I’m going to say “Motorcycles”. (At least bikes in the US.)
20 years ago, a lot of bikes still had carburetors with manual choke. Many of them had no pollution controls at all. ABS was basically science fiction. A significant portion of them were air cooled. (To be clear, there are still some air cooled bikes on the market.)
Now it’s rare to find carbs on street legal bikes, even the 125cc Grom has fuel injection. And basically any bike has at least a catalytic converter. There are bikes with variable valve timing. There are bikes made by Harley-Davidson (The company always the butt of “muh primitive motorcycle” jokes) that have water cooled engines with variable valve timing that make as much noise, and vibration, as the average Toyota. Most bikes have ABS on them now, and there are plenty with traction control and stability control. They’re safer now than they used to be. I recently sold a couple of bikes and bought one nicer bike, and it’s uncanny how smooth, quiet, and stable it is.
airplanes, microchips, vaccines, lenses, lasers, windmils, solar cells, … the list is endless !
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Fair points and nice illustrations 👍
I was mostly thinking about fuel economy and decreased noise levels.I’m having a hard time believing the first picture is a real airplane. Are you sure it isn’t a mock up? The width of the cabin rivals the 787 I flew on from Japan.
Air travel was very expensive back then relative to the average household income. If you’re willing to pay for business class today, you’ll be basically in the same position as those folks in the first photo, and be paying about as much (relatively) as they did.
It’s still available, but you’re not going to get it for the price of a super saver economy ticket. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
Sure, they had more legroom because the modern concept of economy class did not exist. They also crashed and killed everyone onboard much more often
I’d gladly trade leg room for a somewhat increased risk of death.
That would be “made better” to me.
Better is a useless metric.
I understand your sentiment. On the other hand, I would rather my son have an hour of slight discomfort but arrive safely than be a fatality statistic.
There is a feasible middle ground that is not realistically going to happen however. Slightly increasing personal space and comfort in the newer, safer planes without squeezing every possible seat in in the name of profit.
“Better” does need to defined to not be ambiguous. To me a good definition to use in this thread would be “the net changes over time are objectively an improvement for the use”. I think that my middle ground would firmly be “better” but in the current state it is only strictly better for those owning the planes.
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It’s a fair point more affordable is also a kind of better, average Joe could only dream of affording flight. On the other hand it’s all new technologies and the price is bound to drop as adoption goes up. You could argue windmills have been around for a while, but let’s be honest - calling a windpowered electricity generating turbines windmills is a bit of a stretch.
You could argue that was more a function of training, policies & procedures, and maintenance than of construction.
It’s a combination of things to be sure. To give a simple example though, turbine engines are inherently much less likely to quit running than piston engines.
Airline comfort has drastically and steadily declined over the past couple decades, long after commercial airlines started using jets. Maybe not to the level of that first picture - cattle class has been around since I was a kid - but passenger comfort has been measurably squashed just in the time I’ve been travelling as an adult. Safety hasn’t correspondingly improved as a result of technology in that time.
Safety has improved considerably in the past couple decades in the USA.
There’s probably no causal relationship to declining comfort though. Comfort has decreased for two reasons:
- Anything that gets more seats on a plane increases potential revenue. An extra row in a 737 could be on the order of $2 million a year in revenue.
- Any discomfort the airline can inflict that doesn’t significantly exceed its rivals encourages customers to pay for upgrades.
But, again, most likely due to more stringent maintenance, training, and procedural regulations thank because of any technology improvement. American’s average plane age is 11y/o; United is 14 y/o; Delta’s average plane age is 17 years old. Despite bring nearly half again older, Delta’s safety record isn’t much worse than American’s. There’s little or no correlation between fleet age and safety, and it’s more rational that any increased accident rate of older planes is due to wear and tear and general ages of the planes rather than the technology in them.
Cars… old cars were indestructible death traps. Crumple zones kill the car and save the human
Not even indestructible, just big heavy destructible death traps!
There’s a video floating around of a midsized sedan from the 60s and the 00s in a frontal offset crash and the old car is absolutely demolished.
This is a consistent argument I get into with my mother. She complains that cars are made of plastic now, and I try to explain that crashing a steel body car would mutilate your body but to no avail. This and her hatred of roundabouts.
that’s the kind of positivity I wanted. it is cool how much laser tech has improved in the past few decades
Engines. 300hp out of 2L is impressive. It scales even better. V8’s can put out insane numbers.
Ha ha laughing in 1.6 litre WRC cars kicking out 500PS 😂
No one is driving those past 100k miles with 10k maintenance intervals though.
The ICE is “only” outputting ~380hp, the rest is from the electric boost.
For real, internal combustion engines are made way better than they used to be. Both in terms of reliability and power output.
You can get a small, ICE only (non-hybrid) car that gets 40+ MPG. You can buy a new car with a warranty that makes over 800 horsepower.
The IC engine is at its peak. Electric is the future, but the current crop of ICE are incredible machines.
Not to mention the reliability is better now. Basic maintenance will get you over 100k easy with no major concerns
Just about everything. There’s almost nothing you can point to today and legitimately say that the model from 20, 30, 60 years ago was better.
The exception is sewing machines. My 1970s version is still going while more recent ones fail because of plastic parts. The repair man offered me a great deal of money if I would sell the old one to him.
When you hear people saying that technology has stagnated, that person clearly isn’t following advancements in medicine. The medical tech I see now just blow me away.
I’ve heard of lab-grown flesh cloned from a burn victim’s own flesh replacing the need for an invasive skin graft retrieval, and a gold nanoparticle mixture placed into an old spinal cord injury to cause microscopic damage and force the body to resume healing the severed nerves. Those are the big two I like to talk about. I’m optimistic about things like whole working artificial organs in the next 50 years
Unless is Bio-rad. All my homies hate Bio-rad.
It’s not about tech stagnating, but about it not lasting. They say “they don’t make it like they used to” for a reason.
That’s just an entirely separate matter. Definitely truth to planned obsolescence in some cases and lower quality materials used in many products.
But I have heard many people say technology in general has stagnated. Consumer tech keeps getting more powerful largely without major perceivable changes, and looking at developments in key fields is where we can most notably see developments.
Yeah, I know it’s an entirely separate matter than the one you’re talking about. But I think OP was talking about build quality, and not tech stagnating, haha
Oh wow you are totally right… I must’ve misread the question as I was starting to pass out last night.
Haha, it happens!
The advancements in gene editing, vaccines, and biologics is mind boggling. We’re looking at curing diseases that we couldn’t have cured until recently.
*the rich are looking at curing diseases. The rest of us will just die because we can’t afford a 7-figure price tag and the insurance companies just laugh at us until we croak.
This thread is helping me realize what a curmugeon I am. Everybody’s like “such-and-such is so much better that it was” and I’m coming up with so many reasons why all of them suck way worse.
(Maybe that says more about me than about the state of the world.)
What has you grumping old curmudgeon lol? I can see both sides personally. Things are lesser in many ways, but also better. Electronics are way improved from a reliability and size perspective, but they are becoming closed off and made without repairability in mind. Cars are way more efficient, powerful, and reliable, but they are also affected by a lack of thought to repairability, and sometimes use a poor choice of plastic over metal.
Just to your specific examples…
Most of your electronics sell your personal data to a myriad of third parties. They mostly prevent you from replacing the whole OS or turning off anti-features. All in a way they didn’t at one time. And of course there’s the repairability issue. (I just discovered about a week ago that my phone with a non-replaceable battery is bulging. sigh)
We live in a world where our vacuum cleaners go down when some AWS service nobody has ever heard of has an outage and our robot vacuum puctures take pictures of us on the toilet that eventually get leaked to the internet.
Your car too. I bought a car recently. The car I had before was a low-end 2005 model. This one’s a 2021 Subaru. The backup camera is kinda nice I admit. But it’s got StarLink and a mic in the cabin. And the privacy policy basically says “we can record you and use the recordings for whatever we want.” I have half a mind to see if I can’t disconnect the microphone one day. And despite being impossible to disconnect from the internet at any time, the clock hasn’t updated for the daylight savings time change yet. (Having that happen automatically seems like about the simplest possible convenience.) And SiriusXM is spamming my mailbox now. And the tire pressure gauge is slightly off and it nags me in cold weather. And it tries to get me to accept the EULA every time I start the car. (I haven’t hit the accept button yet. Not that I’m under any illusion that affects my legal standing on any issue in any particular way. It’s just my own tiny little protest.) And the touchscreen I have to look at while driving instead of physical buttons I can use by feel seems less safe. Plus, this car has a lot more bells and whistles. I did go for one that had more manual things like a non-power rear hatch and manually/mechanically adjustable driver’s seat and a keyed ignition rather than push start. But still. Is the car going to brick and incur a big repair fee if the rear view camera (that wasn’t a feature of my previous car) breaks?
Finally, have you heard of Wirth’s Law? There are tons of memes out there about how in the nineties they crammed really impressive software into small amounts of storage and they worked on very low-power computers. Now the ads alone on a lot of recipe sites and news articles (previously seen as about the lowest power things one could do on a computer) will bog down a fairly powerful computer.
/c/notliketheothergirls
Computer hardware is constantly improving. Sure, the software is getting worse, but there are good alternatives to that either already existing, like in the PC space, or being worked on, like in the mobile space. Also this is ignoring price gouging of PC hardware.
Display tech has gone a long way since early LCD TVs started being a thing. Granted, I still think CRT is a better technology overall, but modern TV panels do a great job of coming close in quality, while having its own benefits and drawbacks.
Good quality audio is becoming more affordable, with $20 IEMs sounding incredible for the price (Moondrop Chu II specifically) and ~$100 planar magnetic cans being available.
Sure, the software is getting worse
Not in the Linux world. Linux in the 90’s and early 00’s was rough.
First, getting the system installed and booting, then getting the GUI to work, setting up printer, scanner, wifi, etc…
Nowadays, it’s mostly just clicking “Next” a few times, and more stuff works out of the box than after a Windows installation.and more stuff works out of the box than after a Windows installation.
Except drivers, those seem to like to catch on fire, for some reason.
The only driver issues I had in the past 5 years were with the proprietary nVidia graphics driver.
Mostly it breaks when you upgrade the kernel or the driver but not both at the same time.
Other than that, my hardware just runs.I’ve had many problems with drivers for Nvidia and RealTek components, that absolutely refuse to work for more than a week straight. Across three distros and two different machines.
s/software/proprietary software
I’ve been daily droving Linux for over a decade now. Haven’t booted Windows in years.
A lot of beauty products. Nail polish, makeup, hair dryers, hairbrushes, you name it. Some terrible (and even ozone-destroying) chemicals have been removed, and with the proliferation of online reviews and images you can pick something that won’t burn your eyes and will actually work.
I miss radium
Devices with touchscreens
Except in cars, for some reason
Cars are just brutal on electronics hardware, from vibration to heat and cold changes, to sudden bumps and direct sunlight.
That said, they could definitely improve the software that it uses to avoid it responding slowly by not including things like unnecessary transitions or trying to have it do everything and a ham sandwich. Most of the problems with the software remind me of shitty printer drivers with extraneous bloat and lack of optimization.
Car interface design seems like its gone backwards. I’d much prefer a tactile button I can feel and push without looking than having to mess with a touch screen.
Some cars still focus on that thankfully
While the cars are expensive, Lucid says they’re trying to differentiate by focusing on tactile over touch
The worst thing is even in more expensive cars, like a BMW the interfaces or touch screens feel like operating a touch face from the early 2000. The turning button navigator in BMW felt like a joke to me first time I drove one. Would rather avoid such displays and connect my phone for navigation than use this
The fucking low fps on navigation maps, the laggy response on touch input, goddamn
Physical buttons are a must in vehicles for me. I want to be able to operate things with muscle memory so I don’t have to avert my eyes from the road.
Houses. Mainly talking about asbestos and lead.
Unfortunately we’ve also mastered the art of putting a nice facade on shitty, shitty bones
It’s nice they’ve taken the asbestos and the lead out, but older houses used to be built of brick and stone, now they’re built of straw and sticks.
What items AREN’T better than they used to be?
There is absolutely an abundance of cheap crap options out there but almost everything has a much better equivalent available today.
What? Like all appliances break easier and are un-repairable while only performing the same or marginally better than their old counterparts.
Also clothes are way less hardy (though I concede they are cheaper, often softer and don’t bleed in the washer as much) I don’t know that I’d call them better.
Cheap clothes are crappy. More on this story at 11.
You can still buy well made clothes that’ll outlast the person wearing them, they just cost more.
Expensive clothes are also lower quality / lastability. You can buy the same brand even same size pair of jeans or bra and they are totally different from even a few years ago.
For a lot of things that “they don’t make like they used to,” a few companies still do make things that way, but everyone else has gone with way cheaper methods and materials. You get used to this lower price, and grumble about lower quality.
People in the past used to have way less stuff, because it was all more expensive. For example: old houses don’t have closets because you could fit all your clothes in a single dresser. When you’re forced to buy/make expensive stuff, it had better damn well last.
Planned obsolescence is definitely a thing, but it’s not always the sole reason cheap stuff sucks.
The better options are also much more expensive, though.
The normal priced options are worse than they used to be.
Pocket computers
Aka cell phones
My phone’s hardware is more stacked than my PC at this point and that blows me away
iphones
these things are fuckin crazy these days
Scopes, binoculars, and telescopes.
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You just listed most things mass produced in China. That’s pretty much true around the board. Back in the early days post WW2 Japanese products also were seen as dodgy cheap quality throwaway like mass produced products from China today.
