My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Modern technology sucks. Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. That hypertext document requires more RAM to run than I used to have total in hard drive space (for operating systems that also had hypertext document viewers, that rendered the same visual result as today). All new protocols have to run over port 443; I doubt there&#x27;s been a new protocol port registered with IANA in 5 years. Smart devices have no keyboards and rely on swiping on glass. Everything runs off an internet connection so you can&#x27;t really leave your house or a major city and keep things working, to say nothing of vendor service outages. Android <i>could</i> run regular old Linux and apps and give you a desktop, but it doesn&#x27;t, because we are not holy enough to receive a useful user interface. Samsung had DeX in their phones like 10 years ago but apparently that&#x27;s done for, and good luck finding any modern devices that support the standards needed to do things like output video, audio, ethernet, etc via USB-C. Bluetooth is still total garbage. We still have no audible user interfaces other than shitty cloud-vendor-specific &quot;assistants&quot; (even though I made my own audible user interface 15 years ago for a Car PC with nothing but open source tools). We still pay the same amount for a computer today that I paid for one 20 years ago (although adjusted for inflation I guess those older ones were more expensive). Computers today do exactly the same thing they did 20 years ago: save a document or image or video over a network, display it, print it. The only difference is they now do it in a much slower, more wasteful way. And programming is still a thing. To make a new program, a bunch of humans have to sit around typing out lines of text into a screen, and going through a laborious process to compile and test it all, and it&#x27;s still full of bugs.<p>We could have much better technology. The proof is right there in the article, from 24 years ago. We don&#x27;t have anything better because we just suck at making technology. We have resigned ourselves to wasting time and making crap.