So...this is a bit of a rant post. So, I went out the other week. Took my bag with my I put my tablet/gaming handheld in when I go out. Had some earbuds in one pocket. I still used wired earbuds because I have a strong dislike of wireless for a variety of reasons I'll get to. Long story short, my bag flipped over at one point, and I lost my wired earbuds. Thankfully, my dad bought some wireless earbuds for himself and my mom, and my mom didn't really want them, and he offered me them a while ago, but I largely declined because I hate wireless earbuds. Well...now I'm using wireless earbuds. And it got me thinking about the state of the tech industry and the world right now. The predicament of us all having to use wireless earbuds now is a lot like modern AI trends. The reason we gotta do things this way is because some tech bro CEO with a god complex who thinks he's a "visionary" basically forced it on us. And that's kind of what I wanna talk about.
Once upon a time, most earbuds were wired. Earbuds were never a great option, but they were portable. If you had one of those old anti skip CD players back in the day, earbuds actually did a relatively good job at complementing them. I never got into the ipod era. Too expensive and given I listened almost exclusively to like...4 Rammstein albums back in the day, kinda pointless. But eventually, I did modernize and start using tablets and all. And Tablets and phones...used to feature 3.5 mm headphone jacks. And I could use like $5 earbuds from five below with them on the go. It wasn't intended to be the best quality, it's just a cheap, portable option. I got better options for home. But if I go out, ya know, I need something cheap and lightweight that's easy to carry and just stuff in a bag, and if I lose them, like I just did, it's not the end of the world. Eventually, the $5 kind kinda stopped being made at decent quality, so last year I got a slightly more expensive but still affordable $15-20 ones...which are the ones I lost.
Anyway, at some point, Apple decided to kill off the 3.5mm jack. You know how apple is. They're the epitome of the whole "visionary" tech bro CEO types. They sell overpriced products with proprietary blah blah blah, and it seemed obvious that the reason Apple was doing this was so they can sell you their fancy $200 airpods or whatever. After all, Apple is relatively anti consumer, they got their fanbase by the balls making this closed operating system that only works with their proprietary blah blah blah. it's the reason I hate them and why I've never bought their products. I'm purely a windows/android guy, and while I have problems with windows and android, I never saw a reason to go apple. Their stuff is expensive, the value questionable, and it just reeks of anti consumerism.
Unfortunately for us all, apple is considered the "industry leader" in the smartphone and tablet industry, and when apple does something, all these other wannabe tech bro CEO visionaries copy it. Monkey see, monkey do. They think it makes them money, and over time, they've been waging war on the 3.5mm headphone jack, removing it from phones and tablets, to the point it's darned near impossible to get newer devices that have them. Still, I manage to patronize the companies that do. My razer edge handheld has a 3.5mm jack in the razer kishi controller attached to it, and my samsung tab a9+ also features it. So I'm good to go for the immediate future, and I dont wanna do wireless.
Why do I hate wireless btw? A few reasons. First of all, while yes, wires are annoying, you wanna know what I hate more? Having ANOTHER FRICKING THING TO CHARGE! My earbuds going dead because they havent been charged. I have enough devices to charge, i dont need more peripherals to charge. It's a pain. Bluetooth is a pain. I just want to plug something in and have it work. Not go through pairing, unpairing, blah blah blah. Third, price, earbuds are more expensive for the same level of quality. The point of earbuds is them being a cheap, lightweight, and disposable option. I just want something cheap where if i lose it its not a big deal, and i can stuff it into a bag. Not only are earbuds typically more premium, but the case these new ones come with are super heavy and bulky, far more so than my wired ones were. And for some reason it charges using...microusb? Why? Why would it use such an outdated charging standard? I've been on USB-C since like 2020. Again, pain in the butt. More complicated, blah blah blah. I thank my dad for them, but still, my complaint aint about him, it's about the way we do things now.
Some jack### decided he wanted to make money fleecing his customers by making them buy into expensive proprietary peripherals, and then the entire industry decides to copy the guy to the point that it's darned near impossible to get headphone jacks in mobile devices any more. I HATE it! I didn't ask for this change, but these tech bro guys don't care. They just decide "well this is how things are now, and you have to get with it, blah blah blah, look at my genius, muahahaha! look at my money! how dare you peasant not be happy with the way I made things, dont you understand that this is how we do things now? now fork over all your money to us for something you dont want, but you have to buy because what you actually want to buy no longer exists!"
Like, really. All this crap is, is the downside of consumerism. Consumerism is nice...in moderation. It's nice...when it's actually consumer driven. But the problem is, it's often business driven. Rather than appeal to customers based on need, you got these stupid CEOs with a god complex trying to make our lives harder to force us to buy more stuff. They do planned obsolescence. They literally expect you to constantly replace perfectly viable products by either making them break before their time, or just flat out reducing their functionality. They remove the ability to say, replace the battery, which used to be a thing in early phones and tablets. They try to take away your "right to repair". They update their apps where they dont work on the older versions of the OS, even though they used to. They design things to keep us on a never ending cycle of spending and consumption so number on chart goes up.
I guess this is kind of adjacent to my big topics of work and capitalism, because consumerism is the alternative the powers that be came up with instead of working less. As we know from the benjamin kline hunnicutt books, we couldve worked less, but instead we implemented consumerism to keep people spending and people working, because people feared a world in which we no longer had jobs and businesses could no longer make money. So they designed a system in which we constantly have new needs to keep us spending, to keep us creating jobs, to keep us working. It's absurd, and when framed like this it's completely counter to a system based around actual human wants and needs. it's just a system designed to artificially keep us on a treadmill so that people keep working, businesses keep making money, and line on chart keeps going up.
Like, if this were my ideal system, products would be made to last. Maybe some progress would be slower, but honestly, when it happens it would be more meaningful. We'd improve things because the improvements actually benefit people. We wouldnt be taking away the headphone jack standard that people like to force something new on them whether they want it or not. We shouldnt do planned obsolescence just to create more jobs, that's insane. We'd work to meet our actual wants and needs, and to improve things because the improvements actually matter. I'm not advocating for never ending stagnation. I'm just not advocating for constant change and never ending consumption either. You should buy something, it should be yours. And you should use it until eventually it either breaks (not because of design flaws, but actual age), or becomes genuinely obsolete.
But instead we live in a world where rich people write articles yelling at you if you dont replace your phone often enough because youre ruining the economy...for rich people. Well, F the rich people and F the tech bro CEOs.
And it's not just headphone jacks or smartphones in general that has this behavior. It's this AI nonsense too. Look, I'm mixed on AI. I think it's an interesting tech, but I'm not really sold on it as this end all be all of everything. And once again, it's an industry run by the tech bro CEOs with a god complex. I reported on this in 2023 when I just got my i9 12900k. Suddenly new CPUs were gonna use NPUs meaning they'd have AI on board. But why do I care about that? I don't care, quite frankly. My main use case for having powerful hardware is gaming. That's all I care about. But suddenly they're trying to obsolete old CPUs with new ones that have an AI processing unit on it? And yeah. Ever since then, everything is AI, AI, AI. AI is the solution to everything. AI has to be shoehorned into everything. Every site needs an AI bot integrated into it. My fricking PDF reader (adobe) got taken over by AI nonsense. You realize most of us non professionals just use acrobat reader to read PDFs, right? I mean...I DONT CARE about AI, and I was very pointed with them when I uninstalled acrobat reader and they asked me why I did so. It was because the app no longer did what I wanted it to be. It was made overly complicated and taken over by all this AI bullcrap that I don't care about!
And here we are with talk of windows 12 being an AI centric OS with ridiculous system requirements because, again, these corporations don't care about making a good user experience. If anything they make things inconvenient for you to make you spend money on them. Subscription based everything? AI hardware required? No sideloading? Oh, speaking of no sideloading, let's go back to something I've ALWAYS hated about apple. All of their closed garden BS. Needing to use their apple store, and buy their stuff, at their prices, to get a user experience I can get for a fraction of the price elsewhere. But now with the internet going nuts over android clamping down on sideloading, and windows 12 possibly doing it too, guess what? That's the future! And what are you peasants gonna do?
Honestly, at this point I might consider linux/steam OS in the future at this rate. It's so ridiculous. These companies are trying to ruin and monetize everything. There's a term for this. it's called "enshittification", or because I try to avoid the curse words, let's call it encrapification instead. These companies are making stuff worse to extract more profits from you. And it's not just some of them. if it was the userbase would fight back, probably leave en masse, and these guys would go out of business. but because we have so few options at this point, and they're all doing it at once, we really dont have a choice but to go along with this stuff. They're ruining the open internet, the open operating systems. In the future it's not gonna be open anything. "You will own nothing and be happy" as a lot of people covering this issue are saying.
Hell, in the future, it's being speculated that the same will be true of PC hardware. Because these same tech bro CEOs with a god complex are why PCs are so fricking expensive these days. They're all buying all of this hardware to build AI datacenters...to force AI on us...because it's supposed to make them money at some point, even though it's not profitable because everyone hates it.....but hey, in the future, if you wanna game, maybe you wont be able to because no one can afford a PC any more. So...guess what? You can just do game streaming. All future computer needs will be run through these massive servers they're building which they own while you get some locked down peasant device with anemic specs where you have to pay for subscriptions to LITERALLY EVERYTHING. That seems to be the future these guys want. They want to kill tech as we know it, to replace it with their apple like walled garden BS, and consumers have little choice in the matter. because like 3 companies control everything, you gotta go through one of them, all of them suck about as bad, and if you dont like it, screw you! What are you gonna do? They're forcing us into their bullcrap ecosystems one way or another?
Again. I'm a tech nerd myself. But Im kinda old fashioned. I like my gaming PC, which I built myself. I like my open OSes like android and windows, I like my fricking 3.5mm headphone jacks. I like being able to put whatever software i want on my stuff, and use it as I want. And I don't give a flying fudge about AI. Honestly. At this point, give me the 2000s back. Things were better in the 2000s. Even the 2010s are looking great compared to the modern 2020s hellscape at this point. I used to think the future was gonna be cool. We'd have flying cars and robot maids. But instead because of capitalism's excesses, we have the death of traditional computing and OSes, and being forced into walled gardens because it makes some tech bro CEO with a god complex money. F this decade, F the tech bro CEOs. I want nothing to do with this, and I'll resist trends to get on board with it for as long as humanly possible.
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