I’ve been a passionate tech nerd for pretty much all of my life, from getting excited as a kid over tape-based dictation machines I used to record “radio shows” at home, Casio watches with built-in calculators and my family’s first Acorn Archimedes home computer, through to my 12 years as a tech writer for CNET. But in recent years things have changed, and technology has gone from being a point of genuine excitement in my life to a cause of real frustration that’s made me less excited when new innovations come along. So I’m left wondering: Has technology changed or have I?
It’s not that I don’t like tech anymore. I’m pretty sure I do. It’s that so many of those gadgets designed to make our lives easier and more fun actually don’t work as they should. Take game consoles, for instance. My Xbox Series X is great fun when it works. But more often than not when I find myself in the mood for some button bashing and fire it up, I’m met with a lengthy wait while massive updates are downloaded for both the console and then whatever game it was I wanted to play.
Read more: Best Phones of 2023
By the time I’ve made a coffee and stared out of the window while the updates install, I’ve usually lost that urge to play and I end up doing something else. Ditto for the PS5. Then there are the numerous games that launch essentially broken, with huge day-one patches required to make them even barely tolerable. I’m looking at you, Cyberpunk 2077. Do you know what doesn’t require gigantic updates and patches? My Scrabble set.
Then there are the various Bluetooth earbuds I use — the AirPods Pro 2, Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro, OnePlus Buds Pro — which work fine most of the time and then, every so often for no discernible reason, one earbud will decide not to connect and I have to stop what I’m doing and re-pair the whole set. Worse still are the occasions when one slightly goes out of sync, meaning the audio…
Read the full article here