GoKawiilI've been a tech writer at CNET for almost 15 years but I've been obsessed with gadgets for pretty much all of the 38 years of my existence. While today you'll find me reviewing incredible camera phones from Leica or driving EVs in the Arctic, as a kid I'd be excited over Casio watches with built-in calculators or spending hours on my family's first Acorn Archimedes home computer. I'd use tape-based dictation machines to record episodic "radio shows" with my brother, long before podcasting was a thing -- possibly a precursor to both him and me hosting technology podcasts as adults. I grew up with tech, and that passion is what led me to pursue it as my career.
But in recent years, I've noticed that things have changed for me. Technology has gone from being a point of genuine excitement in my life to a frequent cause of real frustration that's made me less excited when new innovations come along. So I'm left wondering: Has technology really changed or have I just reached that grumpy age?
It's not that I don't enjoy 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 simply 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.
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By the time I've made a coffee and stared out 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 before a game can commence? My Scrabble set. It also has offline local multiplayer without a LAN cable.
It'd be fine if it wasn't for the constant updates. Andrew Hoyle/CNET
Then there are the various Bluetooth earbuds I use -- the AirPods Pro 3 or Nothing Ear 3 buds -- which work fine almost all 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 in my left ear might be a split second ahead of the audio in the right. Headache-inducing.
Audio has been a big deal for me lately. Most of the time I love my first-gen Apple HomePod. The sound quality is great and AirPlay works well when it wants to. But it often doesn't want to and decides to disconnect halfway through a song. And when I try to reconnect through Spotify, I can't even see my HomePod as an option anymore. Troubleshooting this often feels more like divination than actual tech support and it seems it's just not possible to guarantee a constantly stable connection.
I've had numerous similar experiences with Bluetooth speakers from other brands, too. And don't get me started on the fragility of in-car Bluetooth connections, which often seem to entirely forget your existence each time you turn off your car.
My record player and Tesseract's Portals on the turntable. Great stuff. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
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