, and how much people are willing to over-pay for storage. Absolutely wild.
I’d also like to have the audio inputs back. I’m sick of charging this cheap overpriced Bluetooth crap.
remember when shit not working was abnormal and would tank a product so they’d test shit and ensure it had basic functionality?
pre-software days… they were a thing
