There are a few good things, but mostly, much of the modern tech is nasty and just not good - honestly. I am in my 60's now, and still remain a pure hacker of tech - really. I built a working IEC fusion reactor in my basement, I run a 12+ node LAN at the Farm, and recently bought another car. I love the idea of Tesla, and the F-150 Lightening, but the Tesla SUV is $120,000 in Canada, and that is just too much. But I do have Elon Musk's Starlink dish, and it is just magic wonderful. It's $145 per month here, but we can afford that. Some tech is truly great - but an awful lot is just terrible. You need to know this. And it gets worse each year. Honestly, aeriously.
My partner has a MacBook Air - the SSD just died. We are lucky, since it is a 2012 version. We just ordered a 250gb upgrade (and the damn little 5-point screwdriver to open the back of the damn thing. But we expect to be able to fix it fine. But since 2018, the vermin at Apple have been soldering the (failure prone) SSD chips to the mainboard.
We find the old-tech is good ( I run mostly Linux boxes - for various needs).
Honestly, everything is getting crappy and nasty. You need to appreciate what I saw when younger - the first Moon landing - and the last on in 1972, with the electric car on the moon.
It's 2021, and we could not go to the moon, if Earth's life depended on it.
I watched and experienced the transition from propeller drive Viscount aircraft, to DC-9s, and then 747's. As a kid in University, I flew to England, on Wardair, and we drank cheap drinks in the upstairs lounge for most of the flight. Way better than Concorde!
I put email into a major Gov't Ministry (as an independent consultant, and I watched it make major changes, as a stiff, old-world style org was flatlined by the technology (we used Novell Networks). We installed a DecSystem 2020, and changed completely how a big, powerful group operated. We watched the Space Shuttles debut, and promise space-travel for all nations, with the ISS, which was billed as a stepping stone to the planets and maybe even the stars.
I bought and demonstrated a Z80 Northstar 64K, with a working Pascal compiler which could do what the DEC 2020 could do, at a tiny fraction of the cost. We saw the disruption of the disruptive tech that was only a few years old. I paid $6000 for an initial IBM 5150 P/C, with dual drives, which had a Fortran compiler, which was solid and good and gave the right answers.
And I bought one of the first lunch-box sized cellphones, which was just awesome, science-fiction level cool - and then replaced it in a few years with a Motorola handset - and then a flip-phone.
The technology was wonderful, it was reliable, and bloody well made.
Now, it is crap. Seriously. It still is sort-of workable, but I find everything has some kind of trick, or some kind of gotchya worm built into it now.
Stuff fails regularly.
Products are released, and the public customers are used as
testers. Early versions of anything now are riddled with bugs, flaws, and are horribly, badly engineered.
Boeing builds expensive aircraft on the cheap, and the dogshit crappy software flies perfectly fine aircraft into the ground.
The USA gives up on space - were it not for Elon Musk, they would have no civilian space transport to the ISS.
Electronics are built with custom ASIC chips, not industry standard hardware - so that failure in in-built, and hardware has to be thrown away every few years.
The internet, which promised knowledge and access-for-all, has morphed into a shit-stained back alley, dominated by scammers and hard-core criminals.
Everything good, useful or honest is behind a paywall.
I have to grit my teeth to use it now.
This was not how it was supposed to be.
It's wonderful to see the videos on the little helicopter flying on Mars - really very amazing. But exploring by sending robots is tragic and cowardly - and offers so little.
Honestly - we need to change the program. We need to deregulate basically everything. Everything.
It sounds crazy, but otherwise, the future is going to be 20 or 30 billion people, choking on their own fumes, fighting over the few remaining resources.
We need to drive the technology forward with a military-grade urgency. I know it's possible, because I saw it happen when I was young. And it is not happening now.