When he was alive, my ol grandpa once told me: "Nobody makes anything for me anymore--they've all just left me behind!" I thought to myself HA! I'll never get like that! I'm always going to be an early adopter, I'll always be optimistic for the new, I believe that technology always marches forward!
Now that I'm getting up there in age, despite swearing otherwise, I'm starting to feel like grandpa. I'm just not the target market anymore, for anything. New cars are boring identical bars of soap with dumb-dumb transmissions. New homes are ugly and made of cheap materials. Computers keep getting more and more locked down and are losing peripheral ports. Everything from appliances to clothing wears out after a few years. Media is made for 5 minute attention spans. Everyone leases and streams things instead of owning them. You can't even buy a lot of software anymore, you have to pay every month. Everything seems to be just getting worse, and only my age cohort seems to notice it. We're turning into those stereotypical cranky old people that we used to ridicule.
The boomers before me were a huge market, and for a long, long time, industry could profitably make things for their taste. Now everything is made for 18-38 year olds who are also a ginormous generation with similar taste. My generation was tiny, and no marketer really ended up caring what we like. I got skipped over, and indeed it's starting to feel like nobody makes anything for me anymore!
> Excuse me Sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour, the Framework laptop?
Very gladly: It has even fewer ports than most mainstream laptops. The theoretical flexibility doesn't make up for the facts that it can have at most 4 ports, and the MicroSD reader counts as a port. So you can have one USB-C (which you need for charging), one USB-A to be able to connect a mouse, one HDMI to be able to connect a monitor that doesn't provide USB-C power, and a MicroSD card reader.
So you could in theory swap e.g. the charging port for a MicroSD reader, move all the files and swap again.
In any case I see your point. I always generally scoffed at laptops with less than four USB slots alone and lack of an ethernet port. But I have a 20€ dongle for that now, which is convenient for switching between the work and private laptop.
"The old Model A had a spark advance you could manipulate. I don't know why they got rid of it. Well, that's your Detroit smarties. The hand choke too. That's gone. Been gone." - Charles Portis, The Dog of the South, 1979
Now that I'm getting up there in age, despite swearing otherwise, I'm starting to feel like grandpa. I'm just not the target market anymore, for anything. New cars are boring identical bars of soap with dumb-dumb transmissions. New homes are ugly and made of cheap materials. Computers keep getting more and more locked down and are losing peripheral ports. Everything from appliances to clothing wears out after a few years. Media is made for 5 minute attention spans. Everyone leases and streams things instead of owning them. You can't even buy a lot of software anymore, you have to pay every month. Everything seems to be just getting worse, and only my age cohort seems to notice it. We're turning into those stereotypical cranky old people that we used to ridicule.
The boomers before me were a huge market, and for a long, long time, industry could profitably make things for their taste. Now everything is made for 18-38 year olds who are also a ginormous generation with similar taste. My generation was tiny, and no marketer really ended up caring what we like. I got skipped over, and indeed it's starting to feel like nobody makes anything for me anymore!