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I think the author is correct to a point but I don't believe the examples they've chosen provide the best support for their case. Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services. You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s (or even a Zune).
Instead, I see the growth and momentum behind Linux and self-hosting as better evidence that change is afoot.
> You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s
I could see how many people would assume this, but it’s actually false.
There’s actually a big selection of dedicated audio players that do the job very well now. The battery life and audio quality are extremely good because there’s a niche market for them with a lot of competition.
If you think the iPod software experience in the early 2000s was good then you and I had very different experiences with iTunes during that time.
The resurgence of retro gear has a simpler explanation: Retro is cool. Vintage is cool. Has been for a long time. The reason we’re noticing it now is because the tech things we remember are finally passing that threshold where they go from being outdated to being retro. Just like clothes and styles that went out of fashion but are now retro-cool.
I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS specific to only playing songs and podcasts, and maybe movies, which I can sync with my computer (maybe with rsync or whatever else). No apps.
The only option that I could find was an iPod classic, modded with an SD card and better battery.
If something else exists, especially brand new, I’d love to know! But I couldn’t find hardly anything that wasn’t just an Android phone with no cell service.
> I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS
There are a lot of DAPs in this style. They're just not popular because the Android-based units are perfectly fine and don't feel like Android phones with an MP3 player app installed. Most buyers don't have arbitrary OS requirements, they just want a device that works well.
I'd start by looking at the Rockbox compatible devices list: https://www.rockbox.org/
They likely want to use the device without looking at it, thus the requirement is physical buttons not a specific OS.
It’s the same issue with touch screens in cars. Anything that’s a touchscreen simply fails a core MP3 player requirement for many people.
Yup. I want to be able to use it to listen to music, start/stop/pause/skip/volume while I'm at the dentist.
I think Fiio and Hiby are the closest that exist today. They have dedicated hardware and physical buttons for the things listed in your comment. However, they do still ship with a custom Android OS and you need the touch screen to navigate your library and such. On the upside, this lets you choose your media library app. On the downside, it still isn't as good as the touch wheel on old iPods. I, too, am waiting for something like this to return. The Hiby is good enough until then for me.
Shanling uses a custom OS although it feels very primitive compared to iPods (e.g. the iPod Nano had VoiceOver for touch navigation). So I'm not really a fan of these dedicated single-function players; modern media player apps can be fast and convenient (more so than a clickwheel, honestly), and Android devices can still have dedicated control buttons. If only these devices weren't so bulky...
Fair argument, these devices (the Hiby R4, in particular, which is the one I have) are absolute tanks. Way too heavy and big to throw in your pocket for any reason, especially if you use a case. Still, it's nice to be able to (sort of) carry my own library around and never need internet to listen to it.
Shanling OS is trash. Absolute trash. Hiby OS is decent.
Hold on. You wear headphones while at the dentist? How are you supposed to carry on a conversation where they ask you question and you respond HOAYRA AH OT AH HA AH
I've got the first boards on my desk for a media player based around the Sifli 58 chip. 1.8" amoled display and 16 buttons.
https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,55419.0.html
Anyone want to help with porting Rockbox?
For me it's not arbitrary. An android device is a general purpose handheld touchscreen computer that happens to be used for music. That means a bunch of things to me:
1. "Touchscreen first" UX
2. Heavier than it needs to be
3. Worse battery life compared to a non-Android device
Using a touchscreen in the rain is impossible. Running out of battery sucks. Going for a run with a 240g brick is no fun, it'll pull your pants down to your knees and trip you.
Compare the specs:
Hiby R1
Dimensions: 86.9 x 60.6 x 14.5 mm
Weight: 118g
OS: HibyOS
Battery: 19 hour play time
Price: $159.00
Hiby R4
Dimensions: 129.6 x 68.3 x 18.5 mm
Weight: 231g
OS: Android 12
Battery: 11 hour play time
Price: $249
> For me it's not arbitrary. An android device is a general purpose handheld touchscreen computer that happens to be used for music
Android is just an operating system. I’ve developed and shipped Android based devices that have no screen at all.
Android and Linux are both used for a wide variety of embedded systems. Saying they’re all general purpose computing devices isn’t true.
> Going for a run with a 240g brick is no fun, it'll pull your pants down to your knees and trip you.
Then don’t pick the largest device with a big screen? There are many smaller DAPs and phones that run Android. The reason that device is so large isn’t because it runs Android.
Generally, across most DAP manufacturers, the android devices are all of those things that I don't want, and the non-android devices tend to be cheaper, lighter, with better battery life. I don't specifically choose non-android, I specifically chose those other parameters and have simply noticed a pattern. I don't doubt you, but you haven't given any examples and I'm not going to spend my life searching for the exception that proves the rule.
My first Android phone was a Samsung Galaxy S2. It weighted two grams less than that Hiby R1. Of course it was much larger, but tiny by today's standards.
Never mind mp3 players, I'd love a small phone again also. It's ridiculous that there isn't a single decent android phone
I loved the buttons on the Galaxy Spica https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i5700_galaxy_spica-pictures...
Now that I think about it, going no-buttons might have been a driver towards larger screens. Having at least a few buttons seemed to make it much less necessary.
> 240g brick pantsing you
Sometimes I wish people from 1995 could read our threads and see the things we’re complaining about.
240 grams is twice as heavy as for example an average minidisc player (https://www.minidisc.wiki/equipment/sony/portable/mz-g750) which could often weigh less than 100g.
The very first cassette Walkman was about 40 grams light: https://www.soundandvision.com/content/flashback-1979-sony-s...
The Rio MP3 player was 109 grams: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/diamond-rio-pmp300-m...
The classic Creative Nomad weighs in at 45g including battery: https://www.crutchfield.com/S-HglCxgxN2we/p_053NX128/Creativ...
> 240 grams is twice as heavy as for example an average minidisc player (https://www.minidisc.wiki/equipment/sony/portable/mz-g750) which could often weigh less than 100g.
The parent comment chose an unusually large DAP with a big screen to compare to. It’s not really a fair comparison.
Also the weights of old devices are usually listed without batteries, which could increase the overall weight by 50% or more.
I had a minidisc player a long time ago. It was a quality one, but it wasn’t the lightest or more robust thing to carry around.
You see that I used the weights including batteries for all but the minidisc player which is specced at 144g including those, right?
Almost certainly a typo, the first Walkman was 390g or 14 ounces (not 1.4oz)
Yes, it seems you are correct. For example this one is 180g including batteries: https://www.1001hifi.info/2025/01/sony-wm-20-1983-worlds-sma...
Though I stand by my implied argument that older devices were not as heavy as we might remember them to be. And it is okay to consider 240g a bit too heavy in the context of a digital music player with no need for cassettes or mechanical parts.
I read the advert as claiming that the headphones for that Walkman are 1.4oz, which seems plausible (they're a very flimsy design).
Well, I had something like this back in the late 90s (can't recall the year exactly)
https://walkman.land/aiwa/hs-px297
Battery: 1AA gets 30h
Dimensions: 111.4 x 29.1 x 80.7 mm
Weight: 132g
Also remember you can just buy another AA battery, and keep a few spares in your bag.
Ok, and each AA battery you keep in your bag adds another 23 grams, so "a few" (let's say 3) and you're already right back up to 192 grams
If you're going running with your Walkman I think 30 hours on a single AA would be fine
We live in 2026 now, with expectations that are matched to the current year.
I've got the Hiby R1 and have been pretty pleased with it. The R1 doesn't actually run android but just straight linux. It boots up in about 6-8 seconds and returns to the place you previously were. As for physical controls it's got easy to identify buttons for volume, pause (double click for previous track) and next track that are pretty easy to find in a pocket.
No experience with the R4 but seems to have good reviews with the hifi crowd.
Whats wrong with some Nokia brick? Has bluetooth, probably 3.5mm jack too, lasts a week, has more physical buttons than you need for playing mp3s. Costs little
I have a few, and for managing and playing music the UX is absolute ass. Fine for dialing a number and occasionally switching to silent mode, but that's about it.
Does the battery actually last a week while playing music over Bluetooth?
They last so long you forget they need charging.
I can't vouch for it personally since I don't own one, but I saw a video on YouTube mentioning the Innioasis Y1[0], which supposedly does a decent job of replicating the iPod experience with some modern features like USB-C and Bluetooth at a decent price. Can be flashed with RockBox. No external SD slot, but it can be opened to swap out the SD card it comes with. Reportedly doesn't feel nearly as nice in hand as a real iPod does but that's pretty standard at this price point.
Bought off your recommendation for my kids to replace their Yotos [1], thank you!
Damn this looks great. I'd guess the main difference in feel is the weight. iPod classic was about 2-3x heavier, which seems to be the main factor in premium feel.
(Well, that and the metal body.)
This is a problem with "single-purpose" devices for kids, too. Drawing tablets, music players. They're all actually full Android phones (sans cell modem) and tablets. It sucks.
Why is android bad here? An android launcher can create the illusion of a single purpose device. What difference does it make? Battery life?
It represents a general purpose computer on your network which will accumulate vulnerabilities and never be patched or otherwise secured, making it a persistent insider threat as a launchpad for attacks on your network
The issue isn't really Android, it's the touchscreen and the way the UX is a regression from many analog single-purpose devices.
If you gonna have a single-purpose device - make it analog (or close to analog)!
Don't give it a perceptible boot-time and all the other flaws that come with general-purpose computing. Don't make the user have to "wake up the device", let alone have to visually confirm that it is woken-up, before they can switch to the next song.
They can do too much stuff, so it’s yet another do-anything device to have to police.
So install a dumbed down launcher and put it in kiosk mode? Thatll lock things down pretty heavily.
That's exactly the policing.
Yes, I want these for my kids so very badly. They have Yotos (similar to Tonie) for bedtime, and iPads for school work, but those are not ideal for a number of reasons. I want them to be able to experience music like I was able to with an FM+cassette walkman clone in the '80s and early '90s, or with my Nomads and iPods in the late '90s and early aughts. Hopefully someone here can suggest something!
ETA: OK, there are quite a few highly-rated options on Amazon, so I just need to solve the "putting music on there" problem and the "dropping it and immediately destroying it problem".
We have a couple of https://bemighty.com which work great for the kiddos. Effectively an ipod shuffle.
Same Works great.
The whole Spotify 30 day refresh requirement is bullshit but there’s really nothing that isn’t without some flaw
Pretty sure I know what music player you're talking about because I have the same requirement.
Sony's modern Walkman is an Android device. No thanks.
For what it’s worth I love mine. I have app pinning enabled in android so it’s completely locked to just my music app. Feels like a great compromise of customizability while also feeling like an all in one device
No promises, but a Tangera might actually be what you failed to find. Fair enough for that too, as they're not exactly mainstream
"No Longer Available - 1,290 claimed", unfortunately.
Well that's a shame - I'd thought they'd continue to be available, but apparently not. I hadn't even noticed the banner, sorry
Comment was deleted :(
Swofy makes a little media player that has physical buttons; the crowd here at home really likes them: https://a.co/d/9icRCCs
Not sure if this would fit the bill for you, but I really like it:
96GB Mp3 Player with Bluetooth 5.0 - Aiworth Portable Digital Lossless Music MP3 MP4 Player for Kids with FM Radio HD Speaker for Sports Running Super Light Metal Shell Touch Buttons (Actual Amazon description)
The "touch screen" is only for moving around the menu. The menu is easy to remember. Sound quality is really good and it takes a mini SD card. Right now, $40.
Have you looked at Cowon? These are somewhat premium end players, but they are absolutely great. Their Cowon J3 was legendary, was declared the best mp3 player of all time by some outlets. I'm currently using a Cowon Plenue D2, which is also really good.
I've been tentatively eyeing up this which I think meets all of your requirements: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008384398058.html
How hard did you look? You can type "MP3 Player" into an Amazon search box (and I'm sure Aliexpress and other competitors) and find many devices that are exactly what you say you want.
So i may install "Rockbox" again (yes - that was an upgrade), on an Kinese express-device? But, but, but...that may sound offending -sry, just for a moment i thought, "you were missing the topic completly" so... my 2 cents OT....
Platforms, globally synchronized making the Uniform, and bland?
(Reads:) "Monitored, connected beds. Antitrust pressure seem slowed"
"A Timex ad went viral this year: 'Know the time without seeing you have 1249 unanswered emails.'"
An Opinon-Refusal-Portal; the 'Wise people Of Gotham"-Citizen-Advice-Agency, the 120%-Normality, the Blue-Milk-Canal-Logic (Kishon)
I like watches cos, there once was a time, machines got that big and heavy, that wind-like waterpowered-energy couldn't make them start, nor keep them go, and therefore a 'need' of steam-engines...
"Cos nostalgia revealed a massive, underserved Service-economy-demand."
so... ?
Random thoughts, not? (-;
Have you looked at Rockbox?
That brought back memories... Used to daily drive Rockbox on my old 80 GB iPod decades ago. Got a lot of use out of the FLAC support.
Latest project updates are dated 2025. Blows my mind that this project is still alive. Feels oddly out of place in today's computer industry where chips are locked down to prevent projects like these from existing.
All the more reason to keep it alive, no?
I have a Fiio M3K with Rockbox, it's great. My demands are not high though; I just want something light that I can put in my pocket, which shuffles a bunch of lofi music. It helps me tune my monkey brain out.
This is my time to shine. I never stopped using dedicated mp3-players. After my trusty Philips Gogears died and became unavailable for purchase, I settled on Ruizu branded mp3-players. The Ruizu X02[1] is an absolute baller, cheap as hell, trustworthy and limited to the basic functionality you would expect from an mp3-player (music, movies, radio, pictures). You put stuff on it via USB + drag-and-drop just like the ol' days. Damn trustworthy too I had one soaked in water for 15 minutes - flinging it was like using a water pistol. Did it die? Pfft, this is a Ruizu we're talking about. Only thing that can destroy these are weights in the gym and even then they still play music: 'I have no light but I must play' style. No biggie, new one is 20-30 euro's it's like I'm robbing them
[1] https://www.amazon.com/RUIZU-X02-Recorder-Playback-Expandabl...
Not sure why you want to have purpose-built OS as the hill to die on since many of those Android-based mp3 players absolutely outclass the old iPod classics in snappiness and compatibility and output quality.
Plenty of choices that meet your other criteria once you're OK with it being Android powered.
Like a SnowSky is very obviously stripped down Android that can only run the music app it's shipped with, but it's otherwise everything you want.
Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example).
Basically part of the charm of a single-purpose device is that it can be built to serve it purpose ridiculously well and do nothing else, and the second general purpose software enters the picture much of that is lost.
The endless amount of Chinese Android-based single purpose mp3 player devices that are obviously iPod Nano/Classic clones basically cost ~$30 and have 50hr+ of battery life. You don't have to think about what player app to use, they ship with the only one that runs. The rest of the Androidness is stripped out.
Then yes, there's obviously the other end of the extreme where the mp3 player is very obviously a phone without a radio with a price tag to match. And everything in-between.
I'd say there's actually too many choices cause the silicon and battery cost required to simply play music has gotten so cheap that it doesn't make sense to optimize the OS further than Android. I'm sure the economics of scale means the actual hardware wouldn't be cheaper by any noticeable amount either.
> Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example).
The battery life is fine on modern DAPs. Excellent, even.
I understand why an engineer would want a completely application specific, built-from-scratch OS that does one thing perfectly, but that's a pipe dream for a niche market.
A powerful and efficient SoC that runs Android is ultra-cheap these days. Less than $1. Hiring an engineering team to write and maintain a custom OS for a niche product would incur so much R&D cost that it would wipe out any money you'd save by using a smaller microcontroller and drive the final cost up.
Just think: How much salary would you have to pay a team of engineers to write the custom OS and maintain it? If you could optimistically sell 500,000 of these devices (good luck) then how much would you have to save in order to pay for the R&D?
You don't need "OS" to play some music, drive display and talk via USB/BLE. It's trivial task and could be done with a few event loops. A lot of firmwares is being written without OS. May be FreeRTOS/Zephyr to somewhat simplify the programming, but that's definitely not "OS" in a commonly accepted sense. You don't need team of engineers, one hobbyist could easily do that. I wrote firmware for a device of similar complexity (work with ADC, implements USB, BLE, some UI with buttons and leds) and I'm not even a professional.
There's no way to win in these threads. It's a very common pattern on HN that somebody will say, "X doesn't exist!" And then people will proceed to point out that in fact does exist. And then you'll find out that the original poster has a bunch of non-functional requirements that were baked into their original request that they didn't state, and I usually don't agree with (typically because they are either not practical or only of theoretical concern). They'll typically defend them using highly charged language, like claiming that having to carry a 200 gram device will pull their pants down because it's so heavy, or that managing a Bluetooth stack and USB doesn't require an OS, but rather just a couple of event loops that a non-professional could code directly in firmware.
I've simply stopped participating because in my efforts to try to help people, I find that I just get into silly arguments.
“Currently unavailable”…
I like Alan Moore’s take: A culture retreats into the comfort of nostalgia in especially uncertain times.
I feel retro fad of this generation is precisely this.
Edit: I’m sure that observation has more refined roots, but I’m far from well-read or well-cultured. But if someone happens to know, please let know!
Ohh that's interesting. Never heard that quote from him I don't think. I like Alan Moore's perspective on life. Seems like he had an interest more in the ancient arts, but more from an intellectual perspective.. Thanks for the reminder. I need to look at his behind the scenes stuff. I remember watching a documentary on the Watchmen (2009 film) DVD when I was a kid. Maybe it was in that. Looks like he is doing short courses this days [0]
[0]: https://www.bbcmaestro.com/courses/alan-moore/storytelling
I think it would be more accurate to say, that technology went in the wrong direction and the further we go down our current path, the more people realize this.
So some folks have decided to go back to something they knew worked, and the supply and demand sides are both growing big enough to run a viable business off of.
I disagree. The nostalgia here isn’t a pushback on the technology, but against a social belief that proved flawed and perhaps a yearning for the times when things appeared to be on the up.
The 1990s to aughties were highly optimistic times. Things like LGBT rights would’ve struggled in any other decades, but we really believed that open borders and accessible communication would break down barriers; and for a time it look liked it would.
Even weirdoes like myself, who had serious personal reservations about enabling China or Russia began to have doubts.
Fast forward to now: Technology is one very easy way to push back against those that benefit in the current economic and political outcome. And entire generations thinking they’re “cooked”.
Edit: I wonder how many HN under 40 even understand the term “fast-forward”.
I think you went for a socio-political angle, I was talking more about stuff in the tech domain.
Back in the mid 2000s, as a teen, I had a PSP, which was supported by the biggest studios and had amazing games - no equivalent device exists today (the steam deck and switch are much bulkier). Likewise, I had a Nokia smartphone that ran Symbian, and could do the vast majority of stuff my current iPhone does. It had a music player, a camera that was decent for the time, it could connect to various chat services etc. It also had nice physical buttons.
If you look at operating systems, both Windows and Mac UX hardly changed.
Since then we had a huge computing revolution, with exponentially increasing compute and a huge array of tools, but my personal opinion, is that a ton of things introduced in tech since the mid 2000s, was either not super impactful, flawed in some way, or ignored eventually. Some geniunely impactful and good stuff, simply disappeared (like Flash)
This is in stark contrast to the development that took place from the mid 80s to mid 2000s.
Considering nobody thought 'this is as far as we would get' cca 2005, I think we made some blunders, which I think are worth reflecting on, and possibly correcting.
For sure, we made and doubled down on tech blunders.
I still use cash or credit cards, refuse to use online/direct bill pay, insist on paper bills, and in general avoid consolidation. Low tech payment and paper trails.
It’s a real pain in the ass (and the nagging…), until things go very wrong; then redundancy or separation is a godsend.
Sure, you can find new MP3 players on Temu and Alibaba, but they are almost invariably nearly unusable instant e-waste (like most things on those sites) And iTunes was great back in the day -- it only got awful when Apple made it support iPhones, Apple Music, etc. When it just did what it was supposed to (rip CDs and put the contents, neatly labeled and organized on your iPod) it was unsurpassed to this day.
Yeah, people hating iTunes seem to have no clue how bad all the "alternatives" were back then. I'll be the first to shit on current Apple, but seriously, it was very successful for a reason.
Agree. I think folks are romanticizing the iPod. It synced only with Mac via iTunes, had 5 GB of storage for $400 and had 10 hours of battery life and weighed 184 grams.
Today you can get a music player whose battery lasts five times as long, weighs one sixth as much, costs one-tenth the price, and stores 25 times as much, while also offering full wireless connectivity, supporting more audio formats, video playback, and reading books.
I think the ipod being so common has helped it remain useful 20 years on. There's a lot of them being sold cheaply as people clean out old drawers, spares/replacements and upgrades are readily available, how to work on them is common knowledge and tools to work on consumer electronics is common, and rockbox is available for most of the range. MP3 players were a commodity good with a huge range of models available from practically any company capable, but most won't have the market around it. My ipod has a 128GB SD card instead of a HDD and a battery that lasts at least 5.5 days playback instead of whatever the original 650mAH allowed
I will continue romanticising the later models though - the ipod mini and nano were, at the time, a lot of value for money.
I agree on the some fronts. MP3 players that support a variety of other formats, including lossless, and have far better playback quality than any iPod ever did are out there.
But the last time I bought one I remember a mixed experience. On the one hand, it sounded incredible. On the other, as soon as I loaded all 9500 tracks in my library onto it, the UI ground to a halt. Storage wise I could have crammed many times the number of tracks on there but there was no way the user interface would cope.
And I had to organise it all manually on my computer in order to avoid a mess on the device.
And the sync experience absolutely sucked balls. There was nothing close to plug it in and forget about it.
So, with some regrets, I returned the device and got a refund. I still use Spotify[0] in the car, and CDs at home.
[0] Which I have a love-hate relationship with.
Yeah, I guess this take is tempting for a technologist, but Gen Z is buying iPods and walking around in wired headphones because it's cool and nostalgic, not because of usability. Cycles of nostalgia are well understood to be getting smaller. The creative industry is creating new things less frequently and referring back sooner (the old 20 year cycle of fashion repeating itself is contracting). There is an element of disenchantment, of wanting to disconnect from the present, but that has always sort of been there as people reached for vintage cameras, record players, and old clothes in the niche cultural movements that have preceded the current Gen Z 2000's obsession that's happening.
see https://www.npr.org/2022/03/01/1081115609/from-tumblrcore-to...
> walking around in wired headphones because it's cool and nostalgic, not because of usability
Can only speak for myself, but I purchased some $15 wired USB-C earbuds to use on flights while the Airpods were charging.
And I've been increasingly just using them. The Airpods would often not connect in one ear without a few tries, and the pairing was a pain (disabled the auto-pairing as that was even worse), even on a medium-length flight I'd have to charge them at least once, and I'd often find a way to fidget with the case and have everything disconnect.
I think I overestimated how much value their noise canceling or audio quality was bringing me when I mostly used them for podcasts.
Wireless earbuds are convenient sometimes, but that comes at the price of inconvenience other times (thinking about charging and connecting).
I think the noise canceling is overhyped to oblivion. Sound isolation with good tips has been more than fine since the 2000s, and most of the annoying, hard-to-block noise comes from physical transfer via vibration anyway.
Aren't we roughly right on schedule for 20 years? Plus or minus a few years here and there (giant jeans, for instance, were more 90s, which is 30 years now. lots of 90s or even 80s influences still popping up in fashion that were definitely not there 10 years ago).
The article has a niche example of some pulls from 2014 too, but the dominant thread is older. 2004 kids not-infrequently went through Nirvana/Pearl Jam grungy phases too for a 10 year loop.
iPods certainly are 20-25 years ago. iPhones and iPod Touches are about to hit 20. N64s are 30.
"Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services."
That seems like a charitable interpretation to me. Maybe it's just a retro fashion trend that is even at its peak a tiny blip in the market, like back in the 90s when bell bottoms were "in". Give it a few years and we'll see.
The iPod and N64 are about 20 (or more, for the N64) years back from now, no? So about as far back as bell bottoms were from the 90s.
I think the real reason is that it’s an entirely different media experience than the current types. Most modern games are either gambling traps (microtransaction hell) or extremely high fidelity products that leave nothing to the imagination. In McLuhan terms they are hot forms of media, but the old ones are cool in that they invite imaginative participation. Hence the popularity also of intentionally retro looking contemporary indie games.
The Nintendo 64 will be 30 years old this summer.
Yes, 30, you can feel bad now :(
> You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s
Tell me about it. My iPod Classic was in a terminal phase, and since I like to carry my music around instead of streaming arbitrary stuff, I bought a Sony Walkman mp3 (+ other formats) player. It's bad. It takes a long time to boot, the battery life is mediocre, the UI is mainly lists of things, searching always misses tracks or albums, the volume defaults to a pretty low level, and when you increase it, it interrupts you asking if you're sure.
And when I started copying my itunes collection to the "walkman" (it is branded Walkman, but not worthy of the name), it would constantly stop copying. The included software was useless, and wouldn't copy a single track, giving up after 5 to 10 minutes of scanning. I had to write a Python script to overcome problems with long directory and file names and copy them to the proper directory.
Worst of all: there's a very loud click when you stop a track (using wired headphones). It's as if they never even used it.
AGPTEK makes decent and affordable MP3 players that still have buttons, and the battery life is really solid (~40 hrs!). I think they also use a dedicated MP3 player OS rather than an Android reskin. That's my recommendation if you want a 2007-style MP3 player with more modern hardware.
I looked that up. This does not have the smooth textual UI of an iPod. It does seem better than many things. AFAICT those are buttons in a circle, not a jog dial, which is the key affordance.
I'd be awesome if ModRetro made an mp3 player that mirrors the iPod similar to the Chromatic's GameBoy.
I had a few. They advertised ogg support but it didn't actually work. The directory ordering was random, and it would lose metadata or not show tracks with non-ascii characters in the filename. It didn't remember position on stop. IIRC the sorting didn't work either. The buttons were awful, it felt cheap. It was typical Chinese manufacturing slop. But it had solitaire or some other game installed.
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Yeah, the author’s examples point to nostalgia-core, kind of like why Stranger Things is so popular. They’re not evidence for the tech monopoly breaking.
As pointed out by Saturday Night Live, Stranger Things is the new Star Wars.
> You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s (or even a Zune).
What the what?!? There's tons of DAPs on the market, and more than a few that would put "an iPod had in the early 2000s (or even a Zune)" to shame.
As someone who would love to buy one - can you recommend a few?
> growth and momentum behind Linux and self-hosting as better evidence that change is afoot.
Linux is still not user friendly enough. Products from two decades ago are more user friendly than modern "mainstream" disros.
Look at Matrix and other OSS that wants to be mainstream. It's got awful UI/UX. And it's never taken off.
Gimp is an ugly beast with a bad name. Nobody's using that unless they're a Linux nerd.
I do see lots of people building retro game collections. Analogue 3D was a huge hit. Massive demand. It's sold out instantly five times. Palmer Luckey has a company building a similar product, and that's also sold out.
The clothing stores sell cassette tapes and vinyl. iPod and Zune are venerated.
My wife is Gen Z and into mainstream culture. She's all about retro. Polaroid, Instax, 2000's era digital cameras. The low end consumer digital camera I bought for $100 or so in 2004 is now selling for more than that. These things are wildly popular.
They're even hunting down old disposable one-use film cameras to pop off the lenses.
In any case, my wife knows this stuff. She doesn't know what Linux is.
> Linux is still not user friendly enough. Products from two decades ago are more user friendly than modern "mainstream" disros.
> Gimp is an ugly beast with a bad name. Nobody's using that unless they're a Linux nerd.
It depends on the use case. The vast majority of computer users nowadays use only the browser and an office suite. Even email clients are a thing of the past.
It's true that Gimp doesn't have a great UX, but who spends time photoretouching on the computer, when one can do it in a few seconds on the phone?
> Linux is still not user friendly enough
have you not touched a steam deck? it does the job well.
when the gabecube comes out, linux as a desktop i think will gain a lot of popularity
SD was only successful because most users don't need to do things Linux is still poor at, such as printer compatibility, sound driver compatibility, and specialty software like music and video editing. The stroke of brilliance is having users buy an additional device instead of replacing their daily driver.
Its success seems to be about 5 million units (of which 2 were mine, mind you) as of last estimation. Given how reticent they are to reveal the price of Steam Machine, I doubt it would do better. I think they just bought a bunch of junk from AMD because that strategy worked for Switch 1 and Steam Deck. And even if it's successful I think it's odd to frame it as an example of monoculture breaking when Valve/Steam is a veritable monoculture. It's like a modern Apple user still thinking they're the guy throwing the hammer at the screen.
Gimp is alright in my experience. It took a while to play around with and get used to... But I was able to use it to edit some of my photographs for a public art exhibition.
I'm not a Linux nerd by the way. I struggle to use it but Gimp did the job, whereas a couple of alternatives wouldn't. (One of them was RawTherapee and I didn't find it user friendly.)
Gimp and on the other side Adobe itself, are a special kind of sad story IMHO
Unless Adobe creates AI models that act as a strong differentiator, I think the accessibility of AI may actually put a lot of pressure on their business model. And the world will be better for it.
Well, there's SV's favorite minimalist hardware (along with the overpriced woop band):
I got one of these for my kid a few years ago. He liked to browse Spotify on my phone, and I thought it would be a good screenless alternative. But honestly it just sat in a drawer, and I didn't have the patience to maintain and sync playlists to it.
It's easy to be nostalgic for the iPod era, but having to sync music is something I'm fine keeping in the past.
That's an MP3-player, right? It looks like they go overboard to call this an offline Spotify device, instead of what it is. Or am I missing something?
It's an overpriced MP3 player with a DRM token cache to decrypt Spotify streams.
Why is it $130? It's a small mp3 player. It should be more like $30.
Wait until you learn what Apple charged for their incredibly basic ipods in the 2000s.
"Playback Requirements: Spotify Premium or Amazon Music" -> hard no.
>You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s
wat. I'm curious how an ipod from 2000 is better than, for example, the Fiio jm21. It's worse in pretty much every possible way, other than the ipod might be appealing to a certain kind of 'old man shakes fist at clouds' type of user.
I can't speak from personal experience with the Fiio jm21, but I was a big user of a previous generation of Fiio, and while I imagine some technical leaps forward have been achieved with this generation (the Fiio M1 never, for instance, achieved gapless playback from 2015-2021, even though this was promised with every new software version), taking a quick look at it... this is just an android phone interface! App store? Chrome? I certainly don't want this from a dedicated music device
Beyond this, I'd say that the true advantage of the iPod Classic was a matter of polish and UX:
* Dedicated buttons/wheel/etc that are tactile instead of a touchscreen interface (the Fiio M1 was button-and-wheel based, but it never approached the quality of Apple engineering); I see the jm21 has some side-based buttons for pause/forward/back, which is nice, but a touchscreen as main interface still grates * A way to interface with your albums that was delightful and visually dense (Cover Flow remains the single greatest music UI put forward)
Took a quick look. All screen. Usability downgrade.
And near-200 bucks is WAY more than a lot of used iPods for budget-conscious groups that are also looking to make a fashion statement on the side.
Going to all-glass made sense for adding "app" functionality. It's a loss if you want a dedicated device.
The jm21 runs Android, does that not make it a multi-purpose device without tactile, bespoke controls and against the main focus of the article?
I'd also argue that the manual[0] leaves something to be desired compared to those original iPods.
[0] https://fiio-user-manual.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/EN/JM2...
It's just a clunky android phone without modem. Looks terrible.
> Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services
It's simpler than that - retro is an (a e s t h e t i c)
Those of us who are Zillenials, Gen Z, or Gen Alpha were still in elementary school or not around when those products were mainstream.
It's the same way you saw Millenial hipsters wearing flannel, drinking PBR, started classical rock inspired indie bands like "Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah", renovating abandoned lofts in bRoOklYn, and making 70s and 80s references in Venture Bros.
Most HNers skew old [0] - late 30s to early 40s at the youngest based on most of the references I've seen - so to you guys the iPod or N64 evokes a similar emotion response to what a Nintendo Switch, Bucket Hats, and SnK will in the 2035-45 period.
Nostalgia marketing is the name of the game now [1][2][3].
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5DlTexEXxLQ
[1] - https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/launch-pad/busines...
[2] - https://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/insights-and-advice/blog/post...
[3] - https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/how-to-retain-customers
Your points about nostalgia marketing are quite valid.
But fyi, the Venture Brothers creators (Publick, born 1967, and Hammer, born 1971) are firmly in Gen X.
U right! Great show nonetheless!
not sure if you mean sonic and knuckles or the company that made king of fighters or something else.
Interesting, I took SnK to mean Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin). I personally wouldn’t put it in a list of manga/anime that will be nostalgic in 20 years, but who knows.
I meant in an Akira sort of way in the West (in Japan, I'd say Gintama has a much more lasting impact than any other anime in the last 20 years).
> It's simpler than that - retro is an (a e s t h e t i c)
I think I agree. But I also think a second order consequence of this is chipping away at the standalone ecosystems (Apple, Google, etc). Even a small contingent of user demand spins up new (or renewed) categories, and that fuels a healthier tech environment
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> Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again
And Pokémon cards because this generation has less ability to afford big purchases like a house or having a child
I don’t think that has anything to do with not being able to buy a house or have a child. TCG cards are the perfect mixture of consumerism and gambling, and Gen Z has been submerged in both for the entirety of their lives
I have seen some rare Pokémon cards going for the price of a small car...
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You can pay a lot for a DAP and have an infinitely better experience than any iPod or Zune. Just saying as an audiophile who has owned all of these devices. But yes, you are correct.
> A Timex ad went viral this year: “Know the time without seeing you have 1,249 unanswered emails.”
Having to micromanage notifications is why I have two phones - one without a SIM card. It's nice to be able to do stuff on the phone and know it won't bug you. I simply put the one with the SIM card elsewhere (other room, leave in car, etc). No - I'm not going to spend too much time learning how to "effectively" manage notifications on a smartphone (and if I do, have it change on me with some future update).
I've been saying it since around 2004-2005 - even before smartphones - that consolidating everything into one device is a bad idea.
One thing I really miss from the 80's and 90's: When you buy a product (hardware or software), its features and capabilities were stable. You never had to worry about some update changing the behavior on you.
I really like some of the health features on Apple Watch. But I won't buy it because I don't want it to be my watch, and I don't want to pair my Apple account with it. I just want the health features and nothing else.
My strategy here is to default notifications off for everything other than calls and texts.
And then manually open Gmail to check mail, manually open Instagram when I feel like checking notifications, etc.
It’s such a better experience when you’re opening an app because you want to, and not because a notification is baiting you.
I agree. I see a lot of comments here and articles out on the web where it seems like people don't realize you can turn notifications off. A large portion of the distraction problem of tech is really a notification problem. Push notifications are the scourge of our era. The only things that I get notifications for on my phone are messaging things that I use for personal messaging (text messages, calls, etc.). If I want to check my email I open up an email program and check it. It's mindblowing to me when I look at someone else's phone and see the constant stream of notifications that are nothing more than ads from various apps.
I feel like a lot of people that are looking for a nostalgic device can get the experience they need by uninstalling most applications and then turning off all notifications first. In doing so, you don't end up with a device that is much different than an old Treo 650 - PIM functionality, messaging, and no growth-hacking loops.
Allowing GMail to only show a notification when an email is categorized as "important" is an acceptable compromise. (Setting up a bunch of filters to manually control the "importance" helps a lot, too.)
Slippery slope there... just turn them all off.
If it's a real emergency you'll get a voice call.
I take a different approach, I use an email client called Shortwave and configured it to deliver most messages on schedules - once a day, once a week, all at once. And then whitelist certain senders and keywords to deliver immediately. That way I don’t feel overwhelmed but I also don’t feel like I’m missing out on important things.
I actually have an Apple Watch that I mostly use for hiking. I just use a $30 Timex most of the time that I don't need to charge.
there's a big yellow clock up in the sky and if there isn't - you should be sleeping anyway
The yellow clock in the sky doesn't have GPS/mileage indicators :-)
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iOS or Android?
Can you default it to off and not have any popups (during run/install) asking you to enable permissions to notify? Or do you have to decline once per app?
iOS. Do a 1 time clean up by manually turning everything off. And then decline for every app you install after that.
I can’t believe I used to be one of those people who got every single email delivered to their smart watch.
> And then decline for every app you install after that.
That's what I already have. And that's what I find painful. I don't want to have to decline at every install. I want a setting that is the default, and no prompts to grant permissions when I install.
How often are you installing apps that it's that frustrating?
It's the principle.
I get that you think it's not a major inconvenience, but if I now throw yet another (pointless) popup for you each time you install an app, are you OK with it?
When I install something on my PC (Linux), I never get such a prompt. If any Linux distribution started giving a prompt on each install, power users will stop using it.
If I installed apps on linux at the frequency I installed apps on my phone, which is a few apps per year, I wouldn't care at all. That being said, I get fewer interruptions installing apps on my phone than I do on most linux CLIs, since on my phone I just press install and it installs, no question. The real problem is first-launch pop-ups/notifications/settings, and linux apps can have as many first launch popups as my phone does.
> if I now throw yet another (pointless) popup for you each time you install an app, are you OK with it?
It would be an extremely minor issue, definitely not rise to the level of having multiple phones being easier. It’d be a few button presses per year.
Adding on to this I think it's bizarre how you need to have a phone to navigate life now and corporations just assume you have one. So for example, using QR codes to gain entry to things. It's weird to think about how we all carry around this expensive computer and think nothing of it. It's like when we laugh about how people in the Middle Ages carried a personal knife for eating because hosts wouldn't supply you with a knife. The knives even came in more fancy and expensive versions for the rich kind of like the Android/iPhone divide. I wonder if historians will talk about these phones in the future.
> Adding on to this I think it's bizarre how you need to have a phone to navigate life now and corporations just assume you have one.
I have a VoIP phone line from 2004. I was told yesterday that it was showing up as "Spam" on someone's phone. Sigh.
Also, for 2FA, some services allow phone calls. So I put in the VoIP line and not my cell phone. At some point, any given service switches to text-only for 2FA - but they don't notify me in advance and I'm locked out for good.
Even worse, some 2FA that allow phone calls just will not call my VoIP line. No warnings, etc. But if I put my mobile number it calls.
And QR codes for menus? I try not to eat at such establishments. Paper is cheap. I don't need a fancy menu. If you change your prices, just print new ones.
Android makes it really easy to disable notifications from any app. Pull down the notifications list, long press, select "Turn off" (or "Settings" if you want more details).
It's also possible to make an Android device ask for every permission, including notifications, when a new app is installed. So it's also easy to deny most apps access to notifications, address book, camera, etc. I think it's the default on current Samsung phones, for instance.
Yes, and this is a headache for me.
What I want: In global settings, say "No notifications." Then I don't want to be prompted when I install an app.
> I really like some of the health features on Apple Watch. But I won't buy it because I don't want it to be my watch, and I don't want to pair my Apple account with it. I just want the health features and nothing else.
I use an Oura ring because of this. I want 1) no notifications 2) passive health monitoring 3) no subscription
I was early enough to be grandfathered into no subscription. The app itself gets worse all the time as they try to do provide higher level guidance and make the data harder to see. But it still serves its purpose.
If I had to pay the monthly subscription I might would probably forgo the category altogether.
> You never had to worry about some update changing the behavior on you.
The most WTF thing was when Airpods got a firmware update that worsened the noise cancellation, because some patent troll sued them saying it violated some patent...
> One thing I really miss from the 80's and 90's: When you buy a product (hardware or software), its features and capabilities were stable
The complete opposite to this is Apple’s new UI for the iPhone. It’s so damn buggy I thought I accidentally clicked on Beta Testing!
… this has to be THE worst update thing they’ve pushed since forcing everyone to listen to U2
> I really like some of the health features on Apple Watch. But I won't buy it because I don't want it to be my watch, and I don't want to pair my Apple account with it. I just want the health features and nothing else.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but isn't it wild to think that such a limited device would likely be more expensive than the do-everything Apple Watch that includes the health features among a myriad of others? Selling perhaps in the thousands instead of the zillions, the development costs would be amortized over such a small user base it would be an incredibly niche product. It often falls to us techies to figure out if we can hack an acceptable solution out of the affordable mainstream product.
> Having to micromanage notifications is why I have two phones - one without a SIM card. It's nice to be able to do stuff on the phone and know it won't bug you. I simply put the one with the SIM card elsewhere (other room, leave in car, etc).
A lot of the Graphene/modscene folks use two phones (one cert and with minimal apps and the modded phone). I think it will become more popular with techies unless google goes fully closed source
The refurbished pebble has been perfect for my iPhone. The more limited functionality is exactly what I want. It tells me if someone is calling, but I can’t answer on it. It displays calendar notifications/reminders. It doesn’t do social media, it doesn’t text, it is just a glorified beeper and fun little gadget basically.
Yeah that ship has sailed. A colleague recently reverted back to physical watches, dissing apple's watches as annoying cheap bit of plastics. He prefers his timex, rolex etc. which give you feeling on wrist no smart watch will ever do. He is an extreme minority in current world.
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Ironically, or not. I bought an apple watch so that I could ignore my phone.
It works for me. I know whatever is on my phone will be there when I get back to it and in the meantime I know if I'm getting an urgent message or not.
I'm not sure I agree with all of that - that single-purpose tech is making a real comeback. But I do have one example in my daily life that supports this: A Garmin watch.
Unlike "full" smartwatches (arbitrarily defined as: You can browse the web on them in some fashion) Garmin devices are intentionally limited but in return, what they do works very well and seems fully debugged. I spent several years recording outdoor activities with the Strava app on my phone, and always there was about a 1% failure rate where for one reason or another, the GPS trace was interrupted or corrupted. With the Garmin watch this simply doesn't happen. If it's recording, the recording is good, period.
It is that, that has somehow been lost. That devices that just do one thing and do it well have been replaced by apps on a device that, in the modern software fashion, are "mostly" debugged, get constant updates that may or may not remove bugs (or features!) and usually don't add anything useful. One app got an update which, on my lower-end phone, changed it from crisply responsive to incredibly slow (5+ second response time to a tap). It worked fine before.
In this, isn't it more that Garmin has been making sports watches for a long long time? And were given the grace by their customer base to just keep making that particular function better.
You could probably find the same with bike computers. Established brands that have a fairly predictable customer base tend to continue to focus on the thing that they do well. If you are having to chase a market that doesn't really exist, you find half baked features that speak to an idea, but often don't actually deliver on it.
For an amazing example of that last, look at how Amazon is destroying their echo market. If they just focused on "voice activated radio and timers," the device would be very different from the "we are trying desperately to make a new market for our smart assistant."
This is my problem with software now. It doesn't work well enough, and a product's incarnation doesn't have a long enough lifecycle, for it to be worth incorporating into my life.
Heck, my big complaint on here for a while was Google managed to break the timer voice functionality on my Pixel, my second most used function after playing music. They broke it long enough and I had enough meals ruined/issues that I moved to something else. My phone is less used for useful things than it was 10 years ago purely because companies have made it not worth using.
> fully debugged
And here I am each morning having to manually enforce sync multiple times to have my fucking Garmin watch sleep data show up in my iPhone Garmin app. I love this watch (Instinct 2) but it’s far from bug free even in its most fundamental functions like data sync
Thats the app, not the watch. On my Android phone, I think it's runnig afoul of OS power saving features.
That's a known, still unfixed issue with Garmins and iPhones. With "smart" devices, the app IS the device!
I had a phone I liked that was stuck on Android 7 and had increasing sync issues until I got a phone that can run current Android. iPhone should be better with support, but also, Apple is hostile to third-party apps that use Bluetooth, so I'm hesitant to say this is Garmin's fault and not Apple's.
The OG smartwatch is better
I still have my old pebble (the metal one they made between the original and Pebble Time). The battery has finally died, otherwise I'd still definitely still wear it from time to time
I've started to realize of late that a vast majority of tech is "making things and services that maximize the amount of money taken out of customer wallets" and not "making cool technology that works". They have just as much pride and put just as much care and craft into squeezing money out of consumers as developers and engineers put into their projects.
This creates a market where quality and craftsmanship and customer service reduce competitiveness and eat into profits. We've empowered and optimized a market for the enshittifiers, and they're damn good at what they do.
Tech hiring has shifted dramatically. It used to be people genuinely interested in, and passionate about technology. Top companies used to filter for this as well.
Now it's just anyone that wants a big paycheck. And the culture shift is reflected in the products.
It's shifted because you can outsource and race to the bottom, and abuse H1B and other programs to ensure you suppress US wages, and you fatten up the ranks of middle managers to make people leave every 3-4 years, stagnating wage growth, ensuring you get a constant stream of fresh, energized, underpaid workers, some of which can't complain or advocate for higher wages, and all participate in a culture of competitiveness and bean counting. Nobody builds relationships or sticks around long enough for policies and perks that are used to sell the package in the first place. There are all sorts of dark patterns that are taught to MBAs as "best practice". Throw in McKinsey et al, third party CYA vendors, and you have a rancid stew of bare minimum, low effort, "technically legal" policy and practices designed to screw everyone out of as much money as possible in order to make number go up. Companies that compete in the number go up game end up beating every other company that think they're in the something-as-a-service game, or the best quality product game.
We don't have to live like this. We can make them stop with reasonable regulations. That'd require term limits and nuking the dark money PACs and all the other corrupt bullshit, though, so who knows. Maybe we're all screwed, and "getting yours" is the best and only move left.
But can you put the AI written code genie back in the bottle? Once that starts dominating app development, things will get even worse.
> and abuse H1B and other programs to ensure you suppress US wages
Heh. Most HNers that seem to have little moral restraints when it comes to making money in their posts seem to be in the US.
Do you even notice how many "solo saas founder" and "faang employee" types defend the right of those large companies that you're complaining about to increase their profits ad infinitum?
Or how many consider "free to play" IAP fests as regular honest video games?
Hint:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46729368
Is that the fault of outsourcing and H1-Bs?
As it turns out, maximizing profit for shareholders screws over everyone else...
And in addition to that, a lot of people think that's normal...
The root problem isn't really multi-purpose tech. It's the perennial coercive tendencies of monopolies being multiplied by their modern capability to update software in the blink of an eye.
If a company develops a monopoly in virtually any part of your life these days, and if a $1 network connected SoC can be added to their product, they can start abusing their position within a matter of months. The standard playbook is some combination of advertisements, notifications, and subscription charges (sometimes for stuff that used to be free!). None of those things are met with enthusiasm from consumers. But if the consumer has no other choice, it's almost a guarantee that the business will add them eventually.
Lock in and abuse. This isn't a new business model, we've just watched it spread from being a Microsoft PC thing in 1990s IT departments to pretty much everywhere now. (Speaking broadly about MSFT's business strategy back then, but they were also literally the first ones to try and shove unwanted Internet ads down your throat by streaming Active Desktop Channels on top of your wallpaper in 1997...!)
Out of curiosity, which Garmin watch model do you have?
A Fenix 5S+. A lucky garage sale find. I can't btw vouch for "fully debugged" on some of its fancier features. I mean map display? On such a tiny device? I'll just use my phone. But the basic sports stuff is rock solid.
fenix 5 - I have one too - within the 6+ years I have had mine - some people have replaced their Apple Watches 2 - 3 times
maybe for a light weight version I will go for a gshock
Map display is incredibly useful for us outdoor people - having a map of a hiking track at hand is much nicer than having to pull out a phone constantly.
This holds true also for other sports - e.g. ski layer is nice to orient yourself on ski slopes.
(Also Garmin maps actually have sports tracks with better detail than software made for cars like GMaps.)
What a weird techno-optimist blog post, full of cherry-picked examples, with a twist of consumerism. Refreshing take in a sea of nihilism, but saying people are interested in Pokémon and N64 games again when it's mostly post-NFT "everything is an investment" mentality is cute in its naivety.
I think the key, and I’m basing this on people in real life, is that these are all different people, and the person toying with Linux desktop is not also buying an mp3 player and paper notebooks and that person isn’t the one who’s building a DVD library.
But what he’s onto is the thing that unifies all these weird little niches: they’re motivated by a bone deep annoyance with the most popular big tech offerings. None of these groups are all that big, but if you add them together there’s something here.
> is that these are all different people, and the person toying with Linux desktop is not also buying an mp3 player and paper notebooks and that person isn’t the one who’s building a DVD library.
Hey! That's (almost) me!
My desktop has been Linux for multiple decades.
I buy paper notebooks and write with pen. Always have.
mp3 player: You got me on that one. Although I did buy a Yoto (https://us.yotoplay.com/) and perhaps I should just use it as an mp3 player, but to be honest it's a poor player (no shuffle without app, etc). On the flip side, what I like about it is putting podcasts on cards. I can assign a card to any podcast feed and it will let me choose which episode to listen to.
DVD library: Nah - I used to have one and gave in to Plex. I don't know how many of my 20 year old DVDs will work now. Video files have more longevity. But someone did once post on HN how he had set up a physical card + NFC for his kids. A given card has a particular movie/TV show. They insert the card, and the TV plays just the movie on the card and turns off after. I'd definitely pay for that if I could buy it. I'm sure many parents would.
Your DVDs are most likely still working fine, just rip them with Handbrake and add them to Plex (which is what I do).
Disc rot seems way overblown it seems, at least for DVDs. LaserDisc does have this problem, though.
It was the "growth of Linux on the desktop" that broke my suspension of disbelief. If there was going to be any year where Linux made strong gains it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10. But the needle barely moved at all.
The author paints a nice picture but there's a lot of wishful thinking and projection there.
> ... If there was going to be any year where Linux made strong gains it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10. But the needle barely moved at all.
I beg to differ...I have a feeling the needle will indeed move, but it won't be a single big jolt. Overall, I think it will be oh so very slow over this and the next couple of years. Sure, some percentage of windows users will migrate over...but i think the bulk will keep using windows until the machine literally dies, and will ignore as many error messages and warning that microsoft displays to them. ...and that death of windows usage will take time, hence why i think it will take time...but i do indeed feel that the needle will move...its just that its only beginning now, but not yet ending. ;-) Time will tell of course.
> I beg to differ...I have a feeling the needle will indeed move, but it won't be a single big jolt. [...]
Then it seems you're not disagreeing with parent: they're saying "needle barely moved", you're saying "it will move".
They're talking about the present; you're talking about the future.
Technically, the parent is saying "the needle barely moved, therefore it will never move appreciably in the future".
Every time a new version of Windows drops there are legions of Windows users who say this is the final straw, they're keeping their old version until the updates stop then they'll use Linux. And every time that doesn't happen, they just keep going back to Microsoft like it's some sort of domestic violence situation. Their standards forever dropping, getting slow boiled like an apocryphal frog. I've seen this repeating over and over for the past 20 years at least.
At this point I don't even have sympathy for Windows users. They choose their lot.
> Their standards forever dropping
And yet their standards still haven’t dropped low enough for Linux to be an acceptable replacement. I don’t think that’s a knock on the Windows user, but an indication that Linux desktop (and its replacement applications) still isn’t user-friendly enough for most people.
It can never be user-friendly enough if how windows does things is the yardstick. Windows users bemoan about how terrible Macs are all the time just because things are done differently, and they don't even try to figure it out. If it doesn't work like windows it's not good enough.
Why can't we make Linux work like Windows? Modifiability is supposed to be a benefit of open-source.
If you install a distro that uses KDE Plasma, you're already most of the way there. Not just because of it's design similarities to Windows but it's the desktop environment that's been getting the most financial support lately and has seen the most rapid improvement.
I personally prefer it at this point. Dolphin blows away explorer, window management is more slick and more flexible out of the box and it also happens to be deeply customizable.
The ASUS laptop I bought has a litany of issues: blue screens, audio dying, won't wake from sleep. MSFT, Nvidia and ASUS all blame each other.
I have a feeling modern Linux on this machine wouldn't be worse than what it shipped with. The days of fighting for 3 days with audio or printer drivers after an install are mostly behind us.
If Linux isn't uploading their FDE keys to Microsoft servers by default, Windows users will get scared and start crying. Needless to say, their tastes and desires should never be entertained.
I hope Linux is never suitable for windows users, who's tolerance for abuse is matched in magnitude only by their lack of taste. You have no idea just how over I am with the very premise of Linux evangelism. I will go as far as find reasons or even just flimsy pretexts to oppose and criticize any change to Linux calculated to win over Windows users, because being co-users with such people is plainly against my own interests. My lack of sympathy extends to full blow gatekeeping.
What is "Linux for normals" besides Android anyway? If that's the crap you actually want, use it. But no, that's not good enough, you want to bring the riff raff into real distros to stink up the place. I hope this never works.
This comment is harsh, but after many years of seeing HN threads about this topic I agree. You can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. Linux is great, I love it, but I’ve stopped trying to convince people to use it.
I was ready to install Linux. I installed a new 1TB ssd in my laptop. I shrunk the windows volume using Windows' Disk Management.
Then I started reading the Arch wiki on this task. It forced me to learn things like MBR vs GPT. Then it said Windows by default makes an EFI partition way too small so I have to re-create a new partition by temporarily mounting EFI, saving the files, deleting the EFI partition, and recreating a new one.
This seems like a horribly complex task and I can envision about a million unwritten things that can go wrong that the answer would be "well duh, that's obvious if you had any experience with linux disk partitioning. I myself bricked a dozen PCs."
Deleting the EFI partition, if it goes wrong, by definition my system would be bricked until I could figure things out.
Also, everything must be typed into terminal exactly with no error and one chance. (If the typo causes the command to error, phew. if the typo causes something else to happen, beware)
So yes, I have a lack of taste.
Downloads distro famous for its manual install process, complains about how manual the install process is…
How does someone browse this forum and get to the point of installing Arch without intimately understanding that Arch is infamously, abnormally difficult to install? Proving GPs point perhaps
If you had tried Ubuntu, KDE Neon, CachyOS, ElementsryOS, or really any other distro, this would not have been your experience.
Arch is a Manual experience designed for power users. It is not a good choice for even your average Linux user, let alone a first time Windows convert dipping their toes.
This is the issue though, Windows obscures the natural complexity of many things and picks defaults that serve to lock you into the ecosystem. You have expectations about how easy certain things should be that you are unwilling to let go of, and you dismiss the things that other systems make easy as irrelevant.
If Windows had never hidden the natural complexity of EFI, or chosen sane defaults, your experience would be better. It is absolutely insane to blame that on Arch.
After leaving that comment I had a moment of doubt that maybe I had gone too far, but no, you've reassured me. The windows user wants to stink up a power user distro to make it a fisher-price toy. Disgusting.
You are right. I went with ultramarine linux and am perfectly satisfied.
Steam is continuing to make it easier to leave Windows for gamers.
And my comment about desktop usage is based on these projections: https://www.webpronews.com/linux-breaks-5-desktop-share-in-u...
Valve's the main force here, AFAIK. I do think it'll make a big difference for home users. Home PC gaming, outside a handful of much-smaller niche use cases that're full of Windows-only software, was the only notable reason for a home user to have Windows at all, after the rise of Chromebooks and iPads to serve the rest of the home market. Valve's made ditching Windows for PC gaming viable for a high proportion of those remaining must-have-Windows users, which means Windows is hanging on to the home market by its fingernails. Just about all it has now is momentum, and that's fading.
I also don't think any of that matters much, because it's done nothing at all to the enterprise market, which is still full of Windows and other Microsoft stuff and that shows no sign of shifting.
I feel like the needle is moving, but maybe not because of the retirement of Windows 10, but other factors:
* Proton got really good and the Steam Deck is making inroads for Linux on the desktop. We are at the point were even gaming publications start to say: you could as well run Linux.
* The disintegration of the 80-years long transatlantic alliance. This really has a lot of people thinking about their big tech dependence on the east side of the ocean (and perhaps Canada?). Currently a lot of OwnCloud pilots are being started in European universities and other organizations. I see more and more people in my country buying Fairphones, the adventurous people even with /e/OS. There seems to be more interest in the Linux desktop.
The change is not very fast yet, but awareness is increasing and the ball starts rolling.
You have great points here! Not only is linux a destination for folks who currently and historically might have used Windows....but beyond linux and the operating system itself, there's a whole massive opportunity for other open source *software* that sits atop the operating system, and that is where migrations (away from Microsoft stuff, etc.) will also happen...maybe not all at the same time...but yeah, awareness has increased and i think will keep rolling forward - even if slowly. I really hope that migration to opeon source software happens too!
As an American I'm super disgusted with the current administration and the awful things they are doing...but I'm also a big supporter of open source and an advocate of every group's sovereignty....so if increased digital sovereignty for many nations (and my good friends all over the world), plus more software freedoms for everyone globally is one of the unexpected manifestations...then that's wonderful, at least something good comes out of the current chaos! As Europe, Canada, other nations start pilots for using their own instances of open source software (like Owncloud,etc.), i welcome that and wish them all the best!!!
I really want to switch from Windows to Linux but it's not an easy transition.
For one, I am in a season of heavy workload and little free time. So I need to wait for my next period of reduced workload.
Second, I am not desperate for a new PC yet and it's hard to justify spending the money at this time.
Roughly my plan is to get a new PC this summer and start with a dual boot approach. So at first it will be more like going from 100% Windows to 80% Linux 20% Windows or something. Over time as circumstances afford maybe I can do away with windows altogether.
Just one data point - I am someone who has been using windows for over 30 years but Microsoft pissed me off so much in 2025 that I have a committed to switching even if it takes me years.
> it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10.
Still too soon, no? Windows 10 continues to work just fine. The layman using it doesn't really care — and probably doesn't even realize — that it isn't supported anymore. Only when they start to have trouble will they start to care. Eventually a time will come when they want to use some new software that won't work in it, or what have you. When that time comes, that will be the true test.
I'm in a few Linux communities and they have grown somewhat over the last couple years. There's definitely been a swell of users moving over, if not a wave.
The market for something like a ModRetro or Analogue 3D surely can't be entirely about everything being an investment?
Pure nostalgia and nothing more
I don't even think it's some sort of nostalgia for many. It's some sort of lifestyle they envision themselves of having by buying certain products, these older products are just more 'unique' nowadays.
I think the distraction problem is more fundamental than that. Especially for children growing up now with a very capable smartphone who will experience genuine anxiety being separated from it.
Nostalgia is perhaps a catalyst, but I'm convinced there is something more there.
Get over yourself
> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use
Literally the only time I've heard of anyone using these in the wild was some guy being an absolute creep and using them to secretly film women to create social media content[1].
There are two claims you're making 1) they're rarely used 2) when they are it's nefarious
To the first point, they've sold at least 2M pairs, and are reported scaling production to handle up to 10M units per year.
To the second point, do you believe that all or most of those 2M people using it for those purposes? Or to take videos of travel, music festivals, etc.
Lots of companies are rushing into this space, so you kind of have to legislate, or choose to view competition in this space, even amongst 3 major players, as as slightly preferable to competition amongst just 2.
> To the first point, they've sold at least 2M pairs, and are reported scaling production to handle up to 10M units per year
Im actually very curious to learn more about the usage statistics of their glasses overall. I live in SF and I have noticed 1 person wearing them in the wild. Its obviously probable that Ive missed a handful, but my suspicion is that a lot of people wear them for short bursts of time, for specific events.
Mine gather dust except for travel. But they're worth it to me for that use case alone.
I also wouldn't be surprised if that was a common pattern.
> There are two claims you're making 1) they're rarely used 2) when they are it's nefarious
I'm not making any claims, just sharing my observation. The claim I'm reacting to is that "they're totally used by normal people now!" and my observation is that I personally don't know anyone in my fairly tech-savvy peer group who has even uttered their name, and the only time I have heard of them outside their marketing is over-the-top creepy.
It's not helping their case that if you google "meta glasses recording light" you find "Adjustable LED Light Blocking Covers for RayBan Meta Wayfarer" in the top-of-the-fold hits[1]. Clearly being a creep with the glasses is popular enough to create a whole cottage industry.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Adjustable-Headliner-Accessories-Reco...
> I'm not making any claims... Clearly being a creep with the glasses is popular enough to create a whole cottage industry.
I think this is pretty much a claim. But in any case, it's not unique to smart glasses. Smartphones also have this problem, which is why they're legally required to make an audible shutter noise in many jurisdictions. And unlike glasses that power on when unfolded and worn on the face, phones and other types of devices can be much more discreet.
You can address AR glasses by changing the laws - Québec has uniquely strong privacy laws against photographing people, even in public places. The rest of Canada and the US have much weaker protections in this area.
You can also change the regulations for the companies that produce the devices. The Ray Ban Metas will not function if the light is tampered with, but clearly there is a cat and mouse game where people temporarily evade those restrictions until they're tightened again. It's obviously not in Meta's interest to allow people do this. But a comparison will inevitably play out as the tech is commoditized and people find off-brand alternates in the back of Shenzen markets.
New technology will bring much bigger challenges than smart glasses. A few I worry about are every conversation being recorded and transcribed by personal AIs (with ultra discreet devices), and the authenticity of audio, video, or image content may one day be unproveable (in which case every recorded corruption scandal becomes a plausible denial).
The article's claim, however, is that we're starting to find off-ramps to many one or two-player marketplaces, and the domain that the meta Ray bans operate within will be one of those (in the interim we should probably be thankful it's not just another Apple product, and that they actually have to play catch up. A weaker Apple will have to treat consumers and partners better). The article's point is that the future of tech looks fun, and should provide consumers with more choices.
Sure, the side effects of future tech could be very bad, but that'd be the case whether or not the points in the article are true.
Many in my regular cycling group are getting them. I find the camera creepy and do not trust meta enough to put anything they make on my face, but they do provide a lot of value to wearers (gps navigation, comms, etc).
I know there are alternatives from more trustworthy companies but haven't looked into them in depth.
I use mine every single day, multiple hours a day. I can’t imagine going back to AirPods. And I think twice about the importance of an incoming call if I’m not wearing them, sometimes rejecting it and returning the call later when I am wearing them. My Gen1 glasses have replaced my wireless headphones completely.
Comment was deleted :(
Call me a pessimist, but I don't agree with this blog post at all. The author's views seems a bit biased and narrow based on their social circle perhaps.
> VR is no longer experimental
Till it has practical everyday uses and is at least semi affordable, I would categorize it as experimental still
> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use, thanks to a clever Ray-Ban partnership (and associated equity stake). 3D printers have become real household products.
I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer. Isn't Meta actually shifting their focus away from metaverse?
> Design matters again. In our devices, and in our lives
Design has been forgotten. Just look at your phones and computers and most of the web.
All I see around me are people swiping away at their screens (most of the time not using their headphones), getting their fix in bursts of 15 seconds, rinse and repeat.
It's getting harder to have fun with tech when you have to deal with things like:
* Operating systems that are actively hostile to their users (Windows and OSX).
* iPhone and Android being the only 2 choice when it comes to phones (the author did mention this). The chances of getting a 3rd player here seems negligible.
* Everyone trying to shove AI down your throat. At no time in the past did we need mandates to use a "useful" thing.
* A couple of players consolidating all the power in the AI space and millions of people having no ethical issues about using products from these companies, or opening up their source code and data for these companies to come suck it all up.
* No real disruption or competition in the browser space. It will be a long time before Ladybird will be usable.
* Bloated, heavy websites with popups galore.
* Everything getting a redesign every couple of months for no reason
* You don't own anything anymore. Even building your own PC seems like it will become a thing of the past given how price are rising.
I could go on.
> Till it has practical everyday uses and is at least semi affordable, I would categorize it as experimental still
I have a Meta Quest 2 from half a decade ago. It's old, but still feels like a mature gaming device (though relegated to more of an occasional fitness device for me).
Sure, it's failed to be anything more (commercial, education, media), but perhaps it's not fated to be for simple entertainment, in which case it's still an interesting new category. And I think the entry price point is like half that of a PS5?
> I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer. Isn't Meta actually shifting their focus away from metaverse?
I think the Ray Ban partnership is consistent with their shift away from the metaverse. The grandiose visions are put on ice, while they shift towards a fashion-accessory with a camera and audio.
Young people seem to be very into 3D printing. My father runs a photography store and a steady portion of the customer base is high schoolers requesting 3D printed models of things they've found online. I presume they'll own their own 3D printers in the future.
> Operating systems that are actively hostile to their users (Windows and OSX).
Never been a better time to give Linux a try. The days of fighting with audio drivers for 3 days after the install are largely in the past
> Everyone trying to shove AI down your throat
There is some backlash against this. SaaS used it to justify price increases, but ironically AI may make it more difficult for them to sustain their very high per seat pricing model
> * No real disruption or competition in the browser space. It will be a long time before Ladybird will be usable.
I still use Firefox for now. But they, unfortunately, have to own their bad decisions.
> You don't own anything anymore. Even building your own PC seems like it will become a thing of the past given how price are rising.
I do worry about this, though less from a cost standpoint, which tend to be cyclical. Deeply embedding and integrating everything does come with some advantages that make DIY builds more difficult to justify outside of seeking peak performance. Though computers like the Framework are actively trying to push against that for some segment of the market.
> I think the Ray Ban partnership is consistent with their shift away from the metaverse. The grandiose visions are put on ice, while they shift towards a fashion-accessory with a camera and audio.
So that people can film me at all times against my choice? So that people are interacting with their devices (with some ads popping up on them eventually, most likely) rather than connecting with me on a personal level, even though we seem to be in a loneliness epidemic? And how is this breaking the tech monoculture exactly? Same 4-5 corporations owning everything and creating walled gardens?
> Never been a better time to give Linux a try. The days of fighting with audio drivers for 3 days after the install are largely in the past
You and I might be using Linux and Firefox (can't even feel proud of using that anymore with the way things are going), sure. But I look around me and I don't see the tech monoculture breaking. I see the opposite. I see technofeudalism. Sure, some of us nerds might be rebelling and holding the line, but I only see things getting worse outside of this bubble.
> I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer
I whish I could say the same :p I just bought another 3d printer and have no place to put it - I have another 3 active printers in my home office. And yes, I keep telling myself its for "work reasons", but its mostly for hobby stuff.
> * iPhone and Android being the only 2 choice when it comes to phones
Not exactly true. Sent from my Librem 5.
Technically true, sure. Let me rephrase it to "iPhone and Android being the only 2 real choices when it comes to phones". My definition of real here would be that
1) non tech people should have heard about it and
2) when institutions like banks force users to use their app, they actually make an app for this platform.
> 2) when institutions like banks force users to use their app, they actually make an app for this platform.
What, does your Librem 5 not have a web browser?
I thought I was pretty clear when I said "force users to use their app". It's a trend more and more banks have started following.
Unless the bank forces SafetyNet, I can run the app with Waydroid. I switched banks when I had that problem.
My point still stands. How many non tech people do you know that will switch to a Librem Phone? Or know it even exists? Or will muck around with Waydroid? And eventually we might not even have a choice to switch banks.
Yes, this is exactly why I'm trying to spread the word about it, and everyone that cares should join.
>Looking at my own purchases from 2025, the pattern becomes obvious...
Is it me or does this list really goes against almost everything preceeding in the article?
Yes it's very contradictory.
"I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription."
"I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses."
What I find odd is that much of the rationale for these moves is completely absent from the article.
Why is Linux growing in popularity?
People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.
Why are people attracted to analog?
People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.
Why are people looking at offline or self hosted experiences?
People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit.
I don't think the OP wants to acknowledge that fact because it paints him as a technology hipster rather than someone taking back their autonomy from corporations. He's saying "Look at me, I'm an individual because I choose to have a different set of companies spy on me than you do."
The other striking thing to me is that the list is also completely devoid of any sense of morality. He might be using Linux but he's actively spitting in the face of Opensource by choosing a Bambu printer.
> "I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription."
I wouldn't pay a subscription to Oura, especially with them moving towards a more obfuscated view of individual metrics. I'm grandfathered in to a lifetime subscription. And eagerly awaiting something comparable in the market, but reviews of competing products are not yet compelling.
> "I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses."
These are for travel videos (dense markets, or places where I can't logistically use a phone or camera). My family enjoys the videos. If the glasses are capable of notifications, I haven't enabled them. The glasses have utility without notifications, and without a heads up display, they'd be of limited value.
> Why is Linux growing in popularity?
This was my point "Integrated platforms seemingly made the Linux philosophy untenable, and yet it may now be growing as a direct result of this decoupling. This was a feature, not a bug."
Linux is not part of an ecosystem, and people are starting to realize they like that for a variety of reasons. We're making the same point
> People are sick of being spied on and being manipulated for profit. I don't think the OP wants to acknowledge that fact because it paints him as a technology hipster rather than someone taking back their autonomy from corporations. He's saying "Look at me, I'm an individual because I choose to have a different set of companies spy on me than you do."
The point is that there is growing optionality. It's becoming easier to participate across ecosystems. We can treat tech as an a la carte rather than an omakase menu. Your computer can be one thing, your phone another, and your wearables something else. It's hard to escape big tech entirely, but cracks are starting to form in terms of portability, and perhaps increasingly in terms of alternative options.
> The other striking thing to me is that the list is also completely devoid of any sense of morality.
I had assumed I could just buy a printer I like that's relatively affordable, on sale, and highly rated? It allows me to use 3rd party filaments and import my designs from TinkerCAD or Python generated. What should I have bought?
The over arching theme of your article is "tech is fun again because we're escaping the monoculture" but there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am". You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment." You've got this curated counterculture vibe of being off mainstream by being on different mainstream platforms.
The shifts taking place are all reminiscent of the shift from Windows to Apple that started in the late 90s. Back in the early 2000s we had Jony Ive channeling Deiter Rams and telling us how cool Helvetica was. And the "I'm a Mac" commercials beating us over the head with metaphor.
You talk about tech consolidation as something that emerged in the 2000s that killed the fun but consolidation has always been there. Technology is about making your life easier and consolidation is a part of that. When a product can reasonably be consolidated into another product, it often is. Look no further than Swiss Army Knives, the Leatherman, Telephone answering machines, boom boxes, or countless other technology chimera. Even your Meta Ray-Bans are a combination of the Humane AI Pin and sunglasses.
You wax poetically about the need for devices to feel personal, that's always been there. It still is but refinement often is about distilling something down to it's simplest possible form and that's where we're at with Smartphones. So the degree of customization is limited to cases and colors in much the same way as a Swiss Army Knife.
We haven't escaped the monoculture. Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture. Options like Linux have always been there, they just weren't cool. Gog for example is nearly as old as Steam.
What's changed is that we've slowly moved from running code on our devices to running in the cloud, which has made the choice of device or ecosystem less relevant. Linux is emerging as an option because Apple has grown to be more like Microsoft with age and they're both stuffing tracking and ads into every corner of their platform. They're no longer cool.
To me this article reads as soft elitism with a side of mid-life crisis.
> there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am"
I think tech should feel cool to the person using it, but it won't make a person cool either way. And it's an odd thing to fixate on.
> You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment."
I'm saying I have choices (at least, relative to earlier). I can use a Mac (or not) and that can tell you much less about the type of phone I have than a would have a few years ago.
> Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture
Then it's not really monoculture? It's narrow rather than cross-all-domains. I'm fine is there's a "toaster brand" everyone buys, or everyone likes Dyson vacuums, as long as it's not Apple producing it.
From what I see there appear to plenty of alternatives to Bambu. Instead of smugly calling people amoral because they bought a popular 3D printer, why not explain what's wrong with Bambu? I still genuinely don't know the criticism. Is it proprietary formats? Banning IP infringing content on their store? DRM? Industry lobbying for something nefarious? Lawfare? What is it that are they doing...?
> To me this article reads as soft elitism
Wouldn't the Apple bro archetype signal this more strongly? I think you may have seen a Leica in the list and way over-indexed on that, while it's actually at quite old D-LUX Typ-109 (not much newer than the Canon it replaces).
And I think the smug condescension throughout the response is closer to a kind of elitism, no?
> side of mid-life crisis
Hopefully I'm not at mid-life quite yet, and definitely not in crisis. That aside, I’m not sure it's useful to frame a critique of an article that way.
> I think you may have seen a Leica in the list and way over-indexed on that, while it's actually at quite old D-LUX Typ-109 (not much newer than the Canon it replaces).
> And I think the smug condescension throughout the response is closer to a kind of elitism, no?
The irony of these sentences... I'm not sure what "over-indexed" means and I know nothing about Leica cameras beyond knowing the type of people that carry them around.
Thanks for proving my argument further.
I mentally checked out by the time he mentioned buying ray bans as some radical personal statement on privacy and tech nostalgia.
You're conflating several things.
Tech nostalgia is driven, in part, by a lack of excitement about what current companies are offering. It wasn't really present when we were all excited about Apple, etc.
That nostalgia signals there's a market for alternatives, which we've seen some companies serve, and expect others to enter. This will provide us with more choices apart from "Apple" vs. "Google" end-to-end ecosystems.
Tech is also fun because we have some new categories for the first time, perhaps since mobile. VR isn't popular per se, but I consider it mature. Ray Ban Metas are also a new category (consider an emerging AR application — or more of a glorified camera device, for now). A first person point of view for videos is very different than what's captured by a smartphone; I feel like I'm "there" when I watch travel videos I've taken with them, much more than when I watch what's taken with my phone.
The only personal statement I'm making is that tech seems primed to be fun again (though we probably have to anchor our expectations around a local maxima)
The best thing about the internet is that it gave everyone a voice.
The worst thing about the internet is that it gave everyone a voice.
The internet is a marketplace of ideas.
Engage with or amplify content you agree with. Create content of your own that represents your values or ideas. If you want, try to persuade others where you think they're wrong.
Overall, if you can feel good about what you've put out there, that's enough. You'll field comments like this no matter what it is.
It is not a marketplace, it is a forum.
You are entitled to your opinion, as I am to mine.
Exactly as you stated, if you cannot handle the criticism, do not go public.
In the article, he lists his 14 major electronics purchases for 2025 along with "more mechanical watches than I can count". Serious question: is this a normal level of acquisition? I'm not a minimalist, but that's more electronics than I buy in a decade.
Probably once you're buying stuff that often, you have so much stuff that you forget what you already have and end up buying even more.
Some of these are simplifications. Instead of upgrading my 12 year old Canon 6D to the mirrorless ecosystem with all its lenses, I opted for a single handheled camera.
In other cases, I bought alternative devices instead of upgrading within the same platform (my Mac and iPhone are both 5 years old). The alternatives turned out not be compelling enough to fully switch to, but found a niche as purpose driven devices. In many cases distraction free devices.
In some cases, the super upgrade cycle was driven by a desire to finally stop carrying a microUSB cable with me when I travel.
As for the mechanical watches, yes I have too many.
He likely has good money, or just decided on a shopping spree and won't buy much in the next few years.
I can certainly relate to the mechanical watches. There is a certain beauty behind timepieces that makes them so alluring to me. It is the only thing I can effortlessly buy in the knowing that I am hoarding. I do feel guilty sometimes, but not often.
It's a combination of a few things, and actually uncharacteristic of me.
Many of these purchases are replacements for 10+ year old devices (a Canon 6D, an absolutely brain-dead iRobot, a smaller hard drive that finally filled up, etc.).
I’ve made very few tech purchases over the past several years. Part of that was a general lack of inspiration inside Apple’s ecosystem stranglehold, and I tend to hold onto their hardware for a long time anyway (I’m hoping to skip from M1 straight to M6 or later)
A desire to spend less time purely in the software domain. Hardware can be fun. I originally studied electrical engineering but ended up spending all of my career in software; the 3D printer ties into a few side projects I’m working on, with mixed success.
A preference for narrow, purpose-driven devices. I now use the Android phone for "serious" things with minimal distractions, and the iPhone for everything else. And if Apple or Google ever become untenable, I have some optionality (and this is my first non-Apple phone since my Blackberry).
The programmable lights seemed kind of unavoidable. If you want lighting where you can change the color, the bundled software and ecosystem bloat is largely unavoidable.
The mechanical watches are tied to travel and circumstance: a Casio from Japan, a Mondaine from Switzerland, and the Interstellar Hamilton Murph as a gift. I’d honestly be happy with two or three watches, but they have a way of finding me. I do tend to match watch to outfit color, which admittedly opens the door for a few more options.
The bit about "Canon, Sony, and Nikon may have replaced Kodak for professionals" was entertainingly silly. AFAICT, Kodak cameras were never used by a significant fraction of professional photographers? (maybe pre-WW2?)
Film is a different matter of course.
FWIW, Canon, Sony, and Nikon all make sensors as well as cameras (I believe Nikon just tweak Sony's these days, but they were certainly making their own at one point).
Tech was probably the most fun for me in the mid to late 2000s. Definitely a lot more fun than whatever the tech industry has become now in 2026.
Everything now has to be fully vetted before trying it as opposed to making something weird and quirky. Sad! I miss those days.
I'd generally agree, but 3D printer mentioned in the blog post is probably one thing that I'd wish to have back then.
Nah things were already going to shit then. Sure it kept getting worse, but that was well on the downslope.
Tech is being run by ignorant financiers and college dropouts who don't understand institutional knowledge or technology.
It was hackers building crazy stuff (Steve Woz' book detailed how he built one of the company's first computers, and he knew what every logic gate in it did) and then some people realized there's money to be made...
Any "founders" out there showing off their vibe-coded SaaS with money from their FAANG career that they got after finishing the bootcamp course? (I mock, as the inner voice asks "You had the talent, why aren't you in the 2 commas club?")
> Looking at my own purchases from 2025, the pattern becomes obviou
As far as I can tell he's among the techies that purchase a lot of e-junk each and every year, no matter the circumstances, not sure of how that's an improvement on anything.
Sort of the opposite, I've found everything uninspiring for the last decade or so and have rarely purchased anything, and when I have it's basically been Apple.
The below purchases are all durable things that should last at least 5 years. An E-Junk list would be riddled with IOT, and devices that forcibly ratcheted tech in ("smart water bottle", etc).
The Leica, Matic and Kindle replace 10+ year old devices.
The Oura replaces itself, with a heavily diminished battery. The hard drive replaces something barely half the size.
The Android is to create a minimal distraction device with only select apps, while slowly weening myself out of the Apple ecosystem stranglehold.
The TRMNL is a side-project, to build some custom code for. The Bambu is used for hobby projects at least weekly and frankly should have been purchased years ago.
The ASUS was a misadventure back into dual boot Windows / Linux after 15 years on Mac. Demoted from a CUDA dev machine to general use second computer.
The Ray Ban Metas only really make an appearance when I travel, but when I do, I'm very glad to have them. Provides a very different perspective than a handheld camera or smartphone, especially in dense areas (walking through crowded outdoor markets, etc)
The article begins with video game consoles, but then doesn't address the fact that video games are the biggest counterexample against the thesis, because it's just collapsing into a PC (and Steam) monoculture. The fact that you're buying FPGAs and old cartridges doesn't mean anything when 2/3 console makers are just making PCs, and even mobile games need to be on Steam now.
I think this just reflects your changing tastes and perhaps increase in disposable income.
I'm a very casual and very occasional gamer, so I can't deeply about this topic. But, is gaming in a dire state?
Platform exclusives seem to be rare (outside of Nintendo). I have an xbox (which I'm told is the wrong console), but I can play nearly everything a PS5 can. Most major titles seem to be very cross platform (PC, Xbox, PS5, and sometimes Nintendo). If anything, they stagger release dates, not access.
Steam's market share has held relatively steady at 75%. And in fairness, it does not seem like Epic is trying at all to improve their product, so I'm not sure they're deserving of more right now. GoG continues to have ts cult following (I had never heard of it until recently, but now see references to it frequently).
And it seems to be easier to game on Linux (and even Mac) than in the past few years.
I have no way of verifying this, but Perplexity states that ~5% of Steam games are exclusives. Have they exerted monopolistic pressure on the market in other ways?
The hardware itself used to be exclusive. We used to marvel at what the Cell processor, N64 MIPS, etc. could do, but now PS and XBox are just commodities that we could say is equivalent to a 58XX + 20XX. Even the Switch 1 became a commodity at the end of its life, if we count emulation.
Personally, I would define the lack of exclusives outside of Nintendo's shrinking sphere as a monoculture. At the same time, I don't have a verdict on whether this is good or not. On one hand, everyone on the globe can theoretically play anything now, as opposed to what countries some American and Japanese companies can find on a map, but on the other hand, this monoculture has also completely erased our ability to truly own or trade games. Gamers now need to periodically assess if they need to upgrade hardware, and it has directly connected this hobby with the turbulence of the global economy.
On an emotional level, the erosion of console boundaries has made the world feel smaller, and that makes me inexplicably sad. Imagine if your local playwrights or board game makers feel like they need to put their works on a global marketplace, tailored to the tastes of the biggest markets.
Of course, I too have a lot of blind spots. For example, I have no idea what games are brewing on Roblox or itch.io nowadays, some of which might be on a top 10 play-hours chart if we could aggregate all platforms together. When I see one of them like Juice World/Galaxy leak out of their containers, I'm filled with joy that there's still a pocket of this world that I haven't explored.
My ideal situation is that AI becomes commoditized so much that it yields relatively little value for the producers and an incredible amount of value for the consumers.
I don't really expect the prices to be this cheap for much longer, but my hope is that the seeds for the next generation of tech have already been sown.
It would be cool if software becomes so mundane and interchangeable that tech once again distinguishes itself with hardware.
> I don't really expect the prices to be this cheap for much longer
Open models are a great proxy (and scare tactic) to what we can expect. As they are already released, and won't change, you'll get basically the same capabilities in the future for current or decreasing cost (with normal hardware improvements trends). The current SotA for open models (dsv3, glm, minimax, devstral, etc) are at or above the mini versions of top labs (haikus, -mini, etc). With the exception of gemini 3.0-flash I would say. So, barring any black swan events in Taiwan, we can expect to be enough pressure to keep the prices at those points, or lower in the future. And we can expect the trend of open to chase top labs to continue. The biggest "gain" from open models is that they can't go backward. We can only stagnate or improve, on all fronts (capabilities, sizes, cost, etc).
I would like to live in a world where open source (not just open weights) models dominate the landscape, but I don't see that happening.
The moat is not the quality of the models, but the compute. Any open model that consumers can run will pale in performance compared to SOTA commercially hosted models. There's just no comparison. The really big open models (e.g. DeepSeek, Kimi K2) are much closer, but they're not accessible to most consumers, who still have to rely on companies to provide them.
Maybe this will change one day, but considering how this industry is artificially inflating the cost of hardware, I wouldn't bet on that happening anytime soon. In the meantime, mega-corporations are building out increasingly larger datacenters to meet the demand, and the moat grows.
I would love to see local libraries offering access to their AI models (whatever those might be). I think it can fit with their function and really serve the local community in the future. Plus it would be cool to have deeper knowledge of AI distributed to someone in every community (the person maintaining the local setup).
Good points. I'm even more optimistic now!
What the author describes seems to be more specific examples in his/her circle rather than a wider movement I’d say.
The walled gardens are imo getting worse. And opting out (dumb phone) isn’t the same thing as that dissolving.
That said I’m also cautiously optimistic in some areas. Linux on desktop in particular is on a good streak. Riscv seems promising. More people are understanding lock in risk etc.
The regulation that I wish would happen that never will is user data sovereignty laws. It's obnoxious that there's not a way to back up my phone to my NAS.
> The walled gardens are imo getting worse
But isn't Apple (the most egregious example IMO) losing a slew of cases in many jurisdictions (not just EU)? I think the consensus is very much that they've overplayed their hand and the bill is coming due
Various player are getting slapped with fines but haven’t seen much sign of it having effect.
Think the fines need more zeros - especially if the behaviour is egregious
> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use, thanks to a clever Ray-Ban partnership (and associated equity stake). 3D printers have become real household products. Wearables are diversifying—smart rings, over-the-counter glucose monitors, connected beds.
In which reality is this guy living?
> Antitrust pressure has slowed consolidation, opened app distribution, killed the anti-competitive iMessage and AirDrop moats
iMessage is still only available on Apple hardware. Apple’s malicious compliance has made developing apps for third party app stores a no-go. I have AltStore installed but there are no apps worth installing.
> iMessage is still only available on Apple hardware.
Yes, but I think the pressure is external. RCS brings many iMessage capabilities cross platform. As adoption increases I think the power and influence of iMessage will wane.
RCS is Google's iMessage with the same vendor locking — not actually cross-platform.
RCS is an open standard that Apple now uses as well.
I think there's a legitimate concern about having essentially two phone platforms, and how anything can really be "open" in that environment. But it's definitely a step forward.
And Google has built proprietary things on top of the standard, which is indeed concerning.
"Open" is an overstatement when it comes to RCS. You can't go out and write a new RCS client for Android, and you can't provide RCS on a new platform (or even unGoogled Android). It's open to the extent that both Google and Apple can use it; other major hardware vendors and carriers could, but don't (Samsung used to, and dropped it earlier this year).
It requires you to have a whitelisted private key to make devices that use RCS
I'm in my 20's now, graduated secondary school (as IT Technician). In meantime cured marrow aplasia.
I love 2000's era (especially tech, but music too). I think almost everything about 2000's tech was superior, from hardware to software. Things were solid, build to last. Software had clean, simple user interface. The user was invited, not forced to do something. For me nothing can beat philosophy of XMB (XrossMediaBar).
I don't know how to find my way in all this IT thing now. Never liked programming, what always intetested me was hardware and IT administration. But every day I wake up it just gets worse. IaC, SaaS, software is worse than ever before. And don't forget hardware speculations.
In 2000's tech was so easy, now it's just annonying, harder and obfuscated with every day.
I miss 2000's simplicity.
As other people have pointed out, the trend towards "retro" tech is like vinyl being popular - it's a nostalgia throwback, not a massive wave of consumer preference. There's a small but profitable niche of enthusiasts who want old electonics. Call me when a major consumer electronics company is making it a selling point that their devices are "dumb".
The Rayban-Meta partnership is such a funny thing to shoehorn in? Two giant monopolists creating a new surveillance-tech product which nobody likes. It couldn't be more "monoculture".
> The Rayban-Meta partnership is such a funny thing to shoehorn in? Two giant monopolists creating a new surveillance-tech product which nobody likes. It couldn't be more "monoculture".
Are we really concerned about an Essilor-Luxottica monopoly? Is there lock-in, shady dealings, etc? Can't you just buy sunglasses from other brands (or brandless glasses)?
Regarding Meta, they are playing a role in shifting us from monoculture (or two player markets) to three or more players.
Meta may be ahead of the pack, but they'll be joined by Google and Apple soon. Apple's poor treatment of their partners through the App Store really damaged the Apple Vision Pro launch, which is a good thing.
One does not need to love Meta to see the value in bringing more players into a given market. We deserve more than Apple vs. Google across all of our decisions.
The surveillance is unfortunately inevitable at this point. Cameras are cheap and are everywhere. You're never more than a few feet from a multi-camera cellphone. I don't see any way around this short to national legislation restricting their use.
I might have said the same, but ever since a guy showed me a first-person go-karting video he took on his Ray-Ban Metas, I've been hooked on the idea of being able to record experiences like that... so stupid but so cool.
Let me introduce you to... GoPro. An expensive action sports novelty.
Not as cool as glasses with a camera in them.
Tech's march towards vertical integration-powered cross-selling and turning everything into a digital-only product or perpetual subscription is sending a lot of people searching for alternatives. Just off the top of my head, I'm aware of growing interest in communities related to single purpose devices like:
- Retro gaming handhelds, which these days are capable of handling every console before the PS3, and their popularity is a clear rebuff to the Nintendo Switch's game pricing, not to mention the horrific microtransaction-riddled landscape of "mobile gaming".
- Standalone MP3 players, which are selling very well thanks to notification hell on our phones and dissatisfaction with music streaming giants.
- Portable DVD players, which can be bought online or thrifted cheaply, as frustration builds with constant licensing changes causing Netflix and the like to remove shows without warning. DVDs can be bought extremely cheaply, and a lot of users are not cinephiles who won't touch anything that's not at least 1080P.
This isn't really the author's point, but I think one effect of AI and the forthcoming robotics revolution will be the unrolling of a lot of consolidated supply chains for all sorts of products. It could usher in a renewed era of bespoke products.
For instance, when the cost of building a new (good) app goes to zero, it becomes economical to make a great app for a narrow niche, with a skeleton staff (maybe just one) and no VC money. And this can happen thousands of times over.
Robotics could open up bespoke local supply chains even beyond what's possible with a 3D printer today. For instance, if you had an actually dextrous humanoid robot "living" in your home, why wouldn't you have it just make all of your clothes? You could have any fabric, any style, exactly the right size. And only for the cost of materials (assuming you already own or lease the robot itself).
I do think the author is right in the big picture - the future will be more fun.
I find this discussion interesting. I have been thinking about the declining appeal of a device that does everything, but on which you can only really do one thing at a time well. Ie, you put the iPhone in a cage and add a tripod and you could make a high quality video. But, then you can't use the phone like a phone...
Solution, a DJI osmo pocket 3, which is something that does video brilliantly. And you can set it up while doing the things you need to do on your phone when you need to.
I recently serendipitously found my sansa clip+ which to my delight has a battery that has somehow and miraculously not failed. It is fantastic for listening to a select few things at night; when I don't want to be starting at my phone screen hunting for playlists and albums. I checked the price on eBay for these things. They are going for 10x what I paid, I won't be selling.
> I recently serendipitously found my sansa clip+ which to my delight has a battery that has somehow and miraculously not failed.
Have you thought of installing Rockbox on it? It made mine instantly better.
oh! great thought. thanks!
Looking at my own purchases from 2025...
This is like a "haul" video, without the video.
Yeah, I saw the list, thought, "oh, I've been thinking about getting a camera", looked at the camera he bought, saw it starts at $1200, closed the article.
Isn't that simply what cameras cost, since glass needs to be manufactured very precisely?
I'm replacing a 12 year old canon 6D with 4 lenses accumulated over that time period with one-and-done camera. It's precisely the cost of upgrading all of that to the new mirrorless system that pushed me in this direction.
An entry level Canon Rebel is like $600, with an extremely constrained focal range. Essentially any non-prime lens will double that cost.
It's hard to understand how $1200 is considered outrageous for a camera (though for the record, these cost more like $2K, but mine is a used Typ-109 which was $800)?
What are you considering buying?
Wired vs wireless headphones can demonstrate why sometimes, the old simple tech is actually better.
Wired headphones have a great user interface - you plug them into the device making music. That's it. If a friend wants to play you some music, you can just plug your headphones into their device (assuming it has an audio socket) without mucking around with pairing and then later having a problem because it can only pair to a limited number of devices.
Also, of course, there's no issue with recharging them.
A secondary "benefit" is that you're far less likely to lose more bulky headphones than earpods.
I can't speak for everyone but I've lost more wired inventory to cable damage (before ca. 2020) than wireless earbuds from just losing them. It seems that now they're not the only game in town, replaceable cables are suddenly a standard feature instead of a luxury, so the moral I've taken from this is that the competition was good.
It's also not like the problem is the audio equipment itself, because the problem most people have is with phones removing 3.5mm and being theoretically unable to charge (with cable) and listen to music at the same time. I think it's another example of a false tech culture war that the original article wants to exist.
Now, I wish we could go to 2 USB-C ports instead of holding on to 3.5mm. Not all DACs are created equal...
The reason retro tech is fun now is because no one is making more of it, and the retro tech is as advanced as it could be without being ruined by enshittification and planned obsolescence. Every old piece of tech you come across is now a relic, rich in lore and history, and sometimes mystery when there are few people around who understand how it works anymore. These old devices are no longer things you just buy from a big corp, you have to find them in a pile of junk somewhere or trade a bit of money for it from some person, and on top of that the condition of the devices vary greatly, they are not fungible. This hunt for old tech feels very post-apocalyptic at times.
People will also look for creative ways to upgrade old tech and implement some quality of life improvements, doing things the original creators never thought of, or were simply limited by the technologies of their times. The result is much more variety in devices, no more homogeneous products.
And this effect will only get more pronounced as time goes on. Consider that in the year 2077, a humble N64 could be something sacred, handed down through many generations, each leaving their mark on the device, and people developing their own homebrewed games motivated more by fun than capitalistic ambition, or just pushing the limits of the device.
I remember the days of wanting to get my mp3 collection in my car. I was not at the age of driving, but would see my peers who were mostly in university build car mp3 projects: https://web.archive.org/web/20021203205014/http://www.mp3car...
> A Timex ad went viral this year: “Know the time without seeing you have 1,249 unanswered emails.”
Sometime last year I got tired of using my phone as a clock. I dug out a 2-decade old watch from a drawer, put in a new battery, and eventually realized I really missed its simplicity. It has calendar functions, and a mechanical rotating dial I can use as a timer. Its interface never changes. I never lose it. What's not to like?
The certs need to be updated for this URL.
or can mod update the URL to redirect to http vs https://[1]
[1] http://www.jasonwillems.com/technology/2025/12/17/Tech-Is-Fu...
Thank you. Was missing a GH Pages setting for that
Strong disagree. While I share the 90s nostalgia, the trend of just relaunching everything is a sad reminder of how bad tech is today, not an exciting new development
I think if there's a trend towards purpose driven devices, those can evolve at a faster rate than our consolidated everything phones. So eventually we'll see something exciting based upon it's novelty and merits.
We'll see!
As much as I want to buy into the premise, the article’s tone is so aggressively optimistic it feels like it was written on cocaine.
I value the author's optimism, but this list activates a deep fear in me. It feels like a such an American point of view to think a techno-ideal is defined simply by buying a different set of consumer electronics, many of which are just as throwaway as the ones before.
I know we can't get away from buying things--even a self-hosted homelab needs parts, and I'm not rejecting capitalism. But it feels like capitalism culture is so strong that it goes through everything people think like thread through a needle, everything they do is stitched with its color.
This makes me sad for the future my children will inherit. I want them to be excited by what comes next, the way I was excited by the N64 or the early web. But those things were exciting because they were _new frontiers_ and new stories, not because they were products.
If the only future we can envision is a curated list of retro-gadgets and subscriptions, we have lost the plot.
> It feels like a such an American point of view to think a techno-ideal is defined simply by buying a different set of consumer electronics, many of which are just as throwaway as the ones before
This author is European, even if posting from the US.
There are classes of items that are throwaway, but bring other kinds of value (like all of the soldering kits I used to buy, that were basically garbage once assembled but were very educational and steered my career in a certain direction).
There are classes of items that increase the volume of e-waste over time. Dedicated purpose driven devices (like e-readers). And there's a compelling alternative: Apple makes very good stuff. You can buy a Mac and an iPhone and keep them for up to a decade (with a battery replacement in-between). You can use that iPhone to many things (like reading books). But I think the real costs of that consolidation aren't worth it, and that anyone growing up in that environment won't be curious or inspired about tech the way I was.
And there are items that are throwaway because they're cheap and won't last. These I usually avoid. The ASUS, I'm finding out, was questionable, though purchased with good intentions - Macbook like solid aluminum chassis, etc. But the Leica (actually 2nd hand), Apple stuff, even the Ray Bans are all pretty durable.
I actually see a lot more "throwaway" tech, and culture around it in Asia than I do in the US. Things are pretty conservative over here for the majority of people.
> the way I was excited by the N64 or the early web.
This is part of the reason I've been buying old, physical games. It brings some clarity and focus that I frankly find difficult scrolling through an endless digital library. Something about the mere act of inserting a CD or cartridge subconsciously silences distractions and feels like a real commitment rather than a passive activity.
It may be more of a callback to the past than the future, but I think there's a reasonable chance the future will look similar, with a wave of new products that seek to do similar things and evoke the same reactions. Time will tell.
> If the only future we can envision is a curated list of retro-gadgets and subscriptions, we have lost the plot.
Hate subscriptions. Left Adobe because of them. Will leave 1Password when they finally end my one-and-done 1Password 7 purchase. Don't use Microsoft Live for my Xbox. Spent years manually copying iPhone photos weekly to avoid the Apple storage subscription (this one I've admitted defeat on). The only subscription product on that list is an Oura Ring, for which I'm grandfathered into a non-subscription plan; would give it up otherwise.
If the predicted AI-driven downward pressure on per seat pricing plays out in SaaS, there's reason to believe consumer subscriptions would likely be under pressure as well.
What world is the author living in? I wish much of this were true, but I just don't see it. Maybe I am too old :(
He is saying that more devices that have single use is better? Maybe that’s true but the downside is you own more stuff.
True. But maybe you also "own" more of your stuff, rather than lease it, or live in anxiety about the next forced update
I hope he's right! I'm terrified that like 4 companies own my entire life now. I do love the movement back to analog single-purpose devices. Would be neat if they had just enough tech to make them useful but not weaponized against me.
As an aside, can they bring back Symbian OS and Windows Phone?
> Art Deco is in vogue
Is it? I wish it was, but what is the author referencing?
People seem to be increasingly interested in it for interior design. I've seen this reported in a few places, Pinterest being one of those sources https://bestreviews.com/articles/home/decor/pinterest-fall-2...
There's also, of course, the aggressive A16Z Art Deco rebranding. But we can put that one to the side.
Neo Deco is growing in popularity. There's a few youtube channels dedicated to art deco restoration and influencers showing off art deco motifs in their homes that have spurred the trend.
It's just the slow swing of the pendulum away from the AirSpace aesthetic that was the modern interpretation of mid-century modern that came out of the early 2000s.
Author is a hipster.
It's so weird, Art Deco was in vogue for a while in the early 90s (see Batman '89, The Rocketeer), and the nostalgia cycle is just coming around again. I'll take Victorian or Art Nouveau instead, please.
As long as we can do away with the ultra Minimalism aesthetic, I'm on board.
Buying retro technology is not indicative of anything.
> Early AR is starting to reach consumers.
Early AR was a thing 10, 15 years ago - along with the dawn of smartphones, accellerometers and cameras. Second generation was the google glass and the like, over ten years ago now. Third generation was Microsoft's HoloLens and Magic Leap. Fourth (current?) generation is Apple's Vision and I suppose the rayban things. There's probably generations I'm missing but I'm no expert.
Anyway, AR has had nearly two decades to "start to reach customers" and honestly, I don't think it's broken through. Not even the 3d environment scanning 'measure' apps see frequent use (in my limited experience). It's always remained a gimmick.
TL;DR I disagree with the author's assertion in multiple levels. It's not "early AR", and I don't think it's actually reaching customers, let alone at a volume that will recuperate its investments.
> Antitrust pressure has slowed consolidation, opened app distribution, killed the anti-competitive iMessage and AirDrop moats, and made big tech cautious about horizontal expansion.
Huh? In what reality is this remotely true? It certainly isn't in the one I live in.
The Big 6 control all media in the US, and mergers happen all the time (WBD->Netflix->Paramount?). Google owns web search and web browsing; Amazon owns e-commerce; Alphabet and Meta own adtech; Amazon, Microsoft, and Google own cloud computing; etc. All of these companies make frequent acquisitions and expansions. "Antitrust pressure" is just the cost of doing business.
What I think the author is referring to are the minor concessions Apple has made in some territories, mainly the EU. And even there, they're using every dirty trick at their disposal to do the absolute bare minimum.
Anti-competitive moats are still alive and well, and growing larger. It's curious that the author is positive about "AI", when that is the ultimate moat builder right now. Nobody can basically touch the largest players, since they have the most resources and access to mind-bogglingly large datacenters.
What a silly article. I don't understand how anyone can consider the current state of the tech industry "fun". I've been following it for nearly 30 years now, and it has gradually been devolving into a place that's anything but fun. Especially in these last ~5 years. I wish I could be optimistic about the future, but it should be obvious to anyone by now that technology, mostly but not entirely by misuse, is the cause of most of our problems.
> The Big 6 control all media in the US, and mergers happen all the time
Media has not been in a healthy state for quite some time. For a long time that had little to nothing to do with tech. With streaming these days and tech companies buying studios, that's unfortunately no longer the case.
I didn't call that out directly in the article, but I agree there's cause for concern and there's probably good reason to strike down the HBO acquisition.
> What I think the author is referring to are the minor concessions Apple has made in some territories, mainly the EU
Government moves slowly, and I think a lot of it is still in flight, but Apple is fielding cases globally.
Apple pay was hit with anti-trust cases in Korea and Japan. Epic has had success against Apple, and they've been ruled in contempt of court for not adhering the verdict (with the CFO referred to the DOJ for possible criminal prosecution).
The EU has been the most heavy-handed. I think these are just the beginning
> Anti-competitive moats are still alive and well, and growing larger.
For the last few years big tech has been more cautious. Very few acquisitions (though an insidious loophole was created in which founders are acquihired, license their IP and then effectively kill their old company). So that'll require another look.
> What a silly article. I don't understand how anyone can consider the current state of the tech industry "fun"
Well, I'm having fun! And that's good enough for me ;)
Well, I appreciate your optimism, but do think it's misplaced.
We live in an increasingly polarized world, with rising political tensions and climate-related problems. Technology has played a major role in adding fuel to the fire, if not being directly responsible for our current unstable situation. Wealth and power are increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a few megalo+plutomaniacs. Advertising dominates all our communication channels, and along with social media, is the greatest brainwashing machine ever invented. "AI" is marketed as the solution to our problems, when in reality it's devaluing human work and flooding us even more in disinformation and propaganda.
But, hey, at least we can buy some VR headsets to distract us from all of this.
By any measure, these are all dystopian signs, which only seem to be growing stronger. I guess we all have a picture from books and movies that dystopia is something that's clearly visible, oppressive, etc. It's likely that it can be difficult to see if you gradually transition into it. Boiling frogs, and all that.
In the reality called the European Union, where phones already have to ask you to pick the default browser during device setup, and Android specifically has to also ask you to pick a default search engine (Apple doesn't have to because they don't own one). AirDrop and iMessage (and WhatsApp) have already been legally ruled against and forced to open up, but that's not the reality as of yet. It will be in a few years from now.
> What I think the author is referring to are the minor concessions Apple has made in some territories, mainly the EU. And even there, they're using every dirty trick at their disposal to do the absolute bare minimum.
It's not Apple specifically, not even a little bit. All of this is a consequence of one piece of legislation called the Digital Markets Act and it applies to everyone that is defined as the "digital gatekeeper" according to that piece of legislation, but the exact steps they need to take are not written in the law and are decided on a case-by-case basis. Such malicious compliance tricks are normal on a short timescale, but on a large-enough timescale they get ironed out and we all get to live in a less monopolistic world as a consequence.
You can join that reality too! One properly thought out piece of legislation can turn the whole thing around.
> Anti-competitive moats are still alive and well, and growing larger. It's curious that the author is positive about "AI", when that is the ultimate moat builder right now. Nobody can basically touch the largest players, since they have the most resources and access to mind-bogglingly large datacenters.
If they become large enough to matter, they will also be designated as "digital gatekeepers", and then the steps they need to do to open up will be decided. They are not that large (within the European Union) as of yet.
The EU is clearly leading the way in consumer protection, but it still leaves a lot to be desired, and in some ways it's regressing.
The GDPR was well intentioned, but poorly specified, so companies resorted to all sorts of loop holes. It also wasn't enforced well or harshly enough, so fines just became the cost of doing business for companies. Now it's being rolled back to meet "growth" demands and appease "AI" companies.
The Chat Control regulation is on the horizon, and bound to be passed in some form soon. I suppose we must sacrifice privacy to protect the children.
So it's good that some effort is being made to protect consumers, but the pressure from tech companies and the desire to not be left behind in tech innovation by the US and China will likely continue to be higher priorities. Along with some puzzling self-sabotaging decisions and increasingly right-leaning influence, all of this is undermining most of that work.
In my experience, people who "invest" in fancy watches usually have nothing of value to say. Same goes for people that buy supercars to drive on the street.
If it's the latter point from the purchase list that raised your ire, I've only ever purchased watches for fun. And that list would be a Hamilton Murph (the watch from Intersteller). Gifted to me, but < $1000
A Mondaine purchased from a Swiss railway station ($400)
Not strictly mechanical, but a Casio A168WA, purchased in Tokyo ($25)
Disagreements on the article are most welcome (and encouraged!), but should probably stick to content therein.
Comment was deleted :(
Nope.
For some people, like this article, technology is just a wave of trends and fashions. For other people there is an actual utility to the tech.
For example consider why so much digital media is pirated. It’s not because most of those people refuse to pay for content. It’s because they reject to pay for limited access. Why bother with all the platform lock-in and limited rights when you can download it for free and achieve maximum portability. The people that pay for streaming do so because it’s the fashion/trend and there is a cost of increased effort to try out individual liberty.
I mean I hear lots of talk about it, but I am yet to see wide spread evidence.
It seems at the moment that its similar hipster-esque analog revival, where everyone was going to type on typewriters, use lomo film cameras and wear camelhair coats.
It was at best a fashion garnish, rather than a significant movement.
If this was a "real thing" rather than hot young things, we would see significant market movement to single device objects again (not that they ever really went away, its just they are cheap and abundant, so not exclusive/attractive)
This article taught me nothing except first-world tech consumerism is out of control. Why is that interesting? Because I think it's part of why the tech bros consistently over-estimate the relvance, pace and world-changing potential of technology like LLMs. If you're drowning in tech consumerism, you see it all around and think it's _really_ important. But this is living in a silicon bubble. 90% of the planet just doesn't care, is not even aware of these "toys" and wouldn't see them as relevant to a normal life if they did, and is extremely innovative about getting their actual needs met with far more basic tools and materials available. And they would be largely right. Technology does change the world eventually, but the latest pair of smart goggles or a slightly better camera on your personal surveillance device does not.
> first-world tech consumerism is out of control ... this is living in a silicon bubble. 90% of the planet just doesn't care, is not even aware of these "toys"
The US is not really among the countries that likes tech "toys". The number of things you can buy in BestBuy, for instance, doesn't compare to a trip to Shenzen, Tokyo, HK, etc. Those items are far more likely to be throwaway than the things listed in my article (most of which are high quality and I expect can last a decade).
> I think it's part of why the tech bros consistently over-estimate the relvance, pace and world-changing potential of technology like LLMs
I think the opposite is happening. A year ago it was sacrilege to state that an LLM would not lead to AGI. Today that's pretty uncontroversial to say that and most discussions center around 2nd order impacts of current capabilities on employment, education, etc.
> Technology does change the world eventually, but the latest pair of smart goggles or a slightly better camera on your personal surveillance device does not.
You can judge the product uncharitably, but I prefer to judge the outcome. Shared with my family many travel videos from my Rayban Metas. Provides a much more intimate perspective, like you're actually at the Swiss Alps, which just isn't a perspective you get from a smart phone. And this was not an upgrade, per se, it was me entering a new category that simply didn't exist before. My other cameras are not recent (Canon 6D - 12 years old, iPhone 12 - 5 years old).
Casio f-91w
I bought mine like 6 years ago and at first thought "wow what a cheap piece of plasticky crap. I bet I'm gonna have to replace it every two years or so." I used and abused it every day since then. It never skipped a beat. I took showers with it, I sweated all over it, I dropped it and it only required a single battery replacement since I purchased it. It keeps time well. I'll probably keep using these until the day I die. I also highly recommend getting metal adapters for straps and putting a decent nato strap on it.
I'm surprised you already need a battery replacement. My experience with those things is ~10 year battery life.
I bought the cheapest one I could find online. It's possible that it was some old stock.
A classic.
Will need one to compliment the A168
>They’re now working to bring a “next-gen” CRT monitor to market.
Wait what? Who? Why have I not heard of this? Did the AI hallucinate?
There definitely is interest in next-gen CRTs.
It’s very unlikely to happen because at this point it seems to be effectively a lost technology.
Nobody’s making the tubes any more.
It’s bit like cassette decks - there’s only one manufacturer left and the mechanisms they build are not up to the quality of the ones from the 90s, and a revival is not enough to bootstrap manufacture back to economic viability, it’s very likely a blip.
Palmer Lucky mentioned in an interview that they were looking into making a TV, in part because of how much he hated all the adware slop bundled into modern TVs.
He then followed that they were investigating whether they could build a modern CRT. I can't immediately find the except, but I had previously watched the interview
As far as I can tell, they aren't making actual CRTs, they're using modern display technology to simulate the appearance.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1m82csj/...
This is the one and only instance I am aware of.
I was hopeful I'd get a different pointer. There really is a market for this sort of thing.
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