I miss technology that was meant to be used as a tool
Both sw and hw.
SW is usually hard to use, offering no meaningful settings or making them hard to get to with meaningful QoL features simply absent. Search in any kind of mainstream product is an absolutely excellent example.
If someone does need something other than the default workflow or encounters any error then that is too bad for them.
For a lot of hw products there is little to no meaningful choice alongside absent repair options. The best example is probably smartphones which are excessively thin bricks with a charging port, camera bump, sealed in battery and hard to impossible to change os.
Features decreasing longevity and contributing to waste(plug in for global warming) are simply accepted and even welcomed by end users for bizzare reasons.
For now there are still workarounds depending on how much effort you want to expend with that effort sometimes being truly excessive.
I miss when the internet was a place you could go, not a haze
insultinginserting itself in everything.Yesterday I spent a few hours trying to figure out what was wrong with an old pair of headphones. It took a few hours because the design is so hostile (to the point some screws are clockwise and some are anticlockwise for no justifiable reason?) that I needed several videos to walk me through each step. As you say, there was a workaround, but what I allotted an hour took three, just in teardown.
It was a long shot from fixing radios in my youth.
The problem is that most people could not care less (to your point about user acceptance), and so you are actively punished by your competitors and audience if you spend extra money on making something better.
The cream does not tend to rise to the top. There is also the other aspect which is that when you make something user serviceable then users try to service it. Unless you spend significant effort on making this foolproof then they will screw it up and then you are in a warranty fight potentially. AI has made this all worse. Service teams are being overwhelmed with AI slop on every communication citing non -applicable law, and it costs the author nothing, but is a huge distraction away from customers with actual problems.
It's even worse when you have to interoperate with something else. For instance the standard for AC charging your EV at home is really simple, but car OEM firmware is largely full of bugs that I have spent way too long working around. They don't answer the phone, we do. We supply telematics and detailed diagnostics, they typically don't. Who is punished? Whose CS reps get yelled at? Customers on the whole have no sense of taste or smell or technical ability and are ruled by black boxes they don't understand and the current market is a direct consequence of that.
(Work in manufacturing a b2c hardware product with a significant software component)