When you connect a new device to a ‘smart’ tv, you must pay homage to the manufacturer with a ritualistic dance. Plugging and unplugging the device. Turning them on and off in the correct sequence like entering a konami code.

Every time you want to switch devices, the tv must scan for them. And god forbid you lose power, or unplug something. You are granted the delight experience of doing it all over again.

I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.

What is some other tech that used to be better?

1 point

Yeah ok having both makes sense as it allows easier controls for the passenger to use or while being stopped

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3 points

Movies. You used to be able to just buy them and own the data.

Now you have to pray the other party doesn’t ‘alter the deal’ and if you are proactive about safekeeping the stuff you own you’re a ‘thief’.

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1 point

Alternatively, everything is now digital which makes it super easy to pirate and keep forever in a universal format. The main exception is music since spotify and the like make everything so easy that most people don’t bother to upload albums.

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5 points

Going with MacBooks. Used to be you could upgrade RAM and other components. Now, you have to get a new machine.

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1 point
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To be fair, MACs are fast (sometimes too fast), and efficient; the perks of having RAM soldered millimeters away from CPU.

But they went and shat the bed, locking the SSDs to the machine and charging $200 for an upgrade. Stupidly absurd corporate BS

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12 points

Depending on your definition of ‘better’ . In terms of repair ability and ease of maintenance, pretty much all old tech. In terms of price… There is no chance, it’s insane how cheap tech has gotten.

The power consumption of old stuff is also extremely bad compared to now. So yeh you can have fridges, washing machines, or whatever appliances from the 70’s that still work and are easy to maintain… They use way, way, way too much power for what they do. In an ideal world where energy is free, sure that stuff is better. We don’t tho.

Also, basically everything that uses software while it shouldn’t, has a worse user experience than before.

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1 point

Even fridges, washing machines, and whatever else from the '00s was better than now. It’s really been the last 15ish years that literally everything has been “Big Mac-ified” to the disposable products that we now have to deal with.

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1 point

Engineers of the past had very limited design knowledge, so generally subscribed to the “I don’t know how to do this. Oh well, more good, morer bettererer.”

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1 point

My grand parents had a fridge in their basement from the 50s until they died 2010. That thing was built like a tank

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15 points

I don’t know if it counts as tech per se, but phone calls. It used to be the case that many if not most phone calls people received were important, so they would have a good reason to answer the phone. These days most calls are spammers or scammers and a lot of people don’t answer the phone because of this. With spoofing, even calls that appear to be from a legitimate number can easily be a scam, and it’s hard to trust any calls these days.

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-1 points
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Tbf though it’s not hard to differentiate the two unless you’re Kitboga’s grandma.

“Wow Steve, nice accent. You been spending a lot of time in Calcutta (or a robot factory depending) recently? And why do you know my car’s warrantee is about to expire (even though I bought it used and 20yr old)?”

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8 points

You can get around that by getting a phone number from a fairly distant location. Spoofed numbers will almost always use the same area code as your number. So if I were to get a phone number from, say, Presque Isle, ME, and started getting calls from the 207 area code, I’d know that I could safely ignore every one of them.

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