So I used to be quite a tech enthusiast but kinda stopped, I used to be a lot in cameras, smartphones etc even tho i cud never afford them lmao
Anyway today i saw the MKBHD video he released recently about oneplus, and it got me thinking, i remember the time when i used to really be into it and remember devices being so cool for their time like iphone 11 and 12, the samsung galaxy s phones… oneplus obv, always came with a lot of actually cooler features like better battery lives, new cooler designs, improved cameras etc etc, we also had companies like ASUS making and experimenting with cool phones
However now it just seems that they all add useless irrelevant features, AI slop being number one of them, but even then the designs are much uglier now… iphone 12 and 13s used to look so elegant and cool… same with samsungs galaxy note series and s10 series, ASUS went out of the market… and oneplus is… well just another random generic brand… the only brands doing smthng cool are prolly xiaomi or vivo but even then its a lot more cool for the first week and then forget abt it than much else
Same kinda happened with the camera market… i remember there used to be cameras lile XS-10 or fujis XE4 and XT30 making big news about being arnd and under 1000$ and being such good value for money with good sensors… IBIS in some cases, and in the full frame you had A7iii from sony and Z5s from nikon offering insane value However now apparently 1K dollars only gets u recycled parts from much older cameras… and entry level is now fuckinf 1.5k+ dollars for APSC cams, micro four thirds is dead (i always wanted a g9 so bad lol it was like 999$ a steal but i was like 15lol), and even the cameras dont seem much that great, however maybe i just am not upto date on that stuff so idk… the pro market might be getting better… im talking more as an enthusiast who just sees them from outside lol
I generally cite mid-2010s (e.g. 2015ish) as when society peaked technologically. This is before the rampant enshitiffication of everything. Most new tech “advances” are of marginal use (or outright detrimental) to the average person and are only beneficial to corpos and govs.
I’d say the main exception to this is medical tech. Those advancements do present real benefits, at least to those who can afford it.
I think the reason tech hadn’t been as enshittified in the 2010s was that the companies making these products and services could still grow profits just by expanding number of units sold. So you could make more money while also being good to your customers. Make great stuff, expand the potential market, make more profits, repeat.
Eventually however your market caps out. Eventually everyone who isn’t living in an uncontacted Amazon tribe or too poor to afford food already has a smart phone. It doesn’t matter how great the features are; the global market for smart phones will never be more than ten billion units a year. And likely never more than half of that. You can only sell so many phones in a year, and people can only afford to pay so much for them.
So what do you do if you can no longer grow profits by growing scale? You have to wring ever more profit out of each customer. And thus, enshittification.