Every time Apple, Intel, AMD or Nvidia launches new gadgets I get a million fake-enthusiastic “reviews” (in fact paid ads produced by youtubers who whore themselves out to the hardware manufacturers) in my recommended videos, and they are always layered – first comes the “oh, a new gadgety thingy, how wonderful”, then “oh, it overheats, is underpowered, there are flaws”, and finally “why you don’t need it and should stick with the last year’s model”, until they decide they milked the product for all it’s worth and shift attention to the next thing. I find it boring and predictable in direct proportion to the faked enthusiasm of the “reviewers”, who are trying very hard to convince us that we live in some parallel universe where good smartphones and computers are something new and unheard of, while the truth of the matter is that the entire consumer electronics industry has peaked quite a while ago and we’re seeing very small incremental improvements. I recently made an experiment where I took several pieces of “obsolete hardware” from boxes and drawers – a 6 year old CPU and motherboard with integrated graphics, an old 120GB SSD, a 4 year old Android phone and so on, because someone in the family always has an old but perfectly functional device they upgraded from, and guess what, it’s all fine. I turned the PC into a local staging server where I test for service and dependency compatibility before I deploy things on the web, and I turned the old android phone into a backup device that I can switch to in emergencies.

The way I see it, a piece of equipment goes through several evolutionary phases; first it’s promising but flawed, and every new iteration of the product brings great improvement and one upgrades immediately after the new product has been released. Then it reaches maturity, where it’s good enough for what you need, and new iterations of the product are better in this or that way, but not enough to warrant an upgrade. The third phase is when the manufacturers introduce changes in design, or control layout, but the functionality of the device is the same, or even reduced to save on manufacturing cost, and after that point all further “improvements” are basically in finding out what they could remove, make cheaper, or introduce intentional design flaws that will make the device break down more quickly and force you to buy a replacement.

I remember times where a 6 months old computer or a digital camera was considered obsolete, because things were progressing that quickly. Now we are at the point where my “new” camera is 7 years old, my “old” camera is 17 years old, both are still in use, and their picture quality is excellent. My mid-2015 15” Macbook pro is still perfectly functional, and I could use it as my primary computer with only a slight reduction in speed from the new one I use. That’s a 7 years old computer, and it’s fine.

That logic doesn’t go forever, though. I would hardly use a Pentium II-233 today, or one of the early smartphones; those are junk and are better recycled for raw materials, than used. Also, I wouldn’t say that there have been no improvements in the last 7 years; however, I recently replaced my younger son’s perfectly good Xiaomi Mi8 with 11T pro, and joked that he now has a typical iPhone user experience, where you buy the new expensive one with better specs, migrate your stuff to it and everything works exactly the same and you feel like a fool for wasting money replacing a perfectly good thing. That’s where we are with computers, too; the last upgrade cycle I did was particularly meaningless, because I replaced stuff that worked fine with stuff that also worked fine, albeit noticeably faster in 5% of cases.

There’s a reason why my most recent tech-purchases were battery-powered lawn mowers: I can actually do things with them that I couldn’t before. With computers and phones, well, nice that they have a new shiny design and color scheme and all, but I’ll pass.

Apple recently created the new generation of laptops that are, performance-wise, the ideal machine to replace my aging 15” mid-2015 Macbook Pro, in the role of a desktop replacement heavy lifting photo editing machine. They also recently released the Mac Studio desktop which is almost exactly what I would want as a desktop machine. Did I just go out and buy them immediately, the way I did some other things they made before? Heck no. Instead, I started moving away from Apple gradually by buying a Lenovo Legion 5 pro gaming laptop; earlier I already upgraded my desktop machine to Ryzen 5900X, so that beast is very unlikely to need any kind of replacement or an upgrade in the next four years, meaning it’s likely to outlast both myself and human civilization.

What made me “fall out of love” with Apple is the fact that they are at the bleeding edge of the political censorship movement based in America, and are basically the most likely company to disable your computer by a remote command if you find yourself in a “political dissident” camp; basically, if you’re not a complete sheep toeing the official American main stream media line prescribed by the CIA. Having in mind my political stance, I’m an obvious target, and I don’t really feel like making it easier for the CIA to shut me out; sure, I have lots of Apple gear, and I have “cloud” accounts with other American vendors. However, I have a sufficient number of backups; I can trivially get a Huawei phone which is already de-nazified, and I already have several older SSD drives with Linux pre-installed, so that I wouldn’t have to go online in order to be able to go online; I would just have to plug an USB stick into the machine and boot a live Linux distro, or, if I wanted to get serious, plug the SSD into the machine and have an instantly-working pre-configured OS where I just install the certificates and encryption keys and I’m up and running within five minutes. Let’s say a paranoid old bastard like myself is not the easiest conceivable target. They would have to really try, it’s not like they can lock my Apple account and I’m out. I’m certainly not going out of my way to make things easier for them by having an all-Apple ecosystem. Sure, it’s very convenient in peacetime environment where you agree with everything the CIA wants you to agree with, but let’s put it this way. By having a non-Apple system, I miss out on things like the iMessage or the iCloud integration. Big deal, I have to get the Macbook if I want to write lots of text messages. If I switch to Linux, it’s more of a hassle, because a certain percentage of things won’t work properly, I will have to use a different, somewhat inferior password manager, and I won’t have Lightroom so managing my photo library would become a real pain in the arse. Other than that, everything will work, because the way I have my Windows and Mac system configured is basically to work like Linux with Adobe apps running on it. Whenever it’s possible, I use the most direct possible way of controlling things, such as copying files over the network using ssh instead of the high-level services, so the moment I get the ssh terminal and the web browser running, I have everything I need. Would I run Linux preferentially over Mac OS or Windows during peacetime? Heck no; too many things are wrong with it. Would I run it if the commercial options start waging technological warfare for America? Heck yes. Also, I did it for five years in a row at one point so it’s quite easy for me to find my way around, especially since I have a current Ubuntu distro running in WSL on all my Windows machines, I run Linux on both my servers, on a home staging server, and I use the Mac the way I would use a Linux distro where the window manager isn’t actually crap.

Besides, I’m quite shocked by the amount of user-unfriendliness of the current Macs, to the point where you can’t even replace the monitor cable on the new Studio display, and you can’t add/replace SSD drives or add RAM on a Mac Studio which is a machine targeted at professionals. I understand that you can’t do it on a Macbook Air, but on a desktop machine? On a thick Macbook Pro, targeted at professionals? And the entire thing is deliberately designed so that America can pull a plug with a single command and you’re out. Russia recently found out what it’s like to implicitly rely on “international” services which are essentially all American-controlled, and you find out that you have tractors and harvesters from John Deere that are designed to be maintained only by the manufacturer, so that when you’re sanctioned by America, your agriculture stops working. Fuck that shit. I want to have a car that doesn’t “phone home” to tell its American masters where I am and what I’m doing so that they can brick it in case they don’t “support” my way of thinking and want to “cancel” me. I don’t want a phone or a computer that requires someone’s approval in order to keep working. Sure, it’s very difficult to get out once you get comfortable in the American ecosystem, but I’m at least keeping a foot out. That’s why I bought a laptop where I can add or replace drives, add or replace RAM modules, it’s designed so that I can open it and make upgrades, and I can just replace the OS with something that doesn’t require political compliance in order to work.

Oh BTW, when Americans figure out that half of the world hates them, they think it’s because of their “freedom”. Well fuck you and fuck your “freedom”. Everything you make is a slave-control device. That’s not what you do if you’re interested in freedom, that’s what you do if you want to keep everyone else as your slave. Anyone who wants freedom today would need to make a list of everything they own and use that is controlled by America, put it on a heap and burn it.

Maybe I’m getting old, but as someone who’s been living on the bleeding edge of technology since 1984 or so, and early-adopting all kinds of gadgets, there are increasingly more things that leave me indifferent, or I actually find them annoying. Let me cite some examples.

• Smart watches. I saw how they work, said “meh”, never got one. Instead, I use a very classic mechanical watch. It is a very elegant piece of technology that is powered by hand motions, is easily serviceable and lasts for a very, very long time. Also, it isn’t landfill fodder.
• Social media. Strictly speaking not a gadget or a tech artifact, but I see the entire phenomenon as extremely worrisome, and it does kind of function as the spirit behind lots of gadgets. My main problems with social media are that they are corporate-owned, and as such have a chokepoint of censorship, where a political group can take control of the company, which is relatively easy, and then basically control behavior of billions. Also, they promote groupthink and mobbing, and, by definition, reduce people to very simplified patterns of thought and emotion. Absolutely none of that is a good thing. I certainly don’t object to people communicating online, and it is definitely possible to create very constructive forums, but the general trend is that Facebook, Google, Twitter and others are implementing political censorship and reducing the level of human mental diversity and complexity.
• Virtual/hybrid reality devices. The only place where I can see use for them are driving/flight simulators. For everything else, they are just a great way of getting motion sickness.
• Mobile apps that are essentially just single-website browsers. Just use the web browser to go to that site and there’s your “app”. Pointless. Also, dedicated media library apps. A better version of this is called a file system and a media player.
• Appliances with Li-ion batteries built in, with no apparent thought given to servicing or replacement of the battery, which shows that the device’s useful life is obviously limited by that of the battery. It’s an obvious example of wastefulness and planned obsolescence. I’m talking about electric shavers, vacuum cleaners, toothbrushes, smartwatches, digital styluses, earphones/headphones, phones, tablets, laptops etc. It’s not that I object to things not being tethered to a wall with a power cord, but just make batteries that are standard, modular and easy to replace and recycle, thank you.
• Electric cars, but shortage of electricity. It’s not that we don’t have designs for safe and efficient nuclear power plants. Thorium-molten-salt technology that uses liquid nuclear fuel not only is safe (it’s trivially easy to make it fail in a safe manner without causing meltdowns), it also uses radioactive waste from our solid-fuel plants as fuel, basically transmuting everything into either fissile or inert form. The technology is absolutely awesome, but you don’t hear the “eco” leftists talking about it, because all they care for is stupid and toxic shit such as the windmills and solar panels. It’s all weak, inefficient and unreliable garbage. The only things that are actually great are geothermal and nuclear plants, and you can define geothermal plants as nuclear plants using unconcentrated nuclear fuel in-situ, because the Earth heat is nuclear in origin. Electric cars are not “clean”, they are toxic garbage, and they don’t use a “clean” or “abundant” resource, because electricity can be both dirty and scarce, and, thanks to the leftists, it is increasingly more so. Power the entire civilization with liquid fuel fission reactors, and power the cars with modern isotope sources instead of those huge, heavy and fragile Li-ion batteries, and then we can talk about electric cars. Safety-wise, I would rather have a nuclear reactor than a Li-ion battery in my car, and as for the solar panels and windmills, has anyone given any thought to their lifespan, recycling requirements and ecological impact? Thought so.
• Hipster tech. Here I’m thinking about film cameras that intentionally produce inferior pictures because it’s “retro”, or using vinyl records mastered from digital sources because it’s “analog”. That’s just affectation.
• Podcasts and video. I don’t object to those as such, but when a guy online makes a video in which he basically shows stock footage and reads from a script, it might as well be an article in textual form. Reading is a thing.
• Nuclear fusion. Stop trying to make that work, it works only when gravity provides containment for free, i.e. in the stars, but when you have to create containment yourself, it’s extremely expensive which makes the whole idea ineffective, dirty, cumbersome and fragile. It’s also not “clean”, it produces as much radiation as nuclear fission, it’s just that the nuclear fuel is gaseous, and not solid or liquid. Liquid nuclear fuel used for fission solves all the problems of solid-fuel fission reactors, and remove all the complexity, difficulty and cost associated with fusion.

Basically, I find it annoying when people who discard a technology that consumes nuclear waste to produce clean electricity, in favor of technology that consumes rare elements to produce chemical waste and dirty electricity, have some incredible urge to lecture everybody about environmental impact. Also, I find it annoying when people who can’t write a web application to save their lives think they are tech savvy because they have all the social media apps on their phones. Also, I find it annoying when people who virtue signal online about the evils of “capitalism” and “consumerism” prefer to buy a locked-in unserviceable device because it’s “more elegant”, and they also bully people who still use an older device because they are “poor”. Also, they use hipster tech, but ridicule “boomers”, without actually knowing what a “boomer” is, only that it’s someone older than they are, with an assumption that they are the smartest generation because they have smartphones and stuff. But the old guys who made them their fucking smartphones, they are stupid and “out of touch with the modern things”.

It is also my impression that we are witnessing a historically unique phenomenon where the younger generations are significantly less tech-savvy than the ones before them. Basically, the WW2 generation went to the Moon, the baby-boomers invented IT, my generation invented all the IT infrastructure that runs on top of that, and the younger generations basically just use it all to exchange memes online. Basically, the level of intellectual degradation is visible from the prevalence of conspiracy theories that cast doubt on the existence of all kinds of things that were obvious to the generations before. I’ve seen all kinds of nonsense – Moon landings aren’t real, space tech isn’t real, Earth is flat, nuclear weapons aren’t real.

All I can say to this is, idiocracy is real.