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

[Scratch This Nut]

I miss Videonow. It was a portable video player (that only played a special type of disc) that was in black and white and had a resolution that was 140x100 or something and ran at 15 FPS. And baby me wanted one really badly because she wanted to watch the same two episodes of Fairly Odd Parents over and over again on car trips.

 

[inexplicable ethos]

Mini and Micro USB ports. Maybe it's just bad luck but every USB-C port I've ever dealt with has been shit, the cords don't stay in like the old versions did. They also seem to stop working quickly and often have manufacturing defects for some reason. I don't give a shit if it's reversible or transfers data 30% faster, I want it to fucking work.

 

[HeyYou]

Wireless headphones, definitely. My phone already dies fast, why would I want headphones that I also have to constantly charge? I wouldn't even hate them this bad if Apple wasn't completely transparently scummy about trying to force the market to adopt them.

 

[SpessCaptain]

Can I just say I really fucking miss Tapes and VCRs? I know they aren't the most perfect ways for persevation but are so much better than CDs. I have begun noticing that my oldest DVDs which are like ~20yo old no longer run and god damn fuck Disc Rot. I get a VCR copy of Pocahauntus from like 1996 still working with little wear.

 

[Hat]

I really hate the way sites are laid out now. They try to make shit look "Modern" by having everything be a graphic or have an animation when you click something instead of just being a simple hyperlink with maybe an icon or something.

All websites feel exactly the same these days. They all have the same general layout with a row of pull-down menus at the top of the screen with as few actual helpful links as possible. Most of them feel like they've been either designed based off of the same template as opposed to something that an actual human created. Worst of all is when major sites redesign every few years or so and end up breaking literally every link to a specific page on the site that was older than a few years.

 

[Harvey Danger]

Well, it's "promising" in the sense that other folding phones launched and were broken right off the bat. Razr is also the first vertical folding phone - the rest fold out to become tablets. If anything, it's proving the tech works and could be adapted (and made cheaper) later down the line. $1500 is absurd, but I think it was more of a glorified proof of concept that got legs and saw production runs after there was interest.

All they had to do was replace the original screen and keypad with two small touch screens, and they could've sold millions. Keep the hinge, maybe update the outer screen as well to handle fancy notifications. Android already has multi-screen support built in, and the cost to produce the original shell has to be peanuts by now.

Instead Motorola went with something outrageously expensive designed to impress "influencers" at a big fancy launch event, not something designed to reclaim the phone's lost dominance.

They could have single-handedly bootstrapped a "second phone" culture: your big phone for watching YouTube videos on the train or on the toilet, and your smaller flip phone when you want something lightweight that actually fits in your jeans/clutch purse, when you only care about phone/text/GPS capabilities. Most carriers already allow a 2nd phone on your line for $10; make the Razr Reboot the hot add-on accessory, and you're on easy street to making a fortune.

On a related note, new tech that I hate are massive phones in thick cases, who emphasize the software and the screen instead of the actual power and size of the phone. "Bigger and shinier" is the only trend the market chases now, with some side players doing the same but cheaper; no one is filling the "smaller and more powerful" segment.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

BBS and Newsgroups in their heyday. The average IQ of the Internet has been taking a nosedive as more and more people get connected. With cellphones we are now in the age of the Kardashianweb.

 

[Spatula]

I miss the headphone jack.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I miss Videonow. It was a portable video player (that only played a special type of disc) that was in black and white and had a resolution that was 140x100 or something and ran at 15 FPS. And baby me wanted one really badly because she wanted to watch the same two episodes of Fairly Odd Parents over and over again on car trips.

Had one as a kid. Only used it twice, I think. Really didn't like watching Spongebob in black and white.

I miss the PS3's UI. Everytime I use a PS4, it feels like I'm navigating a hoarder's house. PS3 was nice and organized. Also miss when consoles didn't require every single game to be installed. Was getting a PS4 ready for someone and decided against playing some Nioh or SOTC because of this. It'd be too much of a hassle to uninstall them.

Crap like this is why I mostly game on PC now. If I'm going to do computer things like wait 20 eons for a game to install, may as well go all out and have a PC.

Thanks to LGR, I now have a love for woodgrain on tech and wish it was a thing again.

I despise glass backs on phones. Maybe I'm just neurotic, but even a case doesn't make me feel confident in its durability. Damn kids and their sexy, glassy phones. I want a phone made of Nintendotanium. The unbreakable material of the Gameboy. Before anyone brings up wireless charging, plastic is fine for that.

Call your glass silverback glass. Call it erect dork glass. Still not trusting it as the casing of a phone.

 

[Captain Manning]

That incompetent queue ball, Steve Ballmer, fucked up Windows so bad, I don't even really wanna use it anymore. There was nothing wrong with the interface of 7 and earlier. Microsoft changed it for the benefit of a mobile market they had already had their ticket punched in.

I miss Usenet. It would definitely need a new coat of paint if it made a comeback (it was all text, with the occasional encoded binary file), but the fact that it was decentralized and mostly censorship free was great. I am nostalgic for those days. Today's social media is monolithic and oppressive.

Non-removable batteries in smartphones are pretty far up on the "I hate this shit"-ometer

What's funny is that the "cheaper" ones still have removable batts. My Motorola e5 might not be the sexiest smartphone, but the batt is replaceable.

 

[byuu]

Most (if not all) IoT devices use an older Linux kernel and you'd think that the manufacturer's would be bothered to harden the kernel to a sufficient degree, but that's also a foreign concept.

Most IoT devices use processors that are too weak to run Linux.
They usually run something like FreeRTOS if they run an OS at all.

Though some Linux software like wpa_supplicant (which does not need the Linux kernel) is often used in their firmware.

 

[Splendid]

Can I just say I really fucking miss Tapes and VCRs? I know they aren't the most perfect ways for persevation but are so much better than CDs. I have begun noticing that my oldest DVDs which are like ~20yo old no longer run and god damn fuck Disc Rot. I get a VCR copy of Pocahauntus from like 1996 still working with little wear.

How the fuck do you have DVDs with disc rot? Were you buying fucking Derek Savage movies?

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

Mini and Micro USB ports. Maybe it's just bad luck but every USB-C port I've ever dealt with has been shit, the cords don't stay in like the old versions did. They also seem to stop working quickly and often have manufacturing defects for some reason. I don't give a shit if it's reversible or transfers data 30% faster, I want it to fucking work.

Seriously, I can't seem to find any micro or mini usb ports anymore. The last one I saw was on a test board for embedded software.

 

[SpEd Kaczynski]

I miss the days when operating systems were really just a simple platform to run applications on. Like I remember back in the day using Windows NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000 and there really wasn't that much there. They had relatively small installation footprints and if they were just sitting there you could look at resource usage and there would be almost no CPU usage, no HDD activity, little RAM being used. You could look at the running services and there would only be a few running services and you could easily identify what each service was doing. You could fire up a packet sniffer and nothing would be happening.

It just made everything easier. If a machine was unstable it was way easier to hunt down what was causing the instability because there was just so much less going on. If you were security hardening a machine, the attack surface was so small that it felt a lot easier to know what was going on and to secure things. Nowadays I look at the services running on the average Windows 10 machine and don't know WTF much of the crap is even doing. I fire up Wireshark and there is all kinds of traffic flowing even though I am not doing anything.

I get that everything is a trade off and that there are legitimate reasons for a lot of the changes over the last few decades, but I really miss the days when things were simpler.

 

[Captain Manning]

How the fuck do you have DVDs with disc rot? Were you buying fucking Derek Savage movies?

All optical disc media is theoretically susceptible to laser/disc rot. They're basically layer cakes that can lose their cohesiveness and undergo environmental contamination. That hasn't changed.

It's less common with DVDs and BDs than it was with early CDs and LDs (owing to more resilient materials), but I occasionally hear stories of bad production batches and whatnot. Lots of HD-DVDs are rotting away on people's shelves right now. Especially those released by Warner Bros.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I miss Minidisc.
Could have caught on big.

I liked the competitor, DCC, the consumer version of DAT. It was a good format at the time. It was a tape system, could skip songs like a CD player, did not have ATRAC like a minidisc, good for recording audio with a mic in. Almost like the audio version of goPro in the mid to late 90's.

 

[Rei is shit]

Why the fuck are there virtually no smartphones that are iphone 5 sized now. I don't want or need some 6in screen.

 

[Splendid]

I miss the days when operating systems were really just a simple platform to run applications on. Like I remember back in the day using Windows NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000 and there really wasn't that much there. They had relatively small installation footprints and if they were just sitting there you could look at resource usage and there would be almost no CPU usage, no HDD activity, little RAM being used. You could look at the running services and there would only be a few running services and you could easily identify what each service was doing. You could fire up a packet sniffer and nothing would be happening.

It just made everything easier. If a machine was unstable it was way easier to hunt down what was causing the instability because there was just so much less going on. If you were security hardening a machine, the attack surface was so small that it felt a lot easier to know what was going on and to secure things. Nowadays I look at the services running on the average Windows 10 machine and don't know WTF much of the crap is even doing. I fire up Wireshark and there is all kinds of traffic flowing even though I am not doing anything.

I get that everything is a trade off and that there are legitimate reasons for a lot of the changes over the last few decades, but I really miss the days when things were simpler.

TempleOS exists to solve this exact problem. Terry's old documentation, which was fully mirrored, talks about it all the time.

 

[Captain Manning]

I miss Minidisc.
Could have caught on big.

It sorta did in Japan. Just not elsewhere. Sony didn't do a good job getting western record labels on board as a music distribution format. The cratering price of CD-Rs hurt it as a recording format. And solid state MP3 players finally killed it as a portable format.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

It sorta did in Japan. Just not elsewhere. Sony didn't do a good job getting western record labels on board as a playback format. The cratering price of CD-Rs hurt it as a recording format. And solid state MP3 players finally killed it as a portable format.

I'm guilty of it too, but it amazes me that shitty sound quality low bitrate MP3s (which were the best you could hope for unless you wanted like 10 high quality songs instead of 80 lower quality on your early MP3 players with like 8GB capacity) beat out a superior sound format, but I guess it's the same thing that happen to Betamax.