Counterpoint: I’m old and don’t miss any of that. Fewer devices is very, very nice. And fewer physical pieces of media is even nicer for the environment.
I actually don’t miss having to be kind and rewind, or spending 15 minutes with a pencil spooling my music back into a listenable format after being a bit careless with my tapes, only to have Glenn Frey sound like he’s eating marbles next time.
Less waste and less hassle. Nostalgia is overrated.
Counter counter point. Your brain hasn’t been as fried by technology as the youth (I’m Gen Z). Streaming has trained our brains to never listen to full albums. Having to rewind is kinda the point. You’re way more likely to listen to an album from start to finish. Phones are overrated.
Hmm, not sure about that. Waiting for my TV to boot or update or connecting to Wi-Fi or my m music streaming app to ‘think’ for two minutes until it works at all is tedious. Don’t get me wrong - it’s still net positive.
But I would instantly choose any option that offers less features if it would give me back this cosy feeling, that I’m the customer and not the product.
Don’t want to go into details here but it feels at certain edges that some of these integrated functionalities have simply not been tested for an actual user, but simply to offer … more.
We bought a TV last year, never connected it to any services and it works just fine. Some things require some care to not become tedious, but… They always used to as well!
I think the problem we’re facing now is that we’ve basically hit on as good as its going to get for a while.
Previously things had to improve upon what came before, but with phones being as versatile and all-encompassing as they are, there isnt really much room for improvement until the next big leap, whatever that will look like. Companies still want to make more money though, and they will do whatever it takes to get it.
We’re no longer customers as we used to be, we’re targets. We’re being analysed at ridiculous levels of scrutiny so they can turn the dials in just the right way to trick us into parting with just a little more money.
I mean, you know, alwayshasbeen.jpg and whatever, but the feeling is gone.
I only use streaming services to discover new music. General listening to music I like, is through local files. Those are always plug and play. No need to wait. Just listen to whatever you want.
Tv shows or movies are also downloaded and streamed from Jellyfin, a local media server on my pc. Local just works. And I’m the owner of my files.
I semi-agree. A phone is better in any practical way.
But there is something magical about interacting with mechanical (and electromechanical) stuff.
Sometimes I really love putting a record on a record table, flipping a switch, and gently lowering the stylus into the groove. There’s no track skip, no fast-forward, you just sit there and listen to an entire album at once. The quality is worse than what I could get from YouTube or something, but it feels so much more engaging.
And it’s not nostalgia either, my childhood music was on cassettes and later CDs, and I feel less attracted to either of those.
I would probably absolutely hate it if it was the only music format available to me. But the contrast with modern digital music blasted from a depression rectangle is what probably makes it so appealing to me.
You can skip tracks on vinyl. Not at the press of a button, but if there’s a track you know you don’t like, and maybe it’s extra long, you can absolutely set the needle down at a different point. It’s literally what old school DJs did and do.
Well, I know, but don’t tell my ADHD brain that! This has forced me to listen to some tracks I wouldn’t have otherwise and made me appreciate the art of album composition. Even if I don’t particularly enjoy one of them, it still still combines with the others to become more than their sum.
Oh, also, there are turntables that allow you to skip tracks at the press of the button. But that ruins half the fun of vinyl for me.
I guess i just miss having a walkman mode, where all it did was play music. If I could turn on a walkman mode on my phone, I sometimes would definitely do that.
A good suggestion. The harder problem is actually me. Oh, imma skip this song I don’t like it. Maybe they have a new album out, I’ll just quickly check. Hmm, what’s the weather tomorrow. Etc.
It’s not exactly a Walkman, but I’ve recently gotten into looking at the Innioasis Y1 MP3. I asked for one for Christmas, as you can put Rockbox on it just like an iPod. That, to me, is so fucking cool!
In dire straits you can still buy an MP3 player. Alternatively, you’ll probably have all these problems still, so if you need to work on not getting distracted there’s nothing else for it.
And I really appreciate being able to watch hours of content with no adverts now. Back in the day, nearly everything had unskippable ads. There was no adblock; you had to watch everything on someone else’s schedule, and the only way to not watch ads was to pee or make a sandwich.
I haven’t seen an ad in years and, my god, it’s awesome.
One benefit I find of less options is you enjoy it more. You paid good money for CDs back then. I carried enema of the state by blink182 and Americana by offspring everywhere with my cd player. Played them beginning to end, two of my favorite albums at that time.
Now, there is just so much, you could never consume it all. And when you do find new cool shit, next week it’s something else. I still fall back to offspring when I don’t care what to play. I missed offspring supercharged when it came out but they made a new one called running and cycling with the offspring that has some of the same tracks and I really like it.
I just feel quality and your care for an album due to the money invested was greater back then.
I do like to listen to some vinyl every now and then, but that’s about it. I’ve listened to portable music all my life. Loved my walkman, don’t miss the quality and the cassettes. Loved my walkman, don’t miss the skipping, broken cd’s and how limited it is. Love minidisc, it solved most of the problems before and LP minidiscs were pretty nice, and of all the things i would say i miss them the most, because how futuristic it felt using a cassette/cd hybrid. But then mp3 players came soon after and that solved everything (almost) and now with tidal, my phone and good headphones, i can listen to everything at all times in lossless quality? What’s not to love?
Yeah, but you had to sit there for like a minute to do that, and you had to be on alert for that, not enjoying it but waiting for the ad break. Nowadays, the whole thing just plays uninterrupted.
Me too old AF and don’t miss walkman or discman or digital cameras or iPod or VHS or any of that old technology.
I understand more as you move away from technology. Like I can get why others feel an attachment to vinyl record players or film photography. Anybody can understand that stuff, while a smart phone seems more like magic.
Because cassette tapes were awful, fast declining quality, tiny picture + tiny booklet if you’re lucky. Discman was awful while cycling to school, potholes causing interruptions… The mp3-player 256MB was a really cool innovation! Enjoyed that supermuch. Went through batteries FAST tho. But vinyl LPs… Is just different. It was never meant for on the road scenario and the size of the 12" sleeve just makes for a really cool collection of pictures alongside the cool collection of music. I still enjoy playing vinyl while I find it is the ultimate album experience. You get nice sleeve/context, sort of forced to listen album a to z and always dead silence in the end instead of some algorithm or autoplay making everything a never ending stream of best case ‘related’ stuff but more common the next sponsored crap being pushed on you…
Counter-counterpoint: The battery saving features on my past 2 phones (Poco X3 Pro and Ulefone Armor 24) have been absolute shit. I am talking about randomly killing the music player, and even alarm.
And it’s also been unstable as fuck. I avoid updates once I learn all the bugs… and learn problems from others. I’ve had the X3 Pro motherboard fail 3 times, lasting 9 months on average. And after repair, instead of EEA version, I received a Chinese motherboard, with different software, and different set of bugs I had to learn to work around. And I heard MIUI 13 made everything even worse. Plus I lost the option to opt-out from tracking, because after the repair I was no longer on EU version of the software.
And what I can do is limited.
Arch isn’t exactly a stable experience. Every update seems to bring some random bugs. But it’s typically the same thing for everyone, you can probably search around, and somebody has experienced it, and you can change things in your OS on your computer, because for the most part, it is YOUR computer. Can’t do that with a phone.
When I was unlocking my Motorola, I had to agree to a license agreement stating that I will not resell or otherwise transfer my phone to a different person, and that I will be held liable for any damages or bodily injury including death caused by the device. Please corporation, have mercy, let me use the device I paid for.
Also if the phone fails, I just lost everything at once.
Plus I have to replace it a little too often. There’s a lot of old electronics that only gets unusable because the plastics have already started decomposing, and either it’s extremely brittle and falling apart, or a sticky mess (fixable with IPA in the sticky case).
Counterpoint: I’m old and don’t miss any of that. Fewer devices is very, very nice. And fewer physical pieces of media is even nicer for the environment.
I actually don’t miss having to be kind and rewind, or spending 15 minutes with a pencil spooling my music back into a listenable format after being a bit careless with my tapes, only to have Glenn Frey sound like he’s eating marbles next time.
Less waste and less hassle. Nostalgia is overrated.
Counter counter point. Your brain hasn’t been as fried by technology as the youth (I’m Gen Z). Streaming has trained our brains to never listen to full albums. Having to rewind is kinda the point. You’re way more likely to listen to an album from start to finish. Phones are overrated.
Hmm, not sure about that. Waiting for my TV to boot or update or connecting to Wi-Fi or my m music streaming app to ‘think’ for two minutes until it works at all is tedious. Don’t get me wrong - it’s still net positive. But I would instantly choose any option that offers less features if it would give me back this cosy feeling, that I’m the customer and not the product. Don’t want to go into details here but it feels at certain edges that some of these integrated functionalities have simply not been tested for an actual user, but simply to offer … more.
Writing that, it also could just be age bias. :-p
We bought a TV last year, never connected it to any services and it works just fine. Some things require some care to not become tedious, but… They always used to as well!
I think the problem we’re facing now is that we’ve basically hit on as good as its going to get for a while.
Previously things had to improve upon what came before, but with phones being as versatile and all-encompassing as they are, there isnt really much room for improvement until the next big leap, whatever that will look like. Companies still want to make more money though, and they will do whatever it takes to get it.
We’re no longer customers as we used to be, we’re targets. We’re being analysed at ridiculous levels of scrutiny so they can turn the dials in just the right way to trick us into parting with just a little more money.
I mean, you know, alwayshasbeen.jpg and whatever, but the feeling is gone.
I only use streaming services to discover new music. General listening to music I like, is through local files. Those are always plug and play. No need to wait. Just listen to whatever you want.
Tv shows or movies are also downloaded and streamed from Jellyfin, a local media server on my pc. Local just works. And I’m the owner of my files.
My situation is very similar, I stream, but also have a vast collection of local media.
Dump Spotify and embrace yt-dlp
I semi-agree. A phone is better in any practical way.
But there is something magical about interacting with mechanical (and electromechanical) stuff.
Sometimes I really love putting a record on a record table, flipping a switch, and gently lowering the stylus into the groove. There’s no track skip, no fast-forward, you just sit there and listen to an entire album at once. The quality is worse than what I could get from YouTube or something, but it feels so much more engaging.
And it’s not nostalgia either, my childhood music was on cassettes and later CDs, and I feel less attracted to either of those.
I would probably absolutely hate it if it was the only music format available to me. But the contrast with modern digital music blasted from a depression rectangle is what probably makes it so appealing to me.
You can skip tracks on vinyl. Not at the press of a button, but if there’s a track you know you don’t like, and maybe it’s extra long, you can absolutely set the needle down at a different point. It’s literally what old school DJs did and do.
Well, I know, but don’t tell my ADHD brain that! This has forced me to listen to some tracks I wouldn’t have otherwise and made me appreciate the art of album composition. Even if I don’t particularly enjoy one of them, it still still combines with the others to become more than their sum.
Oh, also, there are turntables that allow you to skip tracks at the press of the button. But that ruins half the fun of vinyl for me.
It’s more nuanced. We like having all that stuff on one device. It’s the other stuff the device does that annoys us.
I guess i just miss having a walkman mode, where all it did was play music. If I could turn on a walkman mode on my phone, I sometimes would definitely do that.
Turn on do-not-disturb and you don’t get notifications or calls. It’s not a true walkman mode but it turns off some distractions.
A good suggestion. The harder problem is actually me. Oh, imma skip this song I don’t like it. Maybe they have a new album out, I’ll just quickly check. Hmm, what’s the weather tomorrow. Etc.
It’s not exactly a Walkman, but I’ve recently gotten into looking at the Innioasis Y1 MP3. I asked for one for Christmas, as you can put Rockbox on it just like an iPod. That, to me, is so fucking cool!
In dire straits you can still buy an MP3 player. Alternatively, you’ll probably have all these problems still, so if you need to work on not getting distracted there’s nothing else for it.
That’s not an issue with the medium, though.
And I really appreciate being able to watch hours of content with no adverts now. Back in the day, nearly everything had unskippable ads. There was no adblock; you had to watch everything on someone else’s schedule, and the only way to not watch ads was to pee or make a sandwich.
I haven’t seen an ad in years and, my god, it’s awesome.
One benefit I find of less options is you enjoy it more. You paid good money for CDs back then. I carried enema of the state by blink182 and Americana by offspring everywhere with my cd player. Played them beginning to end, two of my favorite albums at that time.
Now, there is just so much, you could never consume it all. And when you do find new cool shit, next week it’s something else. I still fall back to offspring when I don’t care what to play. I missed offspring supercharged when it came out but they made a new one called running and cycling with the offspring that has some of the same tracks and I really like it.
I just feel quality and your care for an album due to the money invested was greater back then.
I saw Blink earlier this year. They were great!
I do like to listen to some vinyl every now and then, but that’s about it. I’ve listened to portable music all my life. Loved my walkman, don’t miss the quality and the cassettes. Loved my walkman, don’t miss the skipping, broken cd’s and how limited it is. Love minidisc, it solved most of the problems before and LP minidiscs were pretty nice, and of all the things i would say i miss them the most, because how futuristic it felt using a cassette/cd hybrid. But then mp3 players came soon after and that solved everything (almost) and now with tidal, my phone and good headphones, i can listen to everything at all times in lossless quality? What’s not to love?
How far back are we talking? Because I remember in the '90s using the VHS recorder to record shows to fast forward through the ads later
Yeah, but you had to sit there for like a minute to do that, and you had to be on alert for that, not enjoying it but waiting for the ad break. Nowadays, the whole thing just plays uninterrupted.
Me too old AF and don’t miss walkman or discman or digital cameras or iPod or VHS or any of that old technology.
I understand more as you move away from technology. Like I can get why others feel an attachment to vinyl record players or film photography. Anybody can understand that stuff, while a smart phone seems more like magic.
Because cassette tapes were awful, fast declining quality, tiny picture + tiny booklet if you’re lucky. Discman was awful while cycling to school, potholes causing interruptions… The mp3-player 256MB was a really cool innovation! Enjoyed that supermuch. Went through batteries FAST tho. But vinyl LPs… Is just different. It was never meant for on the road scenario and the size of the 12" sleeve just makes for a really cool collection of pictures alongside the cool collection of music. I still enjoy playing vinyl while I find it is the ultimate album experience. You get nice sleeve/context, sort of forced to listen album a to z and always dead silence in the end instead of some algorithm or autoplay making everything a never ending stream of best case ‘related’ stuff but more common the next sponsored crap being pushed on you…
Says who? (Lol, wonder why this didn’t catch on…)
I actually miss the iPod and Zune. I like having my music on another device.
Counter-counterpoint: The battery saving features on my past 2 phones (Poco X3 Pro and Ulefone Armor 24) have been absolute shit. I am talking about randomly killing the music player, and even alarm.
And it’s also been unstable as fuck. I avoid updates once I learn all the bugs… and learn problems from others. I’ve had the X3 Pro motherboard fail 3 times, lasting 9 months on average. And after repair, instead of EEA version, I received a Chinese motherboard, with different software, and different set of bugs I had to learn to work around. And I heard MIUI 13 made everything even worse. Plus I lost the option to opt-out from tracking, because after the repair I was no longer on EU version of the software.
And what I can do is limited.
Arch isn’t exactly a stable experience. Every update seems to bring some random bugs. But it’s typically the same thing for everyone, you can probably search around, and somebody has experienced it, and you can change things in your OS on your computer, because for the most part, it is YOUR computer. Can’t do that with a phone.
When I was unlocking my Motorola, I had to agree to a license agreement stating that I will not resell or otherwise transfer my phone to a different person, and that I will be held liable for any damages or bodily injury including death caused by the device.
Please corporation, have mercy, let me use the device I paid for.
Also if the phone fails, I just lost everything at once.
Plus I have to replace it a little too often. There’s a lot of old electronics that only gets unusable because the plastics have already started decomposing, and either it’s extremely brittle and falling apart, or a sticky mess (fixable with IPA in the sticky case).
You’re pouring beer on sticky plastic to fix it? /s