Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

My last CRT I had right up to 2010 because I remember playing Red Dead Redemption on it, fucking behemoth of a 32" JVC with component inputs I got for free from a guy at work and later gave it to another guy at work. Do I miss it? Sure if I wanted something to play my SNES on but I don't miss needing three people to haul that fucker up two flights of stairs.
I remember long nights on CRTs, occasionally glancing away from them to look out the window or across the room and having this weird feeling hit me of how "sharp" and "detailed" everything is, like your brain having adapted to the blurriness and then suddenly hit with the sharpness of reality. I also had a very short stint as TV repairman (when your TV broke you used to call a guy to fetch it and then repair it at his workshop and bring it back repaired, can youngsters even imagine? Yes I'm a thousand years old in minecraft years) and hold onto my last daily-driver CRT a long time until it really became impractical. I often had two CRTs running (connected to either one or two computers) and then a CRT TV or a stereo for distraction and generic sounds, something computers wouldn't be capable of in a very practical sense for another decade at that point. The power I consumed then would give me anxiety now but back then electricity simply was that cheap. It didn't matter.

With all that, I generally do not miss CRTs and I love obsolete tech otherwise. In my experience, most people that dislike LCDs just never owned a good one with a decent panel, good, even backlight and high pixel density. It's not one of the ~$100 1080p ones most people have and the real important stats of an LCD are often in the fine print that isn't advertised. CRTs can't compete. Seriously. Also the late model CRT TVs were an absolute BITCH to repair, mostly because manufacturers started outsourcing and stopped giving a shit. It all doesn't matter anymore because even the more nicely designed sets you won't find e.g. a spare flyback transformer easily anymore for and a CRT is something that just wears down. Just how it is.

That said, I still have an old Triniton screen, a big-ass Braun TV that was a high-end, status-symbol kind of device in the 80s and a small, old CRT TV an neighbor threw out. All in working, good condition. But that's only because I'm basically an old tech hoarder.
Understandable positions to take, especially if working on CRTs was your job back then. The things were generally pretty huge and nowadays taking apart a modern TV doesn't have such an extreme risk of literally fucking killing you like CRT TVs did. Hell, even if you never took them apart... The last big box CRT TV I owned caught fire and fucking exploded after over a decade of use. Reliability definitely wasn't their strongest aspect. They could last a while, sure, but when they died it was a big event and they'd do their best to take you with them.

However... I still can't pretend I don't love the fuzzy visuals and low humming of a small box TV late at night with one of the classic game consoles displayed. The nostalgia I have for that shit is way too strong for me to really move on and disavow them. Can you really blame me for that?
 
I miss how unique older consoles seemed. Now they're just computers with a custom OS. I get that it's probably always been that way to some degree, but they did at least seem to be more unique.
They always had plug and play going for them. Stick a cartridge or disk in and you are good to go. I don't have any modern consoles, last experience was going to a friend's house, we bought a game to play 2 player, put the disk in and it started downloading a 15GB patch and didn't let us play until it installed.

Modern consoles literally are gimped PCs and have nothing going for them other than a green or blue sticker on the box to appease retard consoooomers and fanboys.
 
"Live services" has become one of the worse trends in gaming yet. They're virtual malls disguised as video games. If anything, with all these developers chasing that trend, they're oversaturating the market and isolating players with intensive grinds and substandard engagement.

Even worse when a live service inevitably shuts down, all that money and time you've invested just goes away. The game ceases to exist. See Battleborn and Lawbreakers.
 
Modern consoles literally are gimped PCs and have nothing going for them other than a green or blue sticker on the box to appease retard consoooomers and fanboys.
I'd argue the one genuine advantage that consoles have is that the devs can truly optimize their engines etc. for a specific hardware specification
... except now there's all sorts of variations of the consoles lmao
 
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I'd argue the one genuine advantage that consoles have is that the devs can truly optimize their engines etc. for a specific hardware specification
... except now there's all sorts of variations of the consoles lmao
The other advantages Consoles had were as stated previous plug and play gaming (Which is now gone by "You need to install this patch before playing" and needing to install games), and couch/side-by-side multiplayer which also is dead/dying.

But as far as truly optimizing their games that also depends on the hardware, the PS3 was notorious being difficult to develop for.
 
The Sony Trinitron line was amazing.
Mine could do 1080i through component. People ridicule Microsoft for not shipping the 360 with HDMI but component and VGA was what a lot of higher end-ish TVs supported, including the existing LCD and plasma screens people owned in 2005. 1024x768 16:9 plasma, how weird is that?

1080i isn't that amazing compared to computer screens, but the common large ones at a decent price were often 21" and did 1600x1200.
They always had plug and play going for them. Stick a cartridge or disk in and you are good to go. I don't have any modern consoles, last experience was going to a friend's house, we bought a game to play 2 player, put the disk in and it started downloading a 15GB patch and didn't let us play until it installed.

Modern consoles literally are gimped PCs and have nothing going for them other than a green or blue sticker on the box to appease retard consoooomers and fanboys.
Plug and play in a way, first you had to tune a channel for it so there was a bit of setup. I don't think that someone born after 1995 would be able to play a NES if they were given a NES with the RF adapter and an old TV that doesn't support remote controls.

I don't miss those TVs but I miss having the ability to operate the TV without a remote control. For fucks sake, just put a shitty €.30 d-pad and a button behind the tv, display the shittiest and most backwards android OSD chink engineering could come up with and I would be happy as long as it could do everything the remote can.
 
They always had plug and play going for them. Stick a cartridge or disk in and you are good to go. I don't have any modern consoles, last experience was going to a friend's house, we bought a game to play 2 player, put the disk in and it started downloading a 15GB patch and didn't let us play until it installed.

Modern consoles literally are gimped PCs and have nothing going for them other than a green or blue sticker on the box to appease retard consoooomers and fanboys.
This is my favorite part of breaking out the NES or Gamecube or whatever. I love just plugging in a console, putting in the game, pressing power and immediately being in. No downloads, no sign-in, no obtuse and hard to navigate operating systems, just you and the game. Incredibly cozy.

It's seriously a huge benefit that's basically been lost to time at this point. Not to say consoles shouldn't have online functionality or even home menus (I mean, the Gamecube, Wii, PS2, Xbox, Dreamcast... all great consoles with home menus you could navigate to varying degrees) I just wish they were more unique and less fucking awful.
 
You no longer have a choice or control.
Don't want youtube shorts polluting your home page on youtube? Too bad they come back after 30 days.

Don't want to set up the cell phone app or O365 on Windows? Well you can only remove the full screen nagging for three days and its back.

Remove the stupid Windows 10/11 apps? Guess what After an update they're back.
 
Even terse error messages like BSOD KERNEL_DATA_IN_PAGE is better. It means Windows kernel accidentally paged itself, somehow. My win7 PC crashed, not sure if Win10/11 would still show messages like that.
I got this one just yesterday.
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Wearables. For a trend that never took off, the boomer in me still yearns for it. I know damn good and well that having my phone in my pocket is more efficient and safer (for my privacy and the phone), but the 12 year old who lives in my brain still thinks tapping shit into the computer on your arm is the sickest shit.
 
Wearables. For a trend that never took off, the boomer in me still yearns for it. I know damn good and well that having my phone in my pocket is more efficient and safer (for my privacy and the phone), but the 12 year old who lives in my brain still thinks tapping shit into the computer on your arm is the sickest shit.

You can always get one of those running cases and adjust it to fit your forearm.

I should think that a raspberry pi based fallout style pip-boy exists.

As you say though, it won’t take off, it would have done already.

Smartwatches have been around for a while now, and it’s not like everyone has one.
 
I notice that a number of GCN games are becoming vastly overpriced. Seems to be because of "Zoomers" coming of age and feeling nostalgic for their childhoods in the '00s, and because of "influencers" and other Internet phenomenon bringing them to prominence. For example, there could be a used GCN game for about $10 in 2010 (a "Zoomer" born in 2000 would've been about 10), and now that game is selling on eBay for around 10x as much (said "Zoomer" would be around 23 now).

So the tech trend I don't like here is previously dirt cheap tech becoming insanely overpriced because of some internet trend.
 
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Stuff from 3-5 years ago always seems the cheapest then it starts getting into "vintage" territory and really expensive.
When I think "vintage", I may think something from maybe the 1950s is "vintage" at the latest.

I guess "Zoomers" think stuff from up to the '00s or even the '10s qualifies as "vintage" now?
 
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When I think "vintage", I may think something from maybe the 1950s is "vintage" at the latest.

I guess "Zoomers" think stuff from up to the '00s or even the '10s qualifies as "vintage" now?
From their perspective, zany tech like magnetic tape storage must be alien to them despite tape archival still being a thing. Most cars now don't even come with CD players. Hell the instant Polaroid type cameras have remerged as one of those retro products and now the film canisters have as well.
 
I notice that a number of GCN games are becoming vastly overpriced. Seems to be because of "Zoomers" coming of age and feeling nostalgic for their childhoods in the '00s, and because of "influencers" and other Internet phenomenon bringing them to prominence. For example, there could be a used GCN game for about $10 in 2010 (a "Zoomer" born in 2000 would've been about 10), and now that game is selling on eBay for around 10x as much (said "Zoomer" would be around 23 now).

So the tech trend I don't like here is previously dirt cheap tech becoming insanely overpriced because of some internet trend.
Does it matter? It's very easy to mod a Wii to play GCN iso images.
 
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