Instead, I see the growth and momentum behind Linux and self-hosting as better evidence that change is afoot.
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noticing it now is because the tech things we remember are finally passing that threshold where they go from being outdated to being retro.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.
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.
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/
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
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.
Sometimes I wish people from 1995 could read our threads and see the things we’re complaining about.
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...
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.
https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,55419.0.html
Anyone want to help with porting Rockbox?
(Well, that and the metal body.)
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".
The whole Spotify 30 day refresh requirement is bullshit but there’s really nothing that isn’t without some flaw
Sony's modern Walkman is an Android device. No thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
[0]: https://www.bbcmaestro.com/courses/alan-moore/storytelling
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.
see https://www.npr.org/2022/03/01/1081115609/from-tumblrcore-to...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd be awesome if ModRetro made an mp3 player that mirrors the iPod similar to the Chromatic's GameBoy.
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.
And Pokémon cards because this generation has less ability to afford big purchases like a house or having a child
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.
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)
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.
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 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
But fyi, the Venture Brothers creators (Publick, born 1967, and Hammer, born 1971) are firmly in Gen X.
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
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.
> 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?
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
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.)
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.
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.
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?
I can’t believe I used to be one of those people who got every single email delivered to their smart watch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I want: In global settings, say "No notifications." Then I don't want to be prompted when I install an app.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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
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.
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."
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
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...!)
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.
Now it's just anyone that wants a big paycheck. And the culture shift is reflected in the products.
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.
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.
maybe for a light weight version I will go for a gshock
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.
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.
Disc rot seems way overblown it seems, at least for DVDs. LaserDisc does have this problem, though.
The author paints a nice picture but there's a lot of wishful thinking and projection there.
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.
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.
* 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.
And my comment about desktop usage is based on these projections: https://www.webpronews.com/linux-breaks-5-desktop-share-in-u...
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.
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.
At this point I don't even have sympathy for Windows users. They choose their lot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nostalgia is perhaps a catalyst, but I'm convinced there is something more there.
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].
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.
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.
I also wouldn't be surprised if that was a common pattern.
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 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.
I know there are alternatives from more trustworthy companies but haven't looked into them in depth.
Is it me or does this list really goes against almost everything preceeding in the article?
The worst thing about the internet is that it gave everyone a voice.
"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 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 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.
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.
Film is a different matter of course.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
Not exactly true. Sent from my Librem 5.
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.
What, does your Librem 5 not have a web browser?
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?")
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Think the fines need more zeros - especially if the behaviour is egregious
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is like a "haul" video, without the video.
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.
Have you thought of installing Rockbox on it? It made mine instantly better.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Is it? I wish it was, but what is the author referencing?
There's also, of course, the aggressive A16Z Art Deco rebranding. But we can put that one to the side.
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.
As an aside, can they bring back Symbian OS and Windows Phone?
We'll see!
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.
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)
Will need one to compliment the A168
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.
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).
Wait what? Who? Why have I not heard of this? Did the AI hallucinate?
There definitely is interest in next-gen CRTs.
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.
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
I was hopeful I'd get a different pointer. There really is a market for this sort of thing.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
> 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 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.