> It’s not enough for a refrigerator to keep food cold; today’s version offers cameras and sensors that can monitor how and what I’m eating, while the Roomba can now send a map of my house to Amazon.
I can only answer subjectively here. At some point in the past 20 years, the quality of products deteriorated. We have more options than ever before, but much of it is cheap, plastic garbage. It spies on us, or comes with terms and conditions where we actually own nothing, or is chock full of complexity.
We purchased a bathroom scale from Amazon during COVID. I can’t remember but either Wire cutter or Consumer reports gave it top scores.
The damn thing required installing a mobile app and wanted to connect to my Wi-Fi, and though it gave me an option to skip this step, I couldn’t get it to complete “setup” until I connected it. Once I connected it, there was no option to disconnect it. The scale works okay, but I had to go into my router settings to block it from connecting.
When you think about it, products and services today are drowning in complexity and outright stupidity. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the economics and the race for endless growth. It often feels like innovators are either out of ideas, or maybe because of the few companies who dominate specific industries, it’s just too damn impossible for any new innovative ideas to come to fruition.
It's more than that. It's the obsessive monetization of common products.
I was fine with the crappy plastic stuff we had 20 years. There was some expectation that a refrigerator works as a refrigerator, a toaster as a toaster, a bathroom scale as a bathroom scale. It might break after 3-5 years, but I could buy another for cheap while trying to remain ignorant of the environmental impact.
Fast forward to today. The core functionality is incidental to the real goal of these devices: Data collection and advertising.
A refrigerator might work as a refrigerator, but it's really there to spy on my eating habits and pump ads through the monitor. In many ways, it's a refrigerator in name only. The core functionality is secondary.
There could be a million updates to the refrigerator's firmware, but all in the mission of making sure the DC and adware software keeps working. Maybe there will be one relevant to actual refrigeration itself.
And there isn't any way out of this. One could propose buying a fridge from the 1950s, but do I want to pay for the power consumption of that device?
It's just sad to see that in today's society, there isn't more outrage about core functionality not working as intended. At a minimum, I could turn a blind eye to DC/ads if that toaster actually toasted bread. But I can't even be guaranteed that anymore.
> It’s not enough for a refrigerator to keep food cold; today’s version offers cameras and sensors that can monitor how and what I’m eating, while the Roomba can now send a map of my house to Amazon.
I can only answer subjectively here. At some point in the past 20 years, the quality of products deteriorated. We have more options than ever before, but much of it is cheap, plastic garbage. It spies on us, or comes with terms and conditions where we actually own nothing, or is chock full of complexity.
We purchased a bathroom scale from Amazon during COVID. I can’t remember but either Wire cutter or Consumer reports gave it top scores.
The damn thing required installing a mobile app and wanted to connect to my Wi-Fi, and though it gave me an option to skip this step, I couldn’t get it to complete “setup” until I connected it. Once I connected it, there was no option to disconnect it. The scale works okay, but I had to go into my router settings to block it from connecting.
When you think about it, products and services today are drowning in complexity and outright stupidity. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the economics and the race for endless growth. It often feels like innovators are either out of ideas, or maybe because of the few companies who dominate specific industries, it’s just too damn impossible for any new innovative ideas to come to fruition.