Where's the "objective" part here? It's not impossible to do -- start with a straightforward definition of "good" (we need an axiom) and then show the data that these things have drifted away from that direction.
The first example is because the game had a patch, I'm pretty sure that you can skip that on Switch, but even if you can't, games that couldn't be patched were objectively worse than ones that can.
The second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there.
The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse overall than old cars. Electric cars are amazing tech.
Though games that couldn't be patched weren't as complex but still at least as fun or more fun than today's games. Obviously my opinion. The article is getting at that you cannot just pop in a cart and play a game - there's ceremony with today's games. And for what? It's not a better experience. Unless that's all one knows. Then maybe it's... just an experience, I guess.
the rigamarole I had to go through so my son and I could play a Double Dragon title as a 2P simultaneous experience on my X-Box is the stuff of maximum frustration. Like, exhausting. I pine for the days of hitting the "select" button to choose "2 Player" in NES Contra's main menu and off we go, playing two player. Today, such a feat is amazing technology.
Its not a Switch in the article. There's also this bad trend where publishers literally leave pieces of the game off the disc/cartridge and force you to download the rest. Not a patch, the actual game.
Is it worse than the time when games came on multiple disks or cds and you had to switch during the game? How many cds did myst come on? Prior cds was floppies which you couldn't even install it on a HD because the floppies had copy protection on.
That "trend" isn't shipping incomplete builds, but rather that the engineering work to minimize delta update sizes simply isn't a priority for games with infrequent patches, and YouTubers can't tell the difference.
Uh no. I'm not talking about updates. I'm talking about the game medium literally not containing the entire game because the publisher is too fucking cheap to spring for extra discs or a bigger cart. Some examples include L.A Noire, Spyro Trilogy, GTA trilogy, Tony Hawk 1+2 on Switch, PC games like Doom 2016 or MGSV or CoD:MW II on Series X.
LA Noire is an excellent example of my point - people just assumed the disc didn't have the game because the day-one patch was 3/4 of the installed size, but no, the delta update from the GM version on disc was just that bad.
No, I think that games that couldn't be patched were, at the very least, just as good and very likely a lot better than modern games. At the very least, the fact that the game couldn't be patched meant that companies invested in QA and testing. In those days, "going gold" or shipping the master ROM was a big deal, and so companies went out of their way to ensure that their product didn't have any huge showstopper bugs prior to launch.
In theory, modern games, with patching could be even better. They could be just as well tested as older games, but also ship patches to fix the things that do slip through testing. But in practice nobody does that. Instead, game developers just compress the schedule, knowing full well that they can now ship games with totally breaking bugs that get addressed with multi-gigabyte "day one" patches.
Survivorship bias. Games that couldn't be patched were better if they worked on your architecture. Otherwise you were just left out in the cold or you bought an entirely new PC to play them.
Consoles were better because (after the Crash) the vendors guarded them jealously and put the developers through an absolute hell of quality control to confirm they shipped a working product on the cartridge. Of course, the consequence is that they had massive editorial power over the games that existed in their ecosystem.
You're proving my point. You're saying that the quality controls imposed upon developers by the console manufacturers resulted in fewer, but higher quality games.
Man vehicles are a big one. All of the infotainment crap, the 200 control computers, electronic wastegate turbos, etc. etc. are going to age so poorly. There is a reason why cars with mininal BS are fetching such a premium on the used market.
Agreed! Big rubber controls! Designed to last 20-30 years. If you lean towards “buy things that last to reduce your footprint” and don’t commute a massive distance everyday, it’s a good and reliable car to keep in your driveway
The fuel economy is miserable. Especially if you mod it (heavier). Otherwise they have few flaws for what they are. Toyota has other SUVs if you don’t want body on frame and all that implies. Not to mention 4WD is all controlled physically in some models still, which is nice. It still has a tech package for off roading, but they are simple beasts.
I have one of the physical 4WD knobs, it’s wonderfully analog and sort of shakes with the engine in a way nothing else in the cabin does.
Even the base model has A-Trak. I highly recommend trying it off road if you get the chance. It behaves like an ABS powered diff lock and makes your brake pump sound like a machine gun and can make your 4Runner climb interesting bumpy hills.
4WD selector is a physical mechanical control like a gear shift in a manual car. I have off roaded ours a lot. A-trac is almost as good as a locking front diff. It is an incredibly capable vehicle off road for sure, ours is modded extensively as well :)
Relative to the market it is still a good deal, especially if you actually off road and camp with it. There is a reason there are so many here in Colorado.
Reviews and personal experience with new Bronco (not sport) are overwhelmingly positive, though. No real issues. Let's see how the power plants hold up.
In my mind that is debatable, unless you sell it after a few years to take advantage of the market price for used ones.
There is no doubt at all that it is a durable and dependable vehicle. But you're discounting how good everything else has become, with lower operating and repair costs. My parents used to be die-hard Camry fans and just wouldn't consider anything else. I totally understand how this fandom comes about :)
The Land Cruiser moved to an 8-speed transmission 6 or 7 years ago. Lexus is chock full of reliable, highly-advanced engines and hybrid drive systems. With your Colorado elevation and joke 85 octane gas, you really need the modern tech in your cars. You'd have much improved performance and dramatically lower running costs.
If you actually use it for its intended purpose and not a grocery getter it will withstand more abuse than virtually anything else on the market. We do have 91 octane... and our 4runner is supercharged to compensate for the only real failing of the vehicle (power plant output). For the $$ into it you still won't find a more capable vehicle for its intended purpose. Every Jeep I know about destroys its axles with even moderate duty off roading (part of this is self inflicted, they almost always oversize the tires because they have the space for it, but don't upgrade other components). I went pretty deep down this rabbit hole and could not find a less costly alternative in the new car market (right before supply crunch became really deep). On the other hand, if you are just fetching groceries and need something with AWD, sure, go find some market alternative. I am not a price sensitive shopper so it is just below my threshold of caring.
See, that's the thing! The Sequoia has the same twin turbo V6 and 10-speed transmission as the J300 Land Cruiser (reliability already established as it's been in the Lexus LS500 for 5 years now) but with the addition of a hybrid system. For $60k, you get a much larger vehicle with more power and better fuel economy!
Take that already-in-mass-production drivetrain (or ideally something a little smaller) and put it into a 4Runner type vehicle and you have something absolutely amazing. For the same cost. That's my beef with Toyota.
Yup. I recently bought a 4runner, not top of the line mind you, and it cost the same as my wife's Tesla Model Y. Love that thing though ... specifically bought the non-pro model to get the simple three knob climate controls. Ridiculously overpriced but no direct competition in the current US market.
The climate knobs are so great. Try them when going 60MPH in the sand (out one the desert) and it’s incredible how you can still adjust them accurately!
I sorta want to replace it, because I don't really like driving my children around in it, but new cars seem incredibly complex. I'm just trying to drive here, man.
We have a 2006 Subaru Outback. I’ve rented newer cars and got late 2010s loaners a couple of times and it was quite jarring to realize that I’d actively avoid the later models due to the touchscreen UI - even if you ignore the safety issues, it was amazing how crappy the implementations were - laggy, low-precision screens; UI lag like an intercontinental Remote Desktop session; my iTunes collection broke three separate systems over USB because apparently nobody has 10k tracks; etc. It’s like being charged a couple grand for an 5 year old Android tablet which was barely mid-range when it was released.
That's a pretty bad answer in general. The laminated glass part could kind of make sense, but suggesting tempered glass for a glass that only breaks from "one way"... yeah...
If anyone besides me is wondering what happened, it appears that someone posted a ChatGPT response to this question that was could-cause-death-in-an-emergency wrong and has now deleted the comment.
Tesla model 3s (and some other cars) at least have electric door releases, maybe on the same CANbus (or whatever they use in Tesla) loop.
Also highly relevant (hilarious) story on risks of relying on celltower connectivity with Tesla vehicles (Glenn Howerton on the Always Sunny Podcast, starts at 3:45 if link strips time off):
https://youtu.be/jxud-F_kMWM?t=225
According to this article [1] you have 15-60 seconds until the electric windows stop working. Also, on most cars you can detatch the headrests and use the metal at the bottom to break the windows.
I think the most impressive way I've seen are known as "ninja rocks" - broken pieces of spark plug ceramic insulator. But basically anything that can apply a force to a tiny area of the glass can start a fracture that will propagate through the glass. They make little escape hammers and things if it's a concern.
It’s so wild to me. It performs objectively worse when that high, and adds no tangible benefit outside of ego, or literally looking down upon other drivers. Yet they have all gone that way to cater to the preferences of US consumers.
Depends. Some cars have really good pedestrian detection and will stop automatically. But yes, some of those full size pickups and SUVs have a pretty large front blind spot.
I don’t have a Tesla. Genuine question. Does anyone actually play video games on their car’s console? If you’re that desperate to play a video game while driving or as a passenger, can’t you use your phone?
Rename the headline to: "Software has gotten objectively worse"
Technology on the hardware front has long track record of getting better. But the software stack running on them has gotten worse. Writing good, optimal code is no longer economical. Move fast and break things. Marketing wants new features and done quickly. They want to monetise everything, and run things on subscription model. And they want to spy on you. VC funded tech is even worse.
Yeah, with all the money being in software (at least in western nations' job markets), it's honestly amazing the hardware keeps getting better and better. I guess we can thank the Asians for this, especially the Chinese.
If you set your Xbox settings to "Go Offline" on console or PC after you lose the connection, your Game Pass games will work for up to 30 days before an active internet connection is required
But Game Pass as an option didn't even exist before – more options is still net gain. However, if/when we get to the point where Game Pass is your only option, that will be a different story.
These are all examples of tradeoffs that have been made, and just collecting examples of the downsides of those tradeoffs without mentioning the upsides.
Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and an "ok" button.
Similarly, games have traded off fast startup time for richer textures and assets, and the ability to patch bugs.
> but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit
I know what you're saying but being constrained by dedicated buttons, I would argue, forces you to think very carefully about the controls/user-interface. That discipline likely often leads to a better "interface".
Give a designer a touchscreen and they can add buttons, menus, nuanced features without restraint.
I bought a new Mazda last year and it doesn't have a touch screen. Big selling point for me.
Overall the UI feels much better than touchscreen ones on Toyotas or GMs, etc. Mainly it feels like some thought went into it. I can operate it without looking too. Unfortunately there's areas where it feels unfinished.
I don’t mind touchscreens in cars, but there are just some controls that are used all the time and should be buttons. I think most car manufacturers are figuring out that right mix…except perhaps Tesla who is insistent on removing ever tactile button for a touchscreen or capacitive touch button.
touchscreens in cars might be ok for settings, and the kinds of things you do when you are stopped.
But touchscreens have become a mess in cars.
Telsa is a horrible offender. I believe the UI designers must have stationary mockups that don't move around like a car.
Not only have they removed some dedicated controls, they have eliminated almost ALL dedicated controls now. The new model S/X cars don't have stalks - turn signals are touch buttons on the steering wheel. The car guesses what gear you want to be in.
Even older model S/X cars have been affected by updates - the targets have gotten smaller, and critical controls have lost dedicated positions on the screen.
for example: navigate home used to be a big button. Now it is tiny.
The defrost controls are not only on the touchscreen and tiny, now they can be moved and have state.
To put it into neutral you have to go completely expressionless, let your tongue hang out a little bit, and make sure your face is centered in front of the driver monitoring system
but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit
It is? For whom? A few years ago, I upgraded from a 2007 Hyundai Elantra to a 2019 Subaru Legacy. The new car is better in many ways (most notably, having all wheel drive) but the HVAC situation is an absolute regression. In the old Elantra, I have physical knobs. No, not physical buttons that send digital inputs, actual physical mechanical knobs connected directly to the HVAC mechanisms. I miss those knobs every time I have to take my eyes off the road and enter some kind of complicated input to get outside air blowing. In the old car, it was a matter of turning on the fan and making sure the toggle was set to outside air, rather than internal recirculation. In the new car, you have to turn the system on with the on/off button, set the temperature to "low" by twisting the temperature control until the temperature display reads "LO", adjust the fan speed with a +/- button, and then finally get the air blowing where you want by repeatedly pressing the button with the seat icon until the air is blowing at your face (rather than at your feet).
The crazy thing is, as bad as all that is, Subaru is one of the better automakers in this regard. They have the HVAC controls broken out into their own separate module on the dashboard, with its own display for the temperature, fan speed, vents, etc. And all the controls have physical buttons, so I can at least feel where the controls are, even if I can no longer determine their current state by feel. Other automakers, like Toyota, Honda and Ford consolidate everything into a single 8" display with capacitive controls. Oh you want to adjust the fan speed while also being able to see the Android Auto UI? Too bad, screw you.
Cars have improved in a lot of subtle ways, I'll admit. All-wheel drive has gone from being a relatively high-end option to being far more ubiquitous. For all its warts, I genuinely do appreciate the fact that Android Auto allows me to have a decent GPS and mapping solution built into my car. But if you gave me a way to bring the HVAC controls from my old car into my new car, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
> actual physical mechanical knobs connected directly to the HVAC mechanisms
I'll admit to not living in Phoenix or the like, and it did take me time to trust climate control after only having simple A/C, but I doubt I'm alone in preferring to only adjust target temperature and letting the car automatically control fan speed and vents. Dunno if Subaru is especially bad at that, but in any situation where the interior is hot enough that you're trying to get "max A/C", I know leaving it at my normal auto 72° will cause VW and Mercedes to choose max A/C and blow out of the top vents.
But yeah, designs that completely hide the still-occasionally-used buttons like defrost tend to suck. It sucked in the 2004 Prius, and still generally sucks now. If designers want more console space or minimalism, get rid of big gear shifters instead IMO.
I used cold air and air conditioning as an example, but my problem is actually the opposite. I live in Minnesota. It gets cold here. I need a constant supply of hot air blowing at the windshield and side windows in order to keep them defrosted. Subaru, in its infinite wisdom, decided to make the "Full Auto" default to having the hot air come out of the foot vents. It also throttles the way back when it detects that the cabin is up to temperature (68°F in my case), which is ostensibly fine, but causes problems with frost. So, every time, I end up having to do a bunch of configuration to override the "smart" HVAC system in order to actually get it to appropriately balance safety and driver comfort.
JFC why does "It Takes Two" require 19.13 GB of network to update, but only 10.00 GB of disk?
This is like the time I decided to give Battlefield 2042 another try. It took like 2 hours to download, going less fast than my 100mbps connection. Then it sat there for an hour, before I came back to Origin. And then... it told me I needed to update my game. Which went at like ~3 mbps average for another two hours, and hammered the shit out of my disk.
Just ship the updated game! Stop making everyone go through every delta! Assholes!
>This is like the time I decided to give Battlefield 2042 another try. It took like 2 hours to download, going less fast than my 100mbps connection.
That sounds like my experience the last couple of times I've tried playing star trek online. Never actually got it to work, and wasted a lot of time downloading god knows what.
More accurate title: some aspects of technology have gotten objectively worse.
E.g. for cars, the whole touchscreen thing instead of knobs for things like temperature control is worse, but on the other hand cars are safer than they used to be.
Similarly, while yes there are some aspects of video games that have gotten worse, like needing to download a patch for an offline game, there's some stuff that's better: there's a veritable mountain of indie games out there with great content for a great price. WAY cheaper than games used to be, when you look at inflation.
How many cars are actually like that? I only know a few people with newer (2020+) cars and all of them have physical controls as well as touch screen controls. They're all Asian cars so maybe that's why, but anecdotally I've never seen a car completely controlled by a touchscreen.
If you showed someone from 30 years ago a modern video game, a Tesla, or even TikTok, it would absolutely blow their mind. So the author comes up with some nitpicks and declares "technology has gotten objectively worse". I guess the title checks out.
The point is that this isn’t evenly distributed. A Tesla would be super impressive — but they’d also rightly point out that the giant dashboard TV distracts the driver, and moving the touchscreen controls randomly in patches is unsafe.
That doesn’t mean we should give up on Teslas but it does suggest that we question whether every new aspect is as good as it seemed in the demo or whether the optimal balance is somewhere else.
Modern technology is nice when it works. Except it doesn't always work.
Did old technology work flawlessly? No, it didn't. Memory protection in operating systems is relatively new and older computers came with dedicated reset buttons for a reason. But there was a point when it was balanced. Software was stable enough, built mostly by people who actually knew what they were doing, used the hardware more or less to the full extent, and was actually empowering users by being a useful tool, not doing everything to get some product manager a promotion.
On one hand, it provides an unlimited stream of video that's tailored to your interests that you can consume any time you want from practically anywhere.
And on the other hand, it's a platform where anyone can create something and have it reach over a billion people around the world, with the amount of exposure you get determined by how much people engage with your content.
Contrast that to 30 years ago where you might get 10 TV channels (or 50 if you paid for cable), shows come on only at specific times, you have to be sitting in front of a TV set to watch them, and all of that content is chosen by a handful of guys in suits.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to make videos on a camcorder. Of course nobody watched these except us - because how would they? The thought of sharing these with the world and have them compete on their merits to gain an audience would have been completely insane.
That’s like saying any UX mistakes should be ignored because the technology powering it is ubercool. I don’t see it like that. Technology is a layer below UX and in the end we should be able to compare with past UX and at least match up if not exceed.
He had me until he started shitting on MS Office. I would disagree, I think O365 kind of crushes it value-wise. And yeah, they added the ribbon in 2007. The UI hardly changes year to year, and if you know Excel 2013 you will pick up Excel O365 pretty quickly, and you will actually be pretty psyched about some of the new features.
Subscriptions for MS Office is nothing but a money grab. It is not useful to me. Maybe it’s useful for enterprises. But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR. I don’t fit the subscription model, but there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years.
So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.
Assuming the worst case of needing 3 months a year that would be 20.97 a year. Buying the home edition used to be $150. Office 365 will be cheaper until after 7 years and by then a new version of office would have been released.
I don't know, for me it's a onedrive subscription with extras -especially since I'm sharing the cost with a friend of mine.
I'm peeved because the friend I share the costs with is using libre office so I may have to pay for the subscription myself. I would, $99/year is worth it to me even without word etc.
I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened;
- Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked.
- Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed.
- Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken.
- Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together!
- Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later.
- Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress.
- Uninstall Civ 6
I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything like that level of issue recently and I strongly suspect the issue here is Civ Six itself.
The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to.
ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.
I’ve had a horrible experience with that game. From extremely poor performance on an expensive graphics card, to the game just refusing to start without crashing.
I believe it's mostly due to a global change at the lower levels. It seems similar to google never ending beta (every month basic apps change in layout, color, UX.. it's surprisingly exhausting, even when there's a good idea, which is rare, it's flooded by a bag of mistakes). The constant update model with broadband/fiber access means changing things cost zero, no cost => no pressure to provide something of high quality.
Then games have been rethought to be only online .. many games don't have local multiplayer modes now.. it's a cultural/economical shift.
> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards.
Agree that is a factor, but a small one.
> It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.
1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.
2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some half-baked customer research.
3. Engineers are pressured to "move fast and break things" while simultaneously switching between teams/companies for easy promotion, before getting a chance to fix the things they broke.
The list goes on and on. Basically there's this massive house of cards where everyone is incentivizing each other to do shoddy work and not be thorough.
>> Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
Apple II/IIe/IIc. Nibble Magazine published the complete disassembly of the firmware at the time -- which was kind of a big deal. Apple chose not to sue them for violating copyright (which they could have if they chose).
The hardware wasn't super special either. It was a 6502 with 74x series logic gates. The hardest part would have been the floppy drive controller. But even that seems conquerable by today's standards.
It's worth while comparing this to the Commodore computers at the time which had special chips. The 64 had the sid chip. The Amiga 500 had even more special chips.
Further that was part of the Jobs/Wozniak philosophical discussion. Woz thought computers should be hackable. Jobs thought it should be a walled garden. In the end, Jobs won, but left me behind as a customer.
A part of me wishes the RiscV computers would catch on -- even if they are slower. It would then be much simpler to understand a computer.
Didn't Apple (and some other companies) also publish some form of schematics (and microcode listings?) for the Apple I and other roughly contemporary machines?
It's probably not going to be a popular counterpoint, but for instance, Microsoft has used 365 subscription fees to accelerate the development of Office and in my estimation it is actually getting better over time.
I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.
I do remember the past and dealing with driver issues, irq conflicts and broken implementations of opengl or directx that crashed my games all the time. The countless hours trying to get unreal to run in hardware mode without crashing. Hours trying to find the right combo of drivers and IRQs and even moving slots.
That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.
I remember playing WoW on my brand new Mac Pro (circa 2005) and a month later the GPU was burned out. Replaced the GPU under warranty, a month later it burned out again. Replaced it a third time (with a lot of side eye from the Genius Bar), and decided to stop playing WoW. Never had any more issues with the GPU.
Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
/s The universe is telling you to stop playing video games while living in your parent's basement.
Seriously though thermal expansion can break copper traces and solder joints. There was a waft of people literally baking their gpu's in the oven to remelt the solder joints during that same decade.
Macs in that era were notorious for overheating under any real load.
I had a 2011 MacBook Pro for a while that I later found was keeping a constant 100c without even spinning the fan at 100%! After a while, its cd drive failed, and I learned how to install Linux from a partition made in OSX... Eventually the whole thing became a brick.
I also worked with an iMac that would get strange video errors and freeze until I found an app to turn up the fan. With a little bit of air flow, it would run just fine.
I guess Apple proved one thing: hopes and dreams are not enough to cool a Core 2 Duo.
My guess is that the fan spin-up/speed was based on the CPU temperature or the case temp, not necessarily the GPU temp. The GPU had its own puny fan, but I don't know if GPU temp was even the core issue, though likely.
The people responsible for Civ 6 are advertising multiplayer online play in an effort to take your money, while investing the least amount of money to say they delivered the feature. They are just milking the Civ franchise for all they can.
Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.
AWS is the worst offender. They don’t allow you to set hard limits on billing, claiming that is for your own good, while the fact is they are putting all your data on hostage so they could force sell you things at ridiculously high traffic price at the next unexpected traffic surge. Traffic price into AWS is free but traffic out is extremely expensive, preventing you from getting data out of it.
Excel brings out new features all the time while keeping 100% backwards compatability. The difference in features between old and new versions is staggering. They knew parts of their usage would get replaced by other software if they don't innovate, and so they did.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan to use Excel for all the use cases it's being used for, but it's probably by far the most versatile software out there and powers more businesses than any other software.
EDIT: And if you need an example for a new feature that users wanted, I heard a lot of people being really happy about the introduction of XLOOKUP, introduced very recently.
I think there's a much simpler/happier issue in play - MBAs. Games from big studios are increasingly being directed and driven by people who have zero interest in games and just view it as a means to revenue. So games are being rushed out the door prematurely in an unimaginably buggy state, development rushed such that repairing the mess created (after launch of course) is an endless series of half-working duct tape and shoe strings, designed to coerce endless DLC purchases, and more.
And this is happening at the same time that game development tools have become richer than ever, asset stores have enough assets to feel effectively infinite, you can self publish to a market of hundreds of millions, and even if you do need/want funding there are options: crowd funding, Epic Mega Grants, etc. So for a skilled developer it's never been easier (or a better time) to go independent.
This is driving an endless brain drain of bigger game companies making the problems even worse, while at the same time small companies are starting to produce some amazing games. To give a relevant example here, a couple of guys left Ubisoft. They formed Amplitude Studios, and they then created Endless Legend [1], which I would highly recommend as an alternative to Civilization.
But the story doesn't end there. Because Endless Legend / Amplitude were so successful, they were bought by Sega. And Sega knew exactly what could make their games even better. Oh yeah, MBAs baby! So now Amplitude has turned into just another "big" studio, and their latest product Humankind, ostensibly in the exact same vein as Endless Legend/Civilization, is a mess. Now we just need a couple of Amplitude employees to leave and form Next Good Game Company Studios. Ah, the cycle of life!
To be honest though, the Civilization games in particular are badly implemented. I had no end of similar issues with Civ V and Beyond Earth (didn’t play the earlier ones). I do agree with the general sentiment, but I find Civilization to be a kind of worst case scenario.
What we need is liability, and returns like in other goods.
If everyone behaved with software like when they are pissed off at shop owners for selling them faulty products, this would have been sorted out long time ago.
Meh, old software was also shit. Fucking Windows was unstable for almost a decade, and that was just the base that you run the other things on. What you describe actually matches my old experience with games, things being borked all the time, clients not seeing each other, and so on. Modern games are often as simple and right clicking my friend in Steam Friends, choose Join game, and then it even starts up my game AND joins the friend. Of course, the experience varies per game. Overwatch is smooth usually, Rainbow Six Siege often behaves strangely. But there's nothing here about modernity at all. Games are like businesses, neither is perfect, all it needs to be is to be able to sell.
I don’t agree with all of the example a here—I think software subscriptions work well in some instances and cars, besides a few outliers that have a terrible over reliance on touchscreens, are generally the best they have ever been—but social media and video games are worse in many ways.
Social media companies, but Facebook in particular, have always operated out of fear of missing the next big trend and never stopped to be content with what they were. And that poisonous attitude took over social media. They are all complicated algorithm driven nightmares. Twitter’s ability to sort chronologically is a cold glass of water in hell.
Video games aren’t completely bad. I think games are in some ways the best they have ever been, especially when it all comes together, but it is rare when it all comes together these days. All the big publishers put out broken, derivative games that require constant patching with giant downloads. It is especially bad on PC. Every big game is some level of broken for the first year. Part of that is probably a hangover from the pandemic, but I really hope something changes. It feels downright unprofessional the state some games release in.
For me it has felt like that since the early 2000s. I was born in the seventies. Is it an age thing? I can only get into a couple of games that were made after 2000. But I beat every cave on all 5 levels in Boulder Dash!
I have troubles playing games with younger siblings. My brain never fully adjusted to ultrafast post ps3 games. Something about analog 3d aiming that is just not natural enough for my neurons, while they got fed on it and it's a second skin to them.
> This is objectively a worse experience than I grew up with (and it costs a whole lot more too.)
This is objectively wrong. Inflation-adjusted Nintendo console launch prices have been trending downward since the 80s. Games are cheaper too. I remember saving up to spend $40-$50 for NES games in the early 90s, which would be in the $100 range in today's dollars. That's significantly more expensive than the $60 first-party Switch games today.
There was an era maybe 10-15 years ago where so many PC games were just these semi-automatic ports from the Xbox version, and they were just awful and lazy. That pretty much killed PC gaming for me. I remember it got so bad that Borderlands 2 specifically marketed on the fact that the PC version was not just a lazy port. They actually advertised that you could change the FOV.
Ah I still remember the good old days of TotalBiscuit, checking the options menu for an FOV slider for every game. I legitimately think that if it wasn’t for him, we’d still be in this rut of lazy ports. May he rest in peace.
* I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!)
* Screens in cars replacing usable buttons, are a disaster. give me buttons and knobs.
* the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
I guess it's the glass half full or empty type situation
1. You can watch your favorite movie sitting on a bus stop
2. sure but i can listen to any song i like those that aren't on my playlist thanks to 4g instead of hearing annoying radio ads. i can frickin see the tyre pressure of each individual tyre fwiw.
3. yes but again i can watch anything i like as compared to having a tivo or even before that when you missed your favorite show at 9pm, you missed it forever.
2. You don't need to replace all the important knobs with a screen to do this. Also, even my truck without a touchscreen shows the individual tire pressures, so...
* One reason i enjoy actual buttons on car devices, is that I can feel them when driving and not looking at them.
* I bought a new Xbox just last Xmas. I bought the physical discs, but still had to download 100GB in data, which took a couple hours, to play the game.
Not to do a console war but the "pitch" of a console to me had always been "it just works." You don't know about computers, you don't wanna know about computers, you just wanna buy the disc, come home, put it in, pick up your controller, and play. The hardest part about the experience is supposed to be plugging the correct cords in between the console and your TV.
Nowadays you might as well just game on a PC because it's just as much work apparently, especially to play online.
Omfg and car screens universally have an input lag of over 1 second, so not only do i have to take my eyes off the road to interact with it but i have to extend my interaction by several more seconds for any multi step process. Screens might even be okay if it weren't for the input lag
> the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
I'm not old (mid-30s) so maybe TVs that predate me were quicker, but I remember the old Zenith[1] in the living room would take 10-15s to warm up and sometimes we had to turn it off and on again a few times to get the picture to work. The DLP Sony that replaced it was even worse; upwards of 30s before the picture was more than a dim outline moving on the screen.
TVs are objectively better in terms of speed (my Samsung Q70 takes about 5s to boot; quicker than my Apple TV) and picture quality today. You can make an argument that the smart TV aspect of a TV is worse, but you can also just not connect it to the internet and use a Roku or Chromecast or Apple TV.
The extension to this is shareholders have made everything worse. Instead of a company making a product that does what the customer needs driving purchasing decisions and thus revenue, companies are now being held hostage to be constantly driving revenue number growth. This is easily done by implementing subscriptions or implementing hardware technologies with a limited lifetime.
For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired.
On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it.
Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.
I agree but I also wonder how much of this is a failing or ceiling of capitalism? Where things can never be complete or perfected, where we have to invent new problems to sell new crap?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadThe second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there.
The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse overall than old cars. Electric cars are amazing tech.
the rigamarole I had to go through so my son and I could play a Double Dragon title as a 2P simultaneous experience on my X-Box is the stuff of maximum frustration. Like, exhausting. I pine for the days of hitting the "select" button to choose "2 Player" in NES Contra's main menu and off we go, playing two player. Today, such a feat is amazing technology.
https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/354397-la-noire-switch-d...
In theory, modern games, with patching could be even better. They could be just as well tested as older games, but also ship patches to fix the things that do slip through testing. But in practice nobody does that. Instead, game developers just compress the schedule, knowing full well that they can now ship games with totally breaking bugs that get addressed with multi-gigabyte "day one" patches.
Consoles were better because (after the Crash) the vendors guarded them jealously and put the developers through an absolute hell of quality control to confirm they shipped a working product on the cartridge. Of course, the consequence is that they had massive editorial power over the games that existed in their ecosystem.
I'm saying that's a good thing.
Even the base model has A-Trak. I highly recommend trying it off road if you get the chance. It behaves like an ABS powered diff lock and makes your brake pump sound like a machine gun and can make your 4Runner climb interesting bumpy hills.
It should be half the price, but people will apparently pay Toyota just about anything for it.
In my mind that is debatable, unless you sell it after a few years to take advantage of the market price for used ones.
There is no doubt at all that it is a durable and dependable vehicle. But you're discounting how good everything else has become, with lower operating and repair costs. My parents used to be die-hard Camry fans and just wouldn't consider anything else. I totally understand how this fandom comes about :)
The Land Cruiser moved to an 8-speed transmission 6 or 7 years ago. Lexus is chock full of reliable, highly-advanced engines and hybrid drive systems. With your Colorado elevation and joke 85 octane gas, you really need the modern tech in your cars. You'd have much improved performance and dramatically lower running costs.
Toyota is taking advantage of you.
Take that already-in-mass-production drivetrain (or ideally something a little smaller) and put it into a 4Runner type vehicle and you have something absolutely amazing. For the same cost. That's my beef with Toyota.
I sorta want to replace it, because I don't really like driving my children around in it, but new cars seem incredibly complex. I'm just trying to drive here, man.
I’m looking for a 1997-2000 LS400 at the moment.
Really low effort. Unless, I guess, the point is to showcase how some of the answers ChatGPT comes up with are very confident and very incorrect.
Thanks for deleting it!
https://smile.amazon.com/01-100-09-Original-Emergency-Keycha...
Also highly relevant (hilarious) story on risks of relying on celltower connectivity with Tesla vehicles (Glenn Howerton on the Always Sunny Podcast, starts at 3:45 if link strips time off): https://youtu.be/jxud-F_kMWM?t=225
1. https://rac.com.au/car-motoring/info/unexpected-car-emergenc...
Today i am in colorado with cable modem that can barely hit 60mbps on a good day and 4mpbs up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
Safety-wise, nothing has scored higher than new EVs like the Tesla, so there is some progress.
Infotainment-wise, that’s a different story…
Technology on the hardware front has long track record of getting better. But the software stack running on them has gotten worse. Writing good, optimal code is no longer economical. Move fast and break things. Marketing wants new features and done quickly. They want to monetise everything, and run things on subscription model. And they want to spy on you. VC funded tech is even worse.
Maybe this has changed.
The first outage I had, you couldn't even sign in.
The second outage, you had to set it offline before your internet died. This was when Rogers was down in Canada.
Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and an "ok" button.
Similarly, games have traded off fast startup time for richer textures and assets, and the ability to patch bugs.
When trade-offs are being evaluated what are they in service of? I'm going to suggest it's something other than a great user experience.
I know what you're saying but being constrained by dedicated buttons, I would argue, forces you to think very carefully about the controls/user-interface. That discipline likely often leads to a better "interface".
Give a designer a touchscreen and they can add buttons, menus, nuanced features without restraint.
Overall the UI feels much better than touchscreen ones on Toyotas or GMs, etc. Mainly it feels like some thought went into it. I can operate it without looking too. Unfortunately there's areas where it feels unfinished.
Sadly, even stuff like radio and AC controls in some cars have moved to touchscreens, and that sucks a lot.
But touchscreens have become a mess in cars.
Telsa is a horrible offender. I believe the UI designers must have stationary mockups that don't move around like a car.
Not only have they removed some dedicated controls, they have eliminated almost ALL dedicated controls now. The new model S/X cars don't have stalks - turn signals are touch buttons on the steering wheel. The car guesses what gear you want to be in.
Even older model S/X cars have been affected by updates - the targets have gotten smaller, and critical controls have lost dedicated positions on the screen.
for example: navigate home used to be a big button. Now it is tiny.
The defrost controls are not only on the touchscreen and tiny, now they can be moved and have state.
TBF, most automatic transmissions do this, and I think that Teslas only have one gear anyways.
Unless...please tell me they don't guess whether you want Park, Drive, Neutral, or Reverse?
The crazy thing is, as bad as all that is, Subaru is one of the better automakers in this regard. They have the HVAC controls broken out into their own separate module on the dashboard, with its own display for the temperature, fan speed, vents, etc. And all the controls have physical buttons, so I can at least feel where the controls are, even if I can no longer determine their current state by feel. Other automakers, like Toyota, Honda and Ford consolidate everything into a single 8" display with capacitive controls. Oh you want to adjust the fan speed while also being able to see the Android Auto UI? Too bad, screw you.
Cars have improved in a lot of subtle ways, I'll admit. All-wheel drive has gone from being a relatively high-end option to being far more ubiquitous. For all its warts, I genuinely do appreciate the fact that Android Auto allows me to have a decent GPS and mapping solution built into my car. But if you gave me a way to bring the HVAC controls from my old car into my new car, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
I'll admit to not living in Phoenix or the like, and it did take me time to trust climate control after only having simple A/C, but I doubt I'm alone in preferring to only adjust target temperature and letting the car automatically control fan speed and vents. Dunno if Subaru is especially bad at that, but in any situation where the interior is hot enough that you're trying to get "max A/C", I know leaving it at my normal auto 72° will cause VW and Mercedes to choose max A/C and blow out of the top vents.
But yeah, designs that completely hide the still-occasionally-used buttons like defrost tend to suck. It sucked in the 2004 Prius, and still generally sucks now. If designers want more console space or minimalism, get rid of big gear shifters instead IMO.
This is like the time I decided to give Battlefield 2042 another try. It took like 2 hours to download, going less fast than my 100mbps connection. Then it sat there for an hour, before I came back to Origin. And then... it told me I needed to update my game. Which went at like ~3 mbps average for another two hours, and hammered the shit out of my disk.
Just ship the updated game! Stop making everyone go through every delta! Assholes!
That sounds like my experience the last couple of times I've tried playing star trek online. Never actually got it to work, and wasted a lot of time downloading god knows what.
E.g. for cars, the whole touchscreen thing instead of knobs for things like temperature control is worse, but on the other hand cars are safer than they used to be.
Similarly, while yes there are some aspects of video games that have gotten worse, like needing to download a patch for an offline game, there's some stuff that's better: there's a veritable mountain of indie games out there with great content for a great price. WAY cheaper than games used to be, when you look at inflation.
I recall $60 NES games in Toys R Us and a quick google shows that to be correct (for the top tier games). That's $130 these days!
And re: cars, they are so much more reliable and safe than previous decades.
That doesn’t mean we should give up on Teslas but it does suggest that we question whether every new aspect is as good as it seemed in the demo or whether the optimal balance is somewhere else.
Did old technology work flawlessly? No, it didn't. Memory protection in operating systems is relatively new and older computers came with dedicated reset buttons for a reason. But there was a point when it was balanced. Software was stable enough, built mostly by people who actually knew what they were doing, used the hardware more or less to the full extent, and was actually empowering users by being a useful tool, not doing everything to get some product manager a promotion.
And on the other hand, it's a platform where anyone can create something and have it reach over a billion people around the world, with the amount of exposure you get determined by how much people engage with your content.
Contrast that to 30 years ago where you might get 10 TV channels (or 50 if you paid for cable), shows come on only at specific times, you have to be sitting in front of a TV set to watch them, and all of that content is chosen by a handful of guys in suits.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to make videos on a camcorder. Of course nobody watched these except us - because how would they? The thought of sharing these with the world and have them compete on their merits to gain an audience would have been completely insane.
So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.
Uh, yes, there is: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
Isn't a subscription better then?
Assuming the worst case of needing 3 months a year that would be 20.97 a year. Buying the home edition used to be $150. Office 365 will be cheaper until after 7 years and by then a new version of office would have been released.
I'm peeved because the friend I share the costs with is using libre office so I may have to pay for the subscription myself. I would, $99/year is worth it to me even without word etc.
I just bought my kids a switch to hopefully feel that nes era gaming. It kind of hits on it.
Pre-xbox was nice. The game was pretty solid state. The systems were 'dumb' and performed the function they were designed to do.
There wasn't 10 control configurations, touch this and that. They were games.
It's sad with the newer Mario's that if you die repeatedly it gives you a powerful at the start of the level.
- Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked.
- Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed.
- Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken.
- Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together!
- Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later.
- Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress.
- Uninstall Civ 6
I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to.
ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.
Then games have been rethought to be only online .. many games don't have local multiplayer modes now.. it's a cultural/economical shift.
Agree that is a factor, but a small one.
> It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.
1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.
2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some half-baked customer research.
3. Engineers are pressured to "move fast and break things" while simultaneously switching between teams/companies for easy promotion, before getting a chance to fix the things they broke.
The list goes on and on. Basically there's this massive house of cards where everyone is incentivizing each other to do shoddy work and not be thorough.
What boot camp is purporting to graduate "senior" developers after 6 months?
Apple II/IIe/IIc. Nibble Magazine published the complete disassembly of the firmware at the time -- which was kind of a big deal. Apple chose not to sue them for violating copyright (which they could have if they chose).
Here's the Apple IIc schematic:
https://archive.org/details/Schematic_Diagram_of_the_Apple_I...
The hardware wasn't super special either. It was a 6502 with 74x series logic gates. The hardest part would have been the floppy drive controller. But even that seems conquerable by today's standards.
It's worth while comparing this to the Commodore computers at the time which had special chips. The 64 had the sid chip. The Amiga 500 had even more special chips.
Further that was part of the Jobs/Wozniak philosophical discussion. Woz thought computers should be hackable. Jobs thought it should be a walled garden. In the end, Jobs won, but left me behind as a customer.
A part of me wishes the RiscV computers would catch on -- even if they are slower. It would then be much simpler to understand a computer.
It's probably even simpler than that:
1. Once software stopped being distributed on discs, managers cut QA and pre-release bug-fixing, because they'll just "fix it later in a patch."
If course the patches often have problems too, which will be fixed in later patches with their own problems, ad nauseam.
It's a case where a legitimate technical advance ultimately lead to worse outcomes, because it disrupted certain social "checks and balances."
I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.
That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.
Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Seriously though thermal expansion can break copper traces and solder joints. There was a waft of people literally baking their gpu's in the oven to remelt the solder joints during that same decade.
I had a 2011 MacBook Pro for a while that I later found was keeping a constant 100c without even spinning the fan at 100%! After a while, its cd drive failed, and I learned how to install Linux from a partition made in OSX... Eventually the whole thing became a brick.
I also worked with an iMac that would get strange video errors and freeze until I found an app to turn up the fan. With a little bit of air flow, it would run just fine.
I guess Apple proved one thing: hopes and dreams are not enough to cool a Core 2 Duo.
No amount of fans can overcome a setting that refuses to spin them up.
Crashes, connectivity issues, and desyncing are as old as PC computer gaming, and they were all much worse in the past.
Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.
When was the last time YouTube, the iPhone, or Microsoft Excel added a meaningful (i.e. users wanted it) feature?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan to use Excel for all the use cases it's being used for, but it's probably by far the most versatile software out there and powers more businesses than any other software.
EDIT: And if you need an example for a new feature that users wanted, I heard a lot of people being really happy about the introduction of XLOOKUP, introduced very recently.
And this is happening at the same time that game development tools have become richer than ever, asset stores have enough assets to feel effectively infinite, you can self publish to a market of hundreds of millions, and even if you do need/want funding there are options: crowd funding, Epic Mega Grants, etc. So for a skilled developer it's never been easier (or a better time) to go independent.
This is driving an endless brain drain of bigger game companies making the problems even worse, while at the same time small companies are starting to produce some amazing games. To give a relevant example here, a couple of guys left Ubisoft. They formed Amplitude Studios, and they then created Endless Legend [1], which I would highly recommend as an alternative to Civilization.
But the story doesn't end there. Because Endless Legend / Amplitude were so successful, they were bought by Sega. And Sega knew exactly what could make their games even better. Oh yeah, MBAs baby! So now Amplitude has turned into just another "big" studio, and their latest product Humankind, ostensibly in the exact same vein as Endless Legend/Civilization, is a mess. Now we just need a couple of Amplitude employees to leave and form Next Good Game Company Studios. Ah, the cycle of life!
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/289130/ENDLESS_Legend/
If everyone behaved with software like when they are pissed off at shop owners for selling them faulty products, this would have been sorted out long time ago.
Social media companies, but Facebook in particular, have always operated out of fear of missing the next big trend and never stopped to be content with what they were. And that poisonous attitude took over social media. They are all complicated algorithm driven nightmares. Twitter’s ability to sort chronologically is a cold glass of water in hell.
Video games aren’t completely bad. I think games are in some ways the best they have ever been, especially when it all comes together, but it is rare when it all comes together these days. All the big publishers put out broken, derivative games that require constant patching with giant downloads. It is especially bad on PC. Every big game is some level of broken for the first year. Part of that is probably a hangover from the pandemic, but I really hope something changes. It feels downright unprofessional the state some games release in.
> This is objectively a worse experience than I grew up with (and it costs a whole lot more too.)
This is objectively wrong. Inflation-adjusted Nintendo console launch prices have been trending downward since the 80s. Games are cheaper too. I remember saving up to spend $40-$50 for NES games in the early 90s, which would be in the $100 range in today's dollars. That's significantly more expensive than the $60 first-party Switch games today.
* I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!)
* Screens in cars replacing usable buttons, are a disaster. give me buttons and knobs.
* the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
1. You can watch your favorite movie sitting on a bus stop
2. sure but i can listen to any song i like those that aren't on my playlist thanks to 4g instead of hearing annoying radio ads. i can frickin see the tyre pressure of each individual tyre fwiw.
3. yes but again i can watch anything i like as compared to having a tivo or even before that when you missed your favorite show at 9pm, you missed it forever.
Are you running an old version of iOS? I can run Netflix on my iPhone SE running iOS 15.7.1, which should be available for your iPhone 7+.
* I bought a new Xbox just last Xmas. I bought the physical discs, but still had to download 100GB in data, which took a couple hours, to play the game.
Nowadays you might as well just game on a PC because it's just as much work apparently, especially to play online.
I'm not old (mid-30s) so maybe TVs that predate me were quicker, but I remember the old Zenith[1] in the living room would take 10-15s to warm up and sometimes we had to turn it off and on again a few times to get the picture to work. The DLP Sony that replaced it was even worse; upwards of 30s before the picture was more than a dim outline moving on the screen.
TVs are objectively better in terms of speed (my Samsung Q70 takes about 5s to boot; quicker than my Apple TV) and picture quality today. You can make an argument that the smart TV aspect of a TV is worse, but you can also just not connect it to the internet and use a Roku or Chromecast or Apple TV.
1: https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/Aether/24/683824/H2...
Linux is better, OS X hasn't been as awesome as they focused on emojis and stuff, Windows seems to have improved in many ways but regressed in others.
Car interfaces are going to hell with capacitive buttons and touch screens, instead of simple and reliable old tech that works.
Services instead of owning games/apps.
For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired.
On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it.
Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.
The domain says it all.