loc978 said:
The only solid complaint about "technology" I see here is smartphone battery life, which...
Zhukov said:
modern phones have short battery life (really?)
Yes. They absolutely fucking do. I have a 4 year old "dumb" phone with its original battery... which still lasts a week on idle or several days with heavy use (which is considerably less than it lasted when new). Compare that to maybe 24 hours idle or 8 of heavy use you get from even the best "smart" phones these days.
They really aren't any more flimsy than they've ever been, though.
QFT. I'd rate my HTC as being very nearly as tough as the 3330 I had back in the day ... but it's definitely exchanged battery life for advanced features. I wouldn't really want to go back to that kind of basic provision (though phone, sms, wap/email (er... I know I had SOME monochrome low-rez phone that did that, anyway), customisable ringtones, snake and fm radio is all you REALLY need, so long as you also have a compass, a map, separate digicam, and don't mind calling someone up to google things for you)... but if you could make a modern smartphone with the battery life of the Nokia, even if it then also had to be just as thick as the 33xx series, you'd be onto a serious winner.
Battery meter now: forget to charge up overnight, start the day with it sitting around 20%... shit, fuck, damn. I'd better be hella careful then, maybe scrounge a microUSB lead off someone to juice it up a little off the PC, or it'll be dead by the time I'm heading home, and I still haven't been facebooked the location of where we're all meeting up in town.
Battery meter them: low battery warning blerps you awake a little late for school/work ... grab phone and head out... occasionally cuss the irritating beep it emits every ten minutes, and think "I'd better remember to plug it in when I get back home, otherwise it will probably run out tomorrow and I'll have to beg a charger off someone... plus I haven't any change for the payphones".
The rest of the complaints have to do with culture surrounding technology and trends in software. Much like we saw with cars in the late 90s, hardware is getting more advanced, but the way it's being used in manufacturing is bafflingly impractical. The philosophy of "form following function" is pretty well dead in modern culture, replaced by "form. There's another part?"
Maybe it depends on what car you have. My own 2003 model seems to get it almost exactly right. It's attractively designed, but it has just the right complement of features (all useful without any gaps*, or fripperies that you don't use**) and they all work together in a sensible, ergonomic way. The switchover to largely electronically controlled engines was a bit of a pain because it means you can no longer diagnose an ignition fault by whacking the distributor with a hammer (to free up the impromptu seal of rust that's formed around the lip), tweaking it one way and the other and then popping it open to sandpaper all the corrosion off the terminals ... but it also means that faults of that kind are actually a lot less common, and so long as you can afford the replacement part it's pretty much a matter of undoing one screw, popping a plug out of a socket, withdrawing the offending piece and then doing the reverse with the new one. Almost everything is actually handled in the ECU and all that can go wrong are sensors and the few remaining essential mechanical pieces.
But then, I am in europe, driving a european car. Maybe it's different in the states.
Oddly my previous one (a 2000 model) was from the same manufacturer and, instead of striking a decent balance, was rather the epitome of form following function - the dashboard buttons weren't in an attractive OR ergonomic pattern but spread all over the place, presumably whatever made the shortest cable run (I could turn on the hazard lights with my knee, and often did by accident), and it had a strange, not-sure-if-want running shoe shape that was surely guided by a mixture of windtunnel tests and a need to provide a particular minimum standard of luggage space and ergonomic comfort but little else... a philosophy which seemed to hold right down to the gearing, which made it remarkably efficient, far more than you'd expect such an engine to be in such a car without any kind of actual "overdrive" to the ratios, but was deafening on a long, fast drive. The engine was nicely put together, too, but an absolute nightmare to work on. The current one, although still a bit convoluted, can at least be DIYed to some extent beyond "change the oil" (even the air filter was a nightmare, this time two years ago) without having to hire an engine crane and a trained spider monkey.
So maybe it was a particular narrow period IN the 90s?
