[masraum]

Originally Posted by jwasbury

or both?

I'm increasingly frustrated by the tech devices in our lives. Without doubt they have brought massive convenience, and productivity over the last decade or 2. However, my observation is we have reached a point where the purveyors of this tech are constantly "improving" and releasing "updates" in their zeal to stay "current" but most of the time they are "fixing" things that weren't broken in the first place. Furthermore, the constant updating seems to be accelerating and that also means the expensive hardware is becoming obsolete at a faster pace.

It used to be easy for me to turn off automatic updates and run older versions of software for years, and keep hardware for years. I think this is getting more and more difficult. My iPhone is trying to install iOS updates almost everyday. My windows 10 PC seems to ask for an update weekly, and everytime I update the OS, or am forced to update an app, or other piece of software, something stops working.

Feels like we are now on the downhill side of the productivity curve.

Looking forward to someone posting the pic of the grumpy old man in this thread in 3...2...1

I think there are a few things going on.

Apple, IMO, when they release an update, they intentionally make it beat up the older gear so folks want to buy new stuff that's a bad thing, at least for most of us. Also, just recently, 11.0 came out. They quickly found issues and released a patch to fix them... twice. So we got 11.0.1, then 11.0.2 and then 11.0.3 all within days. That's actually a good thing.

I don't know that Microsoft is doing the same to nearly the same extent. They don't have much stake in the hardware game, so they don't benefit from the planned obsolescence. You probably do get weekly updates to Windows, many/most of those are security updates to patch issues that have been found. Some are not as desirable. I'm still running Win 7 just fine. I have no intention of going to 10 any time soon or possibly ever (Will probably go Mac).

I don't think it's jumped the shark, it's just advancing at a rapid pace with new ideas popping up all of the time. Some of the new ideas may not be mature, but may in a few years be a most have thing. Is all of this stuff really helping? It's probably helping us and hurting us at the same time.

I'm sure people have been thinking the same thing for many years. Heck, just think back to the first "computer" managed ignitions and carbs from the 80s. We all knew they were the a step back and horrible (and they were), but they led the way for our current super efficient and more powerful cars based on computerized fuel and spark which is UFO tech by comparison.