ASK HN: Why has technology become so unreliable?
Forget the ridiculous AI hype, forget about the lack of ethics and a moral compass; What's getting to me right now is the unreliability of it all. It seems like everything is held together with duct tape, and the tape is falling off.
Just in the last few months, all these have happened:
- My Macbook Air M1 has been acting up, refusing to charge in a stable manner. The audio jack is dead because apparently it is linked to the charging circuit. The screen sometimes shows a tint on a whim. Now it is dead and not charging at all. Granted, it has otherwise been a fine machine so far, and I've knocked it over a few times, but still. Even my old trusty 2014 Macbook Pro is still going strong, and I've abused that one much more.
- I also can't use my old Macbook Pro well, because the replacement Transcend 256GB SSD I put in it around 2020 is now failing, causing the machine to unpredictably become very slow. Also, the HP business keyboard I bought some years ago is suddenly now emitting spurious key signals, which MacOS (curse its over-reliance on weird key combinations and gestures) is interpreting to do wild things, like repeatedly showing the desktop while I'm working, or zooming in and out repeatedly.
- I thought I could use my old iPad in the meantime, but it can't connect to the WiFi hotspot on my iPhone, only a normal WiFi. I thought WiFi was just WiFi?
- The Dell travel hub I bought a few years ago seems to not work on a whim when I try to use it to make an HDMI connection between my Macbook and my Samsung monitor. About 50% of the time, it simply does not work, no matter what I do. I tried using my Roku ox to cast my screen, but the Roku remote suddenly does not work. I also tried my old Apple TV; its remote was also not working properly. After somehow getting to work to connect to WiFi, the Apple TV also does not work, giving some cryptic error messages.
- A few days ago, my iPhone 12 mini simply refused to charge from my USB-C to lightning cable, no matter what I did, for hours. I borrowed a similar cable from a friend, it also did not work. So my phone died when I needed it. When I got home, I was able to charge with a USB-A to lightning cable.
- Whenever I plug in the external Crucial SSD I bought a few years ago and partitioned, it does not show up in Finder on macOS. I almost always have to go in the Disk Utility to mount the partitions.
- My Sony Bravia TV died suddenly after like 7 years. I took it to some repairers; they said the entire screen is kaput.
All these have happened in the last three months. At this point I'm ready to give up; I plan to be very minimalist with my tech purchases (including Apple stuff), only getting the minimal stuff I need mostly for work, and keeping in mind that most of what I buy is throwaway, likely to stop working in a few years at most, and when you least expect that.