Every waking day of every waking use of the devices I have, I find myself constantly fighting a lot with the shitty input and recognition of said input. Things I swore I clicked once but having to click twice or sometimes three times. Such lag input between the last time I clicked and to the time the function of whatever I had to click fucking functioned.
With phones it is obviously worse, with finger input being either too sensitive or too dulled to register, inquiring more touches just to get somewhere or to type something, along with the separated frustrations aside trying to type on awful keyboard interfaces.
Edit:
For clarification’s sakes, people are bringing up old computers and how you’ve had to go extra steps to make it work. That’s not what I’m talking about and I thought I had made it clear as possible.
I’m talking about with the way things have been with technology over the past 15 years. You would think with all of the millions and billions that get invested into making things snazzy, crisp and shiny, that they would function similarly. Except, no, things got lots of wrenches thrown into their design phases to make them laggy, drag and otherwise shitty.
Phones, Tablets, Site Interfaces .etc
Was looking for some wireless speakers and “the good ones”, or in other words the more popular recommended brands, all require an app. Nah removed, use open standards, I just want to connect. Bluetooth exists for a reason.
Bluetooth is not a good Standard for speakers. In fact, there ARE open standards for wireless speakers. For example DLNA
My Samsung S9+ still works. Original battery, too.
As far as I know those days have never arrived.
In the 1980’s you’d buy a computer and the diskette drive would eat disks, the tape drive would fail to load because the volume was turned up too loud, or the software was just badly written by an amateur and it would kill multiple people with high doses of radiation..
In the 1990’s the gaming computer as we know it today took shape, but you just go ahead and put one together. Install a graphics accelerator card or a sound card in Windows 3.1 or DOS. Go ahead. Windows 98, featuring USB Plug And Play! It just works!
It’s the year 2000! nothing bad will happen! Windows XP is so much better with so many new features, granted about half of your old Win9x software isn’t going to work because this is basically NT Home Edition. It’s the 21st century, computers are always online and have basically no built-in security. What could go wrong?
It’s 2010, and it seems these smart phones are here to stay. No problem, we’ll just rebuild the entire internet for tiny, vertical displays and release an entire generation of Windows as a touch-first UI. Nothing’s gonna go wrong.
It’s 2020, so put your mask on! Between a containership jackknifing across the Suez canal, traffic jams at ports because covid, impending political bullshit, and the rising trend of using AI to “write” software and said AI’s insatiable thirst for hardware meaning entire brands of computer parts are shutting down, maybe you should just go to the store, buy a stick of sidewalk chalk for $17 and just play a goddamn game of hopscotch instead.
I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today’s money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.
My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.
When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.
Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.
Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.
Not everything is that bad. My instance just works, for instance ;)
Absolutely brilliant!
Take my upvote and this crown: 👑
And a hot plate!
And my axe!
👈(❛ ᗜ ❛👈)
There is the aspect not many are talking here.
When previously people released software, there was no easy way to release patch. This means that the first release is the release most of people are going to use forever.
Nowadays you can very easily patch after release, which means that you can be quick to release, and fix later. This means that you can never install anything .0 version, because they are buggy as hell.
Since iOS 26.2 was just released, I’m wondering the exact same thing. I don’t think they listened to any reported feedback.
You should send in a hand written note asking why they require your feedback if they won’t listen to it.
And the note should be written…IN BLOOD!!! But, like spirit halloween fake blood. I’m saying to send a message! Not commit murder…unless you want to commit murder. Then go ahead. I won’t stop you. I’m not your mother.
I wish android versions past 10 didn’t exist. They keep making it worse for aesthetic purposes. Like why are the buttons so huge when phone screens are at their biggest point yet.
I will never understand why they removed the bluetooth tap to toggle, and replaced it with an open to a separate screen. That’s what long-press was for!
It seems like regressing or breaking typical functionality is simply a tactic so companies can bring it back in 5 years and call it innovation.
The mobile companies are slowly hiding all radio controls to guarantee the user is too inconvenienced to keep turning them off. Guarantees more enriched telemetry gathering.
Happens at the app level too, although it may be less malicious and more crappy coding. Watch Duty on Android, for example, is really a pain of an app in that regard. You can disable android’s WiFi/Bluetooth scanning, but their app uses that Google service specifically instead of raw GPS, so you lose the ability to get location-based wildfire alerts. If you don’t consent to Google stalking.
What a trade-off, if you don’t give away your location Metadata, you can’t be kept safe from fires?
My Pixel dis/enables it on a press. Long press for devices.
Works that way on my Samsung as well, you just have to hit the circle button instead of the larger bluetooth button that encompasses it.
Heck, my first smartphone ran Android 4.0. Compared to current Android 16 more than a decade later, the only practical change I could think of is granular permissions.
I started with 2.3, it was a bit daunting. 4.4 though was so fun. Even up until like 7 or 8 I remember rooting via a simple app and then the world was your oyster.
On the topic of practical changes, it took them until 11 to add an audio output switcher to currently playing media notifs and even then they made them far uglier and less functional.
They used to run on a model of “we know best” which is arrogant, but passable in a developing industry like earlier mobile where things needed work. Unfortunately, they still think they know best, and that closed-minded approach only works so long until you lose sync with the tolerance of the general public. Honestly surprised it took them this long. iOS and MacOS have both rotted terribly.
Take the UI aspects alone. Samsung “leaked” hints about a glass UI, saw user feedback, and pivoted. Apple released a glass UI because they would have never checked what users actually wanted, nor even bothered to see the user feedback from Samsung users and realize it’d apply to them as well.
My shit still works, alltho its a bit fluid ;)
“agile development”, “AI generated code”, “early release”, “corporate greed”.
100% - so sick of trouble shooting shit and charging everything
My favorite one is when you tap something on a touchscreen, the item highlights/reacts visually showing the device recognized your input, but it doesn’t perform the action you tapped on. (it works just fine the second time you try though)
I presed the button…
You know I pressed the button…
I know you know I pressed the button…
WHY are you not doing the thing??
Shit just working doesn’t make money.
Yep, good old planned obsolence
An answer so simple that you’d think it’d be more obvious, but there it is.
*doesn’t make enough money.
Things that mostly work with occasional minor problems that are easily diagnosed and fixed are still profitable… they just don’t maximise profitability.
That’s the problem. Capitalism isn’t happy with making a decent profit. It needs to maximize the profit by cutting everything else.
On the commercial side, it’s the curse of the pareto principle and the “good enough” approach that is the rational consequence of money-maximizing strategies.
For volunteer/free software/etc. it’s both people being used to working in commercial settings on the one hand, and being ok with scratching one’s own itches first and foremost on the other.
Node and react. Giant frameworks that seem to be the standard nowadays. They’re huge, bloated, and largely overkill for most things. I personally suspect they will be losing popularity soon due to the memory shortages.
We moved fast and broke things.
Nobody came back later and fixed things. We were too busy breaking other things.
Because software is cool so let’s just add more stuff!!
