this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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ADSL internet and dial up. Hard drives as boot drives. Those crappy 2000s era phones that filled the void between old school cellphones and smartphones. Only BlackBerry was decent, the rest were absolute trash. Cheapo digital cameras, thank goodness smartphones are good enough to take decent pictures now. Low quality MP3s. Modern lossy compression audio formats are so much better. Having to burn CDs and DVDs, that was a pain.
I liiiiked those, at least the later ones
I probably didnt have one long enough for it to break down or for me to get sick of it though. blackberries were much better in most ways but expensive and not exactly tanks themselves.
everything else is real as fuck but also very much problems of the digital age, created by the digital age lol
Yeah the start of the digital age was rough. Basically the quality of everything got downgraded in pursuit of being fully digital. The first flatscreen TVs were worse than CRTs, video and audio quality was rough, consumer grade cameras were bad, the internet was slow as a snail. But then it advanced to a quality that we could only dream of back in the day before everything was digital. Now we gave gigantic 4k HDR TVs, videogames that look like movies, cellphone cameras with incredible quality and zoom, and high quality digital video and audio formats that blow analog out of the water, and internet that downloads hundreds of gigabytes of data in a reasonable time. So it was all well worth it in the end.
I still think its a mixed bag at best but mostly because tech companies' greed and AI bullshit have utterly poisoned the well.
The web is bigger and flashier and capable of doing more than ever, but it requires a pretty hefty CPU to even do basic things that you could do as fast or faster on a midrange tower from 15 years ago. And all the sites are designed to be addictive. Mobile devices are technological marvels more than ever before, but they're also always within like 2 years of being e-waste, and have become almost completely proprietary and locked into surveillance capitalism, locking out DIYers as much as physically possible. The cameras are great but "processing software" (it was verging into outright editing/enhancement for years even before the latest AI boom) has gotten so "good" that photos often no longer look like real life, they look "better". The 4k HDR screens come from the factory with baked in ads and dead pixels, the videogames are all building in gambling mechanics to make money, etc etc. And thats not to mention "AI" shit
This sucks :(
I was mainly focusing on the technical specifications to be honest. There were some doomers out there that thought we would never get anything better than the high resolution CRTs, that we would never get anything better than vinyl, that cameras had peaked with the high quality film models, etc. That digital meant a permanent insurmountable reduction in quality. I'm just glad that wasn't the case. Though on the screen front we had to wait for OLED, and some of the early LCD and TN panels were shockingly bad when compared to contemporary CRTs, and the only way to get good picture quality was to spend your life savings on a plasma TV. Glad that's over.