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.

I don’t want to silence my phone because I need to actually get a message if it’s an emergency

not doubting this but can i just say that turning notifications completely off of my sms app has been amazing and i'm never going back. if my partner is in trouble - the only emergency i can think of - they will likely repeat call which should go through.

i also turned off notifications on my work chats! i look at them every few days, like, oops, i guess i "wasn't there for a few things" but "it actually didn't matter at all."

cutting off instantaneous access to my attention from texts and chats has been a significant relief in my day-to-day.

I have a kid who just started driving and she's out late on the weekends, and I have an elderly mother-in-law on oxygen and I'm the point of contact. If someone can't wait to send me a message they should send a damn email.

Cow_Art, you can set any number of bespoke do not disturb settings on your phone, e.g. family messages Bing through but none other do.

If it feels deflating to succumb to solving the problem the way they want you to and leaning further into the technology, I feel that deeply. But I think it has become a widespread assumption that people put their phones on DND when they turn in for the night

Bing! I think that was supposed to say come through… but sure I bet there’s a way to modify it to only get Bing notifications from your automated microsoft searches

I can do that?!?

If so, my hate levels are going to go way down.

Hooray! THANK YOU

People that text at odd hours are still horrible.

Hooray! THANK YOU

People that text at odd hours are still horrible.

Have it on good authority Stephanie just got one of her tacos

Doordash sucks because even if you don't use it it makes shit worse, love to be at Q'Doba at the front of the line waiting for 10 minutes because they got six huge delivery orders they got all mixed up

heres mine, it takes forever to actually get something on the TV these days. back in the day it took all of five seconds to put the game on TV now it takes a full two minutes to put on, these TVs lag horribly despite being 10000x more sophisticated than the tubes of yore

concur, it makes the whole experience of watching tv just a total drag

thats a good one

controversial and def “old person” complaint but jfc i am out for a movie, i shouldn’t need earplugs!! no one needs this shit to be so loud!!

Yes.

Also, the way audio signals are compressed or something, I have to turn to TV up to hear what people are saying. Then when something loud happens it's REALLY LOUD.

I bought an external speaker (soundbar) and hooked it up to the TV. The difference in clarity is remarkable.

i have a soundbar with sub for my computer set up. it is great!

Changing your TV from 5.1 to stereo can help a lot, you might say this is obvious but I only realised last week.

stereo die hard here too

it takes forever to actually get something on the TV these days

I will just add how difficult it is to get rid of Soap Opera Effect - each TV is different, and you have to dig way into sub-menus to find the definition settings. (My ex's mom couldn't understand what we were talking about, she would happily watch in SOE all day long)

I was at a bar awhile ago and they had The Graduate on... in SOE. Such a beautifully shot film, and now it looked like it was filmed on a 1986 Betacam. "What? Looks fine to me.." I wanted to pull my hair out

I feel like the internal menus are intentionally difficult to navigate, mostly because it seems to always try to point you into using certain apps. miss the days when UIs were designed with the actual user in mind.

Also, the way audio signals are compressed or something, I have to turn to TV up to hear what people are saying. Then when something loud happens it's REALLY LOUD.

Not compressed enough. I want movies and shows to either be way less dynamic (idc if that feels less 'exciting') or way better mixed, in terms of dialogue vs music. We have dynamic EQ and all kinds of tools now, come on, why is it worse.

we were watching a movie at a hotel recently, and the dialogue kept getting quieter and quieter, but then the commercials were SO fucking loud.. it was clearly some intentional processing

I will just add how difficult it is to get rid of Soap Opera Effect - each TV is different, and you have to dig way into sub-menus to find the definition settings. (My ex's mom couldn't understand what we were talking about, she would happily watch in SOE all day long)

I was at a bar awhile ago and they had The Graduate on... in SOE. Such a beautifully shot film, and now it looked like it was filmed on a 1986 Betacam. "What? Looks fine to me.." I wanted to pull my hair out

― Andy the Grasshopper, Tuesday, November 3, 2026 12:36 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Assuming you're talking about what most often seems to be called "motion smoothing" and i've been thinking about this. My pet theory is that there are actual, physiological individual differences in how our eyes are processing and seeing. Because, how could you possibly not notice it??? But those differences may also extend to how quickly we adjust and compensate, or whether we do at all... My own experience is that while i find it almost intolerable to watch anything remotely cinematic in this mode at first, my eyes adjust to it in less than a minute to the point where I legitimately don't notice it. But then if I look away and look back, it's there again. Which obviously still sucks.

The question I ask myself is, in those times when I do let my eyes adjust and the different frame rate becomes invisible to me (and I don't look away), am i having a degraded experience, one that interferes with the full experience or dare I say the piece "as the artist intended it"? Put another way, did I just "get used to" seeing a different thing? In which case, if those individual differences do exist and you wanted to be a snob about it, you could criticize my visual processing as not refined, or even a biological correlate to poor taste or something! Alternatively, did my visual processing compensate to change the input to my brain to the original, intended frame rate? In which case, does this really matter at all? It starts to get into some philosophical shit about perception of reality, perhaps, but this consideration did reduce some of my doom and gloom about how motion smoothing was another nail in the coffin of art appreciation.

my mother genuinely doesn't notice motion smoothing at all and can't figure out why I'm frantically trying to change the settings while cussing at the screen.

half the time I change the setting away from motion smoothing to like Cinema she's like "well now you made it too dark"

huh, interesting theory. My eyes *never* get used to it, and everything just ends up looking like Three's Company or something

I do remember this: Some audiences felt disconcerted watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at 48 frames per second as opposed to the 24 FPS conventional for theaters, where they opined that the film looked "unnatural" and "too real", thereby giving it a "soap opera" look.

that film looked like garbage

wow, a pretty recent article on how to fix it:

https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/your-tv-is-ruining-every-movie-you-watch-turn-off-this-setting-now

HD and motion smoothing make me legit nauseous, and it doesn’t ever “get better” with adjusting for time. i blame not going to the movies very often and (ahem) not having a typical TV— we warch everything on an old iMac that we wiped and installed Linux on to use as a “TV.”

I can't really say anything about the phenomenon of getting used to it until you don't see it anymore, but the people who simply don't notice it in the first place just don't have an eye for these things. They can't discern what a movie or tv show should/shouldn't look like.

"well now you made it too dark"

legit complaint... I think it was Childhood of a Leader where in some scenes it just looks like a black screen but with Robert Pattinson head floating in the abyss

the people who simply don't notice it in the first place just don't have an eye for these things.

Like those who would have their tvs set to automatically stretch the picture when widescreens were a new thing.

Millions of people have Thomas Kinkade prints hanging in their homes.

Millions now living will never die

I was an art school kid and I knew that people bought Kinkade prints but I sorta never believed it. Then I got a job as a chimney sweep and spent all day going into rando’s houses. There’s a lotta Kinkades out there.

"There's a lotta Kinkades out there."

I imagined dick van dyke saying this.

my mum can't tell the difference either. I find it really jarring.
that said, I've seen something recently on my own TV that seemed to have some effect switched on (lit weirdly) - we changed a few modes and now not actually sure if it was a setting or the film had been 'remastered' or something.

the people who simply don't notice it in the first place just don't have an eye for these things. They can't discern what a movie or tv show should/shouldn't look like.

Correct. I really dunno if we can attribute this to Kinkade type reasons - my mum's youth was more about Chagall paintings and Pasolini films, nevertheless she doesn't notice the motion smoothing. Possibly just age in her case.

It is telling to me that the one person in my life who reacts to it with the same unadulterated disgust I do is my brother in law, who's an obsessive photographer.

I've seen arguments on here that the reason companies keep going w/ the motion smoothing shit is most ppl don't care, which doesn't make any sense at all to me - if coca cola released a new, supposedly superior flavour and 95% of ppl were like "oh I didn't notice this was a different flavour" and 5% were like "this tastes like absolute garbage" would they keep it in circulation?

I've long ago turned off motion smoothing but it didn't seem that bad to me when it was on - but this may be to do with just not being a visual person / severe colour blindness.

I really hated early motion smoothing, but as the technology has improved I find some of the newer ones where you can dial in a sweet spot that reduces some judder but keeps the cinematic feel a nice middle ground.

And often with things like sport I actively prefer a stronger setting.

my TV is from 2010, I dunno if it's even got any of these features. it's only 720p but because I haven't got used to anything better it still seems fine to me. I keep hearing about new TVs being really annoying in various different ways so I decided not to bother getting a new one until this one packs up

Ours is a hand-me-down from my mum, like everything else we own, must be at least ten years old, may be as many as 15.

heres mine, it takes forever to actually get something on the TV these days. back in the day it took all of five seconds to put the game on TV now it takes a full two minutes to put on, these TVs lag horribly despite being 10000x more sophisticated than the tubes of yore

― frogbs, Monday, November 2, 2026 11:11 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Amen. I also miss flipping between channels. Last night was a perfect example: I wanted to watch election results, and trying to switch between networks required a multi-part process each time. How do people who watch sports deal with this?

But yeah, between the latency of the remote, the myriad apps and settings, and the fact that everything I want to watch is on a different service, it seriously takes like 8 minutes to even cue up a friggin' episode of MST3k

our apartment complex mandated we get Spectrum TV and there's no way to opt out, it's part of our monthly fees/rent, and the channel guide is so confusing because i guess they just assume everyone is going to use the automated voice activated bot to find everything so they don't care

we've been watching classic Simpsons lately and I feel like the animation looks wacky on new TVs, it's weirdly choppy, I mean I can't prove it but something's just off

xxxp that was basically mine, in the opening post of this entire thread:

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.

Being deep in a streaming app, hitting back, nothing happening, wait 5 seconds, hit back again, still nothing happens, wait 10 seconds, still nothing, back! back! back!, oh now i'm at the home screen

Fire Sticks are the worst with that shit, they get 'stuck' all the time

Apple TV is the least painful I've experienced