Why does technology suck these days?

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, technology was awesome - there were always new things to look forward to, and advances in many different technologies were happening almost daily. It was such a great time to be alive - everything was interesting and cool, and there were tons of new things to look forward to.

Today, though, technology is... boring. There really isn't anything new, and what passes for new these days are just small iterations on what has come before, and everything is normie-fied to boot. The excitement and joy of upgrades and new tech is gone. There's nothing special about it today either.

Feeling kind of blue today, Sup Forums. Anyways, your thoughts on tech of the past, and anything that's exciting you these days?

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For people who feel similarly and hate anime/linux faggotry

What is there even left to discuss if both anime and Linux are left out?

>mobile devices reaching peak performance every couple of months

>desktop computers reaching photorealistic performance to make Virtual Reality more feasible

>bluetooth speaker so compact, yet deliver bass and detail articulation beyond expectation

>TV's have become more stunning and life like with OLED technology and further increase in pixel density


the best is yet to come, fucking holograms, hyperloops and autonomous cars.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU MISSING user, WE'RE STILL ON THE BLEEDING EDGE, AINT WE

it's not because technology is boring.. it's because you're old now OP

I can say that I agree with you despite not having nostalgia being the reason. Bought an Amiga 3000 from a car boot sale for £5 (guy didn't even know what it was besides "son's old computer" and I only knew the name Amiga), and I've been having a blast with it. I can't believe that there's still software made for it on AmiNet...Just have to work out how to get it on, since it's all just a case of floppies of various programs at the moment.

At least it's all a hell of a lot cheaper. I can actually afford multiple laptops, PCs, monitors, a big TV, etc. without destroying my bank account.

This looks like bulky slow shit, I much prefer things now.

You're missing that everything is smaller, and cheaper. Don't you realize how amazing it is that you can buy a fully working computer, complete with networking, display and input for like $20? And it fits in your pocket? That's some crazy shit.

OP here. I suspect that you're partially right, but honestly there isn't really *new* technology today like there was in the past. *Improved* technology, sure, we have it coming out our ears. But *new*? I guess maybe VR might be that, but beyond that there isn't anything.

Cause really we've hit a wall performance wise. What's the point of upgrading your graphics card or cpu (and blowing loads of $$) when what you have now will deliver 100+ fps with all bells and whistles turned on at high res in all your games. or being a dumb ass blowing your money on a faster cpu to cut video encoding time from for ex 30 min down to maybe 15 min. Really, you blew $400 just to save 15 min? The only thing that is worth while anymore is the constant need for expanding storage capacity. Drives are cheap, External enclosures are cheap, being able to cram an 8TB drive into an external enclosure without going bankrupt is a big win for everyone. Or dumping Win 7 for Ten, Really how is Ten gonna affect what you do now with 7? Pretty much all it'll do is cause you massive headaches.

because all new attempts at new technology are immediately regarded at 'gimmicks' by the geniuses here and elsewhere ie oculus rift.

I haven't updated any of my components for about 8 years and it's still kicking. On one hand it's good to save money, on the other...Well...At this point I'll only ever replace not upgrade.

The next iteration of Ryzen is getting me excited.

>Today, though, technology is... boring.
-OLEDs
-Fuck we have ENDGAME resolutions just on the doorstep of being affordable with Dell's $5000 4320p monitors.
-SSDs are finally affordable and instant OS starts ups are taken for granted now
-Can watch HD porn whenever you want

Computer tech in the 90s was terrible. Consoles on the other hand were great.
Wrong and anything related to a wall is console shit.

There's always been gimmicks, like VR, whose only contribution to humanity has been Ashen's Tech Dump.

except its one attempt at actual innovation, instead of incrementally improving what we already have

I kinda agree with OP. I mean hell back in the day when I upgraded from a 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 to a Radeon (Original V1) I saw the difference in both visual and fps with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, + other games of the era. I still play those games today. Now a 6800GT (2005 era) would give you 100+ fps in those titles no question so it'd be pointless to upgrade it. So yeah you'd be throwing you money away for no gain.

>There really isn't anything new, and what passes for new these days are just small iterations on what has come before

Welcome to the world of corporate consolidation where any company that even thinks about doing something innovative gets bought up by the big guys and their ideas bastardized.

the-american-interest.com/2017/04/02/where-have-all-the-public-companies-gone/

If you just want to improve on what another company is doing prepare to be sued into the ground. Even the big guys have to hold massive arsenals of patents to protect themselves. So much for market economies and competition.

SSDs are amazing, I can never go back to OS/programs on slow-ass HDDs
The unending fire hydrant of porn is pretty ridiculous

Fell for the SSD meme.

see

Government is too large and powerful

a) allowing all sorts of large incumbent corporations/industries (via lobbying and other political influence) to maintain the status quo and suppress any kind of new radical disruption that would render them obsolete

b) prolonged economic stagnation and boom-bust wealth destruction due to Fed monopoly control and mismanagement of currency and interest rates

I don't think modern technology is boring, but I hate the fact that pretty much everything is a botnet nowadays

Wrong.

Back then advancement was in such a way it directly led to new consumer products. Progress and consumerism worked together. People kept making progress because they knew if they did people will gleefully give tons of cash. Around 2007-2008 the basic standard of computing power was enough for pretty much any and all normies. Almost any laptop or desktop would be just fine for facebook and youtube. With that, suddenly normies had no reason to care for computer speed improvements, their demand vanished. This would have been a pretty major shift in the market, however, things were kind stretched out a bit because of gaymen. Thanks to gaming becoming more of a normie thing, there was still some market that wants *new* tech. As time has passed though, and gaming became more and more normie, the ones actually buying high end systems tend to be less and less informed, and therefore more susceptable to consumerism and advertising. AND here we have Today...tons of normie gamurs with SiCK RIGZ So MuCh PoWeR! except not really because they've just been buying the next iteration of same tech.

Currently there is no major market demanding real quality progress, instead just consumers demanding an appearance of progress.

woops forgot that I wrote a 'Wrong' at the start.

I wrote that because the truth is we're just in a lul right now but as VR and AI begin to require more power, innovation will occur. Progress drives progress. Consumers drive consumerism. Consumers have been the driving force most of the last 10 years which is why everything is shit.

So..partially wrong. You're right that shits shit right now but it won't be for long.

I remember when I got my first modem. It came with a nice, thick instruction manual. 80 pages full of detailed info, diagnostic codes, everything I would need to tinker with it.

Today, you're lucky if your shiny new purchase comes with a 3-step picture guide for pressing the power button.

I miss the old internet. Just discovering weird and interesting websites. Getting an OS killing virus every 6 months or so and having to reformat. The internet is far too safe these days.

This.
Is sad that the alternative is just as bad in our current society.

>on an anonymous anime imageboard
>shilling your tripfag circlejerk irc

If your talking about gaming (like your pic) consoles killed PC gaming as a primary development platform. Everything is multi-platform with PC as an afterthought. Consoles have far more profit to be made from. The last big AAA PC game to come out and push boundaries was the original Crysis which came out in 2007 (10 years ago). This stagnation has curtailed the need to upgrade every six months for gaymen.

But for home PCs in general, their performance plateaued for what most people needed them for (which is just web browsing or office type stuff). There is not a huge market for upgrading every six months like there was in the past (just like with gaming hardware).

Smartphone performance has sorta plateaued as well, even though performance is still increasing. Most people will be good with a high end phone from 2004/5 because all most people do is check social media/web browsing.

So basically a glorified Sup Forums chat room?
get you don't belong here.
You fail to realize why some of us use Linux and why most of the times OS choices don't really matter unless for retarded Sup Forums babies like (You).

>autonomous cars
>hyperloops
>holograms
>yet to come
They are here already and all of those things failed to impress me anymore, but your surprise about them surprises me. What good are you seeing in them?

>SJWs
>die-versity
>mommy coders
>pajeet
>botnet
>losers trying to reinvent what worked great for years

live in cage

I get what you're trying to say, but what is wrong with optimizing the most common use case?

It's because you're living in the normie consumerverse.

Come on over to the enterprise side of things, much more interesting.

I don't think this is a major part of it, but I feel as if technology today is too focused on looking as sleek or flashy as possible because they've all hopped onto the same train Apple took when they started putting out eMacs. It makes everything you see out there blur together so they all just look the same despite any real differences going on in the actual hardware/software.

Because technology isn't what you're used to calling technology any more. Technology has always been a word used to describe something that really was almost entirely in the realm of scientists and engineers. Before consumer electronics were around, technology would probably have probably been a word used to describe engines, miniaturization, factory automation or business automation machines that would barely be recognized as computers today (but are probably computers). Before that, it probably would have been used to describe things like what we'd consider simple metallurgy, standardization and replaceable parts, and the creation of accurate measurement tools.

Eventually, all of these things become normal, and we stop thinking about them as being special, or, "technology". Electronics are no longer technology. I'm not sure what the next "technology" is, but it's not computers any more.

There's an actually good TED talk about this from when TED was good (pre-TEDx, 2008 or so) where the presenter tells the story of his parents' first date, and then points out that nobody in the crowd was shocked that his dad just happened to have a horseless carriage with an internal combustion engine in it. That's what computers and the internet have become: not an impressive and special part of life, but a thing with implied existence that is recognized by the public as ordinary.

home computing matured

there's only so much you can do to accelerate algorithms and workloads that were pretty much perfected by the late 1970s

where an upgrade used to make a difference in seconds to even minutes for some everyday tasks, now it's often just a difference of milliseconds, to the point that even something twice as fast is going to be imperceptibly quicker for most jobs

moore's law was never anything more than an astute observation

>but I feel as if technology today is too focused on looking as sleek or flashy as possible
you all say this but the reality is the opposite; nobody gives a fuck about design at all anymore and that's actually a problem, OEMs don't give a shit about making something interesting, unique or worth admiration, they just hop onto a given trend, shit out something safe and boring that appeals to the lowest common denominator and then have foxconn slap it on a frame and call it a day

minimalist cancer today makes it even more apparent, because there's only so many ways you can design a product in that way and ultimately everything ends up looking like a piece of shit macbook clone, even Apple doesn't design shit anymore and hasn't changed up their general formula since 2009

>LOOK AT ME I USE LINUX I AM BETTER THAN YOU

he wasn't necessarily unfounded in the statement considering it was your ilk who got buttblasted about it first

people who jerk it to GNU/Shit all day are annoying as fuck and usually just as brainless as Sup Forumsirgins but most people who run it on here are neither, they just like it, big deal

not a nostalgiafag -- incredibly excited by the fact that we have fully capable computers in our pockets, web browsers that are bordering on powerful enough to host fully capable graphical applications, unified toolchains like electron for distributing cross-platform applications, and an industry full of old players having fires lit under their asses by each other to become more and more open source and create actually innovative products instead of worry about paper racing.

>be me 2001
>score a heavily abused sony monitor for like 50 bucks
>use it daily from 2001-2009
>give it to grandma when I moved out of state
>switched on 2-3h daily for card games and puzzles and shit
>my fucking face when it looks better than the asus predator and benq XL I bought in the last year

It's really funny what passes for quality these days, there is basically nobody making quality peripherals like in the early home computing era

>480i
>looking better than modern 1080p or 1440p
You got some pretty terrible genes, May want to consider not reproducing.

your mom

>Why does technology suck these days?

It doesn't.

But, guess who does?

well image quality and sharpness of CRTs are p. nice, but resolution can't be beat on LCDs

>480
given the time frame, i'm sure it was at least a 1024x768 if not 1280x1024

>CRTs
>sharpness
You need to stop kid.

>he thinks all crts are trinitrons

Stop

Haven't seen anything new in tech since 98.

your post looks very crisp in 2048x1536 at 85hz

Since when did monitors come in 480i? mid line aperture tubes supported 1800x1440 before you were born newfag

>typing

>like

>this

back to plebbit you go

> i
Not sure what do you mean by that, interlace is a TV thing.

The government has always been in the pocket of corporations,you can thank lobbying for that.

>confusing vga pc monitors with pleb tier tv shit
This is unacceptable, Sup Forums.

>why did technology seem cooler when I was still in diapers?
Gee user, no fucking clue.

it always boils down to normies, the destroy EVERYTHING they touch.

Seems like ever since the i5/i7 line of cpus came out shit has become more locked down and intentionally cripled. probably when the cia got serious about their surveilance shit and really clamped down on what us plebs are allowed access.

Monitors can accept interlaced content you underage retards.

>autonomous cars

The ability to live where I want not close to work because I can be doing something else other then driving for 30 minutes to 4 hours a day.

autonomous cars also implies electric, which means that distance is also cheaper then its ever been to travel.

It would be nice to live somewhere outside a city, get dropped off by my car, have my car drive itself to a garage, and when I'm done have my car come to pick me up.

Hell, I could probably set up some kind of curtains or box in the car that would allow me to watch porn and jerk off, and if wireless data gets a kick in the ass, probably watch shit on the go too.

Imagine how annoying the brainded hordes like you who don't do much, just trashtalk an OS with 2% marketshare. This is the best you can do? Twat.

>there were always new things to look forward to, and advances in many different technologies were happening almost daily.
Because you actually saw benefit from that new technology. For most uses outside gaming (which has been in a downward spiral as of recently) and niche uses, computers were powerful enough a decade ago for anything most people might want to use them for. Ever since then companies have just been rolling out more bloated software to suck up all the additional resources you could supply it with todays hardware making most hardware upgrades feel like some shitty RPG scaling (ex. multi core support for modern web browsers to improve performance, for a fucking web browser on computers with modern clock speeds). Also, as time has gone on and more people who are less knowledgeable about computers have started using computers, companies have started stripping out features and doing shit to piss off people who actually care (see most of Microsoft's recent decisions and the capabilities of software available for smartphones vs what was available on UMPCs). The last time I was seriously impressed with new hardware was when I finally got around to purchasing an SSD.

Honestly, the most fun I've had with computers in recent years has been seeing how weak of a computer is actually good enough for my needs when it isn't running tons of bloatware.

>mobile devices reaching peak performance every couple of months
Who fucking cares when you literally can do nothing on them of use, and dare play a game in public and you are now an autist no matter what you do so may as well play a real game on a real system with real controls instead.

>desktop computers reaching photorealistic performance to make Virtual Reality more feasible

As of right now, vr is not worth it and its arguable will not be worth it.

See, for me the main use of vr is as a monitor, an

23040 x 8640

It would be 4 4k monitors tall, 6 4k wide and 120 vertical degrees and 160-180 horizontal. possibly full panoramic.

But current hmd have a massive issue with focusing, and its not something I think we are going to solve, at least cheaply, as its a mechanical issue, distance from eye to lense, lense to screen, yea... not a cheap fix and breaks the vast majority of what I want vr fro right there.

>bluetooth speaker so compact, yet deliver bass and detail articulation beyond expectation

audio has been a solved problem upwards 50 years ago, and a good 10 years ago manufacturing caught up to make high end relatively cheap. blue tooth itself is not interesting,

>TV's have become more stunning and life like with OLED technology and further increase in pixel density

we had a what 40-50 year run on b&w crt
we had a 40-50 year run on color crt
we had plasma, which went away
we regressed to lcd in quality
and we keep getting teased that we will get something better within the next 2 years for the past 15 years... yea, fuck display tech.


we use to get teased shit, and the shit would actually come out, and after it came out it would get cheap, we are going on what, i want to say over 15 years on being teased about oled's?

maybe you finally learned that technologies do not make our lives better

you cant, the shit costs over 300$ and in america at least, all contracts where you have a smart device are put on plans assuming you are paying said device off.

but smaller and thinner part...

I don't want shit smaller or thinner, I fucking despise how smartphones feel in my hand. more portable sure, but for their intended use they suck.

I want my shit properly cooled so it doesn't throttle, or run at a constant 80c because 'its cool enough to not impact performance'

I don't want non replaceable batteries, hell, if you could make it work with AA's that would be fucking fantastic,

you got old and depressed, you now see the true value of things, and look back to the past with watery eyes, not because it was that much better, but because you were more excited about bs back then
you're nostalgia is just that, nostalgia, not well deserving praise for the past or critique on the present
now stfu and make '90s kids will remember' memes

teased about oleds for almost as long as I have been alive, and the only place I have seen them for favorable prices are tablets and phones.

get me a nice 48inch oled tv I can use as a monitor and then we will talk.

end game resolutions... yea... and all I want are nice 100~ ppi monitors as I don't like scaling shit 100 ppi is good enough, passed this I want screen real estate so I don't need more then one monitor, I want a 48 inch 4k so I can have the equivalent of 4 1080p's

ssd's have largely stagnated, and the only advancement is the controllers, which cost stupid amounts of money, yet show no real world upgrades to even sata drives for real world performance outside of unicorn programs or uncompressed data sets.

>and dare play a game in public and you are now an autist
Is this actually a problem for people?

Oh, I forgot, all the hd porn i want? and yet I fall back on photography because listening to all the fake moaning and horribly acted lines is a massive turn off.

me personally, I'm not trying to impress anyone and I don't care what they think of me, so no, but most people do have this as a massive issue.

>and yet I fall back on photography because listening to all the fake moaning and horribly acted lines is a massive turn off.
It pisses me off how much porn now days is videos. I just want pictures but there are so many videos today if I'm just searching for it that I actually need to exclude video sites a good portion of the time to get usable search results.

I'm not gonna lie I really don't socialize much, but the only time I've ever heard someone go on about people being autists because they play handheld games in public has been on Sup Forums.

>mfw that picture is true

There are numerous reasons, but here's the main three:
1. You got used to technology since it's part of your everyday life now.
2. The software is more consumer friendly, meaning it's dumbed-down and boring.
3. Everything is on-demand, there are no real challenges for the user. Even the majority of development projects is just using apis and copy pasting code.

See , it isn't nostalgia.

this is just a number of years ago, but I had a ds, and would be doing shit for goddamn ever at a family gathering so I brought it along, decided to play a game with sound off, as I am aware enough I don't want everyone else to be brought into what I am doing.

Get told by all my immediate family to stop playing games because its embarrassing. get threatened a bit later, and because I was just out of highschool with nothing to fall back on if they follow through with the threats, put the ds away.

So here I am, in a building, only family around me, no one to talk to, nothing to do, for upwards 6 fucking hours, watching the few kids that are there being allowed to play games, slowly hating my family for bringing me along.when they knew this would be the result.

yea, normal people have a massive disdain for games and see you as an embarrassment for playing them in public, or at all really.

dude what

If we're talking about computers, things are fucking awesome. Hardware is a lot cheaper than it was back then because it lasts longer. 6 years on the same CPU? Unimaginable, yet here I am without feeling any pressure to upgrade. Is that "exciting"? Probably not, but the premise of having more money to spare on other things is a lot more exciting to me. Software is incomparably better today. And if you're addicted to waiting for things for some reason, there's always something to look forward to there.

I don't want to go back to my 386, fuck no. Especially not to whatever the fuck I had in the late '90s. All I remember is having to upgrade all the time if I wanted to keep up with gaming. Photo editing wasn't that exciting because digital cameras were bad as well as expensive. Music production was a chore - not that it isn't today in many ways, but at least our computers can handle near anything you throw at them. Run a dozen instances of fucking Serum - go right ahead bro, I don't mind. 6 year old CPU.

Why aren't you pining for the early 20 century automotive industry? I can think of a few reasons.

>everyone focuses on general platforms deficiencies but only touch lightly on the actual software and hardware which are the main factors.
>one mention of Moore's law and no mention of Dennard's law/scaling
>no mention of multithreading issues and how pretty much OpenMP is 'state of the art in that field without performance impact

I don't even actually want to contribute meaningfully here if this is a so called 'good thread'. I hate this place for its shallowness and ignorance 'excused' by shitposting where barely anyone has a clue about what they are talking about.

ITT selection bias.
betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18
read it.

my old modem would tell me exactly what was wrong, is the modem crashed, or is the cable company not sending data, is data not being sent out, what the fuck is going on.

my new one has nothing but an on led with no documentation what anything it does means.

crysis was the last 'cant play it on current hardware' game made that way not due to piss poor optimizations, not saying crysis was well optimized, but its better then some of the shit we get.

and as a profit per platform, pc gives them more money hands down, at least on a per game sold basis, consoles still have a massive used market and even piracy helps game devs more then that does.

for consumer hardware outside of the gpu, performance has been stagnant for the last 6 or so years, and don't give me the 2-5% intel gives as not stagnation. is an 8 core more then what we require for browsing the web? fucking absolutely and i dread the day its the minimum, but is it something we don't want?

most of what makes a smartphone useable is hardware accelerations and standards, a 2004-2005 would be completely un useable today.

I like cheap parts and not having to upgrade every year and sell off all my old stuff to recoup some of the costs. Still use an ivy as my main and it was cheaper than the 486 we had when I was a kid.My next build will be cheaper than it. its bretty gud times.

a computer in your pocket that can do nothing at all but show you a webpage... yay. locked down shit.

...

that looks like the 80s. why are they playing Q3 if it hasn't been released yet

You just don't know where to look.

Why are you being a faggot if you know when q3 was released?

>-OLEDs
...Which we don't have. Only available in a minority of phones and overpriced TVs.

>Fuck we have ENDGAME resolutions
When top of the line GPUs can barely max games in 4k, windows scaling is horrible and there's little 4k content.

>SSDs are finally affordable and instant OS starts ups
Not really coming down much in price in the last years. Also boot times arent relevant since sleep was invented.

>Can watch HD porn whenever you want
It's hard enough to find good porn, it's almost never HD unless you want to watch some old roastie with fake tits.

the two aren't mutually exclusive

Regarding the weak pcs, i enjoy doing that, have a cheap laptop i got for 150, works fine for my needs of web browsing, watching anime and word processing, also runs games like portal 2 and aoe 2 hd

Also, RPI zero w i find interesting, has WiFi built in, can browse web, play games and other stuff, only 9 quid

Facinates me that for 9 pounds you can have a pc that is more powerful than early pcs in the 90s

alright man w/e, but those mt. dews and viewsonic crts are clearly late 90s early 2000

>2004-2005 would be completely un useable today
meant 2014/2015

>Not using a T-mobile sidekick in the current year

Pity the Pi and other SBCs don't have a dedicated OS that plays well with the hardware, is fast, and actually reasonably capable.

Much or most of the "blurryness" attributed to CRTs was just distortion introduced in the signal path to the monitor, some of the late Mitsubishi tubes used DVI and were crisp as fuck at supported resolutions, in fact the way they rendered a dot was arguably superior to any fixed pixel display I have ever seen

Yeah kinda sucks, i just like the fact that it's really bare bones and runs from a micro SD card

this is why this place is so shitty most of the time
people with actual arguments and meaningful topics to discuss get pissed as people spew their own opinion while calling their opposition whatever demeaning thing they can think of
this is why we lurk, its exhausting trying to actively make this shitshow anything worthwhile. kinda an analogy for life, I guess