What is a nifty little feature modern gadgets have lost?
What is a nifty little feature modern gadgets have lost?
For me it’s the notification light you used to find on older phones, was particularly good to know if your phone was charged without picking it up
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Simplicity.
iPhones are far too big and have too many huge cameras for me. Everything requires a subscription or some login to do anything. Applications and operating systems are updated at the whims of CEOs while the job of UX designers is de-prioritized. Software updates keep breaking established workflows. I can no longer rely on devices or apps to maintain a consistent experience from one year to the next. It's just been years and years and years of disappointment and stress as technology changes for the worse.
All this is pushing me towards a more unplugged lifestyle. Which is a bit ironic given how it adds more complexity with the need to own and travel with more things. A bag of five 'things' that always work regardless of network connection is better than a little tablet that could crash or die or be updated at any moment and having a significant impact on your lifestyle.
There's just no fucking zen anymore. I feel like I'm living inside a simulation built by the same people who brought us Windows 95.
One part about this you may be surprised about is that the random updates to software tend to be pushed by UX designers in my experience.
They want to do "something", and that's something often is changing something that currently works. Or pushing for design that goes against UI best practices because it's their pet.
...etc
As a former UI I artist, I wholeheartedly disagree. The interfaces and operating systems that I've struggled with recently go against human interface guidelines. It's more likely that middle management is creating projects to make themselves seem more relevant. Or, in the case with Apple, my assumption is that upper management is trying to push all their other devices towards synergy with Vision Pro - a product which has yet to hit market and find acceptance.
I kinda miss the simplicity of Windows 95. Pre-OSR2, the last version before the integration of Internet Explorer, one of the last few versions before the analytics era, where everything you do is collected, catalogued, compiled into data that drives further UX change (which A/B test did the best this week? Cool, now let's change it up again). The last one where I could reasonably understand every process that was running. And it was even possible to shut almost every one of them off in the name of giving every CPU cycle to the processes that I wanted to run. (Back when 350 mhz was as good as I could get)
iPhones are far too big and have too many huge cameras for me.
It's the same outside of the Apple ecosystem too. It's as if everything is tied together. If I want a high end phone with nice build quality and a good, high resolution + high refresh rate display, I'm usually forced to also pay for 3-4 different cameras that I might never use. If I want to constrain myself to a more reasonable price, I'm limited to either a last year flagship or a current midrange model.