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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody's landline used to work in a blackout.

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

taking the headphone jack away

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too.

sez you, "Telecom"

:)

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

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

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

Wait, what?

oh god please just go away

iPod clickwheel RIP

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too

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

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

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

The iPad was a bit of a stumble
-techno beaver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audio fidelity/quality was better with landlines too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

development of laser hair removal is a big improvement tbh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that everything has a remote is ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have the same tv remote problem with my microwave.

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

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

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

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

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

Also Denny's getting rid of the Breakfast Dagwood

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

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

P much any form of watching tv now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iPod clickwheel RIP

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

Nnnnnngggg I am holding out against my own manager and the prevailing winds in slow-walking the introduction of AI into our customer service and "help desk"-type communications channels. NO ONE WANTS A BOT THAT TELLS THEM TO CHANGE THEIR PASSWORD, however annoying it might be to get 10 requests about changing your password. Salesforce is going insane mythologizing their "agents" right now and I feel crazy -- they're just bots, right? It's bots all the way down.

we've been trained for years to accept the diminishing utility of help desks, etc. so it's no surprise that replacing that functionality with a robot sounds reasonable to management. most support roles are reviewed based on how many tickets are closed, not how many things were resolved to a client's expectations. partially solving things leads to more tickets, and the more tickets you close, the better!

it's a communication and management problem they're trying to solve with technology

YES. I think my direct manager is really tired of hearing that from me, I find myself repeatedly saying, "This seems like a relationship question that's being managed with technology instead of talking to people" but he loves the promise of tech "tools" and I really don't.

I'm 90% sure he told one of my colleagues to send me an event debrief message that was written with AI and ended up being four times longer than it needed to be, to say the same things.

lol I'm sure it was AI because she forgot to clip off the top part that said, "Here's your nuanced, specific message feedback message" at the top.

As always, I'm going to have to do my surveying & inquiries of the end users and get THEIR feedback to say that the interpersonal connection and trusting relationship that is built when a person knows they can get help and a friendly ear and maybe some other stuff they need from asking a trusted source--that it has inherent value and shouldn't be replaced with bots that tell you the pantry hours.

yes, my work has been using copilot more to do AI meeting minutes and it always ends up giving off big TLDR energy

one of the main things my coworkers have to do regularly when interacting with corporate IT is explaining to the support person how to resolve the situation. due to the race to the bottom to pay the least for support, the external contracting firms that address support tickets have staffed their companies with employees that have no experience with the things they're purportedly supporting

This isn't a "backwards step" in any kind of objective way but it's a little sad for me that now 90% of the time I hear a great song somewhere it's not because a human being likes it and has decided to play it, it's because it's in some randomized playlist. One of my few sources of small talk gone.

― Daniel_Rf, Monday, December 9, 2024 5:17 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the last two times I was browsing at a record store and asked what was playing, the person at the counter did not know

the last two times I was browsing at a record store and asked what was playing, the person at the counter did not know

This should be a "secret shopper" firing offense.

yeah, that's like the first rule of a record store, only play stuff that is for sale

agreed, that is shameful

Maybe they did know but just didn’t feel like talking to you? I tend to give retail workers the benefit of the doubt.

well if it's a record shop refusing to say what the music is is kinda like refusing to say what the cake in the window is in a bakery

which can be cool if your boss is shitty and you're not being paid enough tbc

xp then they’re bad at their job and rude on a personal level

I think it's obvious they were using Spotify

Grateful for Shazam

i went to insert my card into a chip and pin device yesterday to pay for something over my contactless limit* but because it was close enough to the reader it was seen as a contractless payment and was rejected. this happened a couple of times. worked on third attempt.

realised later that i'd've been fucked if the card had been locked - no other money on me, no way to get home.

*my bank lets you reduce it from the default £100 and given i use it for sub £20 purchases 99% of the time i figure this is probably safer

I never really thought about the RFID getting set off when trying to use the slot! Thats bloody stupid.

just gonna say sometimes pushing a search function as the primary way to locate information in a FAQ or database isn't always a benefit

this is years upthread, but, matttkkkk, i use the "rename PPTX to ZIP" trick allllll the time. it's been massively helpful. thanks!

I hate that when people send a link to an Office suite document in Teams that the link opens in Teams, or it opens in a web browser tab, but it never (and apparently cannot?) by default open in its own native application, which is by far the best and easiest place to actually review/edit the thing.

I recently had to present something and decided use Powerpoint for better compatibility with Teams, and I could not believe how primitive it still is. The animation interface is so awful I ended up just scrapping all but the most basic capabilities. Specifically, I kept losing elements underneath others. They couldn’t have swiped the layer system used by every graphic editor?

― beard papa, Thursday, 18 November 2021 18:09 (three years ago)

I know this post is old but if it helps anyone, there IS a layers system in PowerPoint: Home ribbon > Drawing > Arrange > Selection pane

Right click send to back / send backward etc., just like in PageMaker or whatever (Oops I just dated myself). There's a key combination that allows you to select among layered elements, but I forget what it is.

I hate that when people send a link to an Office suite document in Teams that the link opens in Teams, or it opens in a web browser tab, but it never (and apparently cannot?) by default open in its own native application, which is by far the best and easiest place to actually review/edit the thing.

In my version of Teams, linked files have three dots which opens a menu where you can choose how the file opens, and where you can also change the default open to either in Teams, in a browser or in the app.

Right click send to back / send backward etc., just like in PageMaker or whatever (Oops I just dated myself). There's a key combination that allows you to select among layered elements, but I forget what it is.

Yes, I went PageMaker > Quark > Indesign but lost the will to continue. I still do a little Illustrator and Photoshop when needed. But my soul yearns back to 1991

Windows 11 defaulting the start menu to just show Pinned Apps and requiring you to click All Apps to see them all has created a bunch of people who don't know how to find things in the Start menu.

every day at work I see people immobilized by this. it usually goes like this:

*Person attempts to pull up an app
*Person uses the search field at the bottom or embedded within the Start menu to search for app
*Person get the wrong environment for the app under Best Result so they click on that, and it's not the right one OR
*Person spells it slightly differently, i.e. adding an extra space, and no app pulls up in search
*Person can't figure out how to fix their search to find the right program and don't know how to get to All Apps to just see the full list of apps SO
*they run asking IT for help

I admit that it's really not that hard to learn and I haven't had any difficulty with it but it now comes up 3-4 times in every training class and through the power of Google I see a bunch of people starting Microsoft tickets for this lol

Oh I switched that default as soon it became the default… as well as unpinning most of the apps they default to having pinned.

Yes, I went PageMaker > Quark > Indesign but lost the will to continue. I still do a little Illustrator and Photoshop when needed. But my soul yearns back to 1991

Hahah another PageMaker user here, then Pages, then Indesign when I had a job that paid for it. I do everything in Canva now. Idk what actual designers are using these days but who can keep up? I despise Adobe for going to subscription and always needing updates.

I have been fortunate to have worked for nonprofits since before the tragedy that is CC, so I get the discount rate on the subscription. I have seen so much bad Canva generated content that I have come to dislike the software which I know is a totally irrational thing.

Still much prefer editing magazine pages in InDesign rather than Canva.

I tried Canva a couple of years ago and couldn't stand it. I started with Quark but have been InDesign all the way for many years now.

I'm sure those sophisticated programs are much better but we don't have designers in my department at all, we would have to contract out of house freelancers for every flyer, and that is not happening. So like all 4 people who sometimes make flyers need to be able to to work with a simple tool. Canva, for better or worse, ticks the boxes. A backward step/inefficiency that we just accept because the alternatives aren't really available.

This will make professionals gasp but I often work entirely in PowerPoint.

It's a tradeoff - when I am in roving consultant mode, I often come in to an organization for three weeks or so, do a bunch of stuff, and then ride off to the next project. If I worked in Indesign or Illustrator, the teams I support would be unable to open and edit the resulting graphics. So if, down the road, they want to put in a comma or update a statistic, they can't.

So I have become able to push Word and PowerPoint to their limits to get reasonably presentable business documents (flow charts, org charts, etc.) That can be edited by an Office lackey after I leave.

This is not ideal but it is common in my professional world. I have encountered some designers who were able to do pretty sophisticated things just using Office and some careful planning. Further, sometimes we have a designer do a shell graphic in Illustrator (with the right backgrounds and shapes and such) and then plop editable text boxes on top. That way they get a nice graphic without sacrificing flexibility.

Back when I was a struggling freelance designer 10/15 year ago I often ended up doing work for a company who often wanted me to make Word and Powerpoint docs fit into different corporate styles.

Word I was less keen on… but I got pretty fluent on using Powerpoint to make some pretty OK looking stuff - making the templates (master-slides?) was quite a powerful tool to speed up the process. It probably helps that most brand guidelines call for simple, clean approaches that depend a lot of the time on the right font, colours and just using white space.

Grimly clinging to my CS6 Suite until I die.

^^^

pretty sure it's gonna break whenever i finally upgrade my PC and go to Windows 12 tho

CORELDRAW OR GTFO

Windows 11 finally broke my MS Office 2010 installer that I copied from work years ago but Libre Office is good enough nowadays and I only really used Excel anyway

Grimly clinging to my CS6 Suite until I die.

I also fear what fresh hell Windows 12 will bring … I lowkey judge versions based on ease of access to Task Manager (i forget what it used to be called). … speaking of apps to pin that are never the default

Task Manager just used to be called "control-alt-delete" IIRC

Task Manager just used to be called "control-alt-delete" IIRC

My company subscribes to Office 365, so when things change, it changes for a lot of people. About 6 months ago, everybody's Word docs defaulted to printing in landscape. It took a while to figure out that there were 2 different settings in the printing set up that you had to change to stop that.

"Grimly clinging to my CS6 Suite until I die."

I still have a legitimate, actually paid-for installation of PhotoShop CS4 on my main PC, and I still use it fairly frequently. I have to use Adobe's DNG converter to turn modern RAW files into DNGs, but it works well. Earlier versions of PhotoShop are just as useful but CS4 introduced a fairly advanced set of graduated filters in Adobe Raw Converter / Bridge that are incredibly useful.

It's vastly, vastly smoother and more functional than GIMP. I still learn things about it every now and again, e.g. the auto-align layers feature, which is a godsend for assembling comparison images, or the automation / scripting, which can do simple stuff - resize an image to 1000 pixels wide, apply a filter, make it 8-bit, and save it - with just a few clicks.

Adobe should re-release it as "PhotoShop Lite" for £49 or so. It was great! I have no idea what CS5 or CS6 added, or if there actually was a CS6. Also I like the blue opening screen when it opens up. The blue.

it bugs me senseless every other month when i go to download the attached Excel spreadsheet so i can fill in my hours and it saves it from Outlook in the cloud where it is a pain to edit to OneDrive, also in the cloud where it is a pain to edit

CS4 was solid. You should be proud

thought maybe the recent bump was due to this article, which I thought was quite good

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

lots to discuss here, for me this jives with my recent observation that it feels like most devices just come standard with malware installed that you can't get rid of

wow that's an amazing article. ty.

It's like that U2 album that came indelibly installed on new ipods.

Now you're stuck with some malware that you can't get rid of...

I actually suddenly got a threat from Adobe to unregister my CS6 in 2 days, but I found that if you uninstall some updater/"genuine Adobe" program that comes with the software then this problem goes away. Thank fuck. I'll probably have to switch to the sub model at some point, but the very idea of it chafes my plums.