Comment by kergonath
4 days ago
It’s a common fallacy: “$thing is good, new and exciting, therefore everything else is old and rubbish”. The pattern is very easy to see if we pay attention. It’s very common in tech circles, where people tend to be easily excited about new things.
This has always seemed wild to me. New tech always always sucks. In complex problem spaces it takes years to effectively identify use cases, edge cases, and bugs and get all that shit ironed out, and yet the enthusiasm you speak of is pervasive.
That's because tech fetishists are buying hope and optimism. If they actually cared about how to build the future they would be into engineering:
Paperwork, standards, logistics, non-destructive tests, monitoring, certification, other "boring" stuff.
Tech people LOVED bitching about how complicated the USB-C standard is, how it does too much, etc.
Guess what? As a consumer, I can plug pretty much anything into anything else, use literally any brick to charge nearly any device, deliver outstanding amounts of wattage over cables the size of headphone wires, for pretty cheap, and USB-C docks that you just plug into whatever and things just hook up and function.
It does that because of the millions spent on human beings spending time to work out bugs, work around edge cases, discover what people tolerate and care about with the standard, etc.
Consumers ignored all the complaints about it being complicated and just fucking used it and it's ubiquitous and works for pretty much everyone and the only people who have bad experiences are the ones buying exclusively fraudulent cables off amazon and only some of those people are hitting those problems!
I can just plug a cable into the power port and get HDMI out of my steam deck. Holy shit.
THAT'S the future.