Tech is Boring, Are There Any Good Examples Left?

Reading Time: 8 minutes.

 

Nothing is exciting anymore. Nothing in tech leaps off the page at you, begging you to open your wallet. Now it just sits there, expecting you to buy it because, what else are you going to do? Just let your iPhone slow down with every update? No! You’re going to buy! You have to!

Tech companies want to do two things: make you complicit drooling dopamine addicts constantly sending them money, and replace you in the workplace with garbage AI, so that “money” they take from you is just a debt figure that piles up. Modern day indentured servitude, trapped by debt. If you can never build up the savings to take a few months off for a passion project, you are not free. And Americans, you are not free. Big tech likes you that way. Apple’s latest ads for the iPhone can be summed up like so:

“Hey, you’re an idiot, so why not let us write your emails and prepare gifts for your loved ones instead? You’re basically just a lazy, uninformed, illiterate brain rotted zombie needing three screens to scroll through the first 15 seconds of videos on TikTok while Severance plays in the background or your skin starts to feel like it’s not on your bones right, so let us do the thinking for you!”

A Microsoft study even showed that relying on AI makes people less capable of critical thinking. So far, this hasn’t changed how companies use AI and put it in their products, seemingly proving their intent.

Technology didn’t used to be like this. It was a promise of something better. You could go from punching out short bursts of T9 text on your phone in under 160 characters to a cool flip out screen with a qwerty keyboard under it in less time than Apple has last updated their iPhone design. Now, you have to wonder how the fuck (not duck) autocorrect is worse in 2025 than it was in 2014. Seriously! I try to type a period now and it gives me a whole new sentence instead because it wants to use AI to write a sentence for me. I tap ‘n’ instead of a single space key and it changes all the possible words it could have been into three words and an abbreviation? My phone types “DJ” all the time for me. Why? I almost never talk about DJs!

Tech isn’t about making your life better anymore. Now it’s just about making your life more profitable. And I could talk for hours about how capitalism is the cause and we all warned you about the duopoly forming between Apple and Google but no one—unfortunately, myself included—wanted to take a chance with a Windows phone or the Palm Pre, the best choice in the late 2000’s, so here we are with our boring phones that steal ideas from old phones and steal personal data from us. Oh, but some of them can fold in half now! Not that it does anything for you, as apps still are poorly optimized for different screen sizes.

But I also want to talk about something else. I want to talk about the tech that is exciting. Because there are a few nuggets of goodness in this sea of shit, and perhaps they’re worth highlighting too.

Yeah, Tech Sucks Now

Show someone an iPhone 16 Pro and an iPhone 12 Pro and they might not be able to tell the difference. In fact, I can’t if I can’t directly compare their camera bumps. Apple increases the size of the camera bump for the larger sensors because they haven’t been able to think of a unique design in a decade. But you’d never see phone manufacturers doing anything like that a decade ago. Four years with barely a change? Just one design across the entire platform? A single, repeated, boring, flat design that hasn’t changed in a decade? If it wasn’t the most iconic and advanced design at the time, you’d assume the company was dead. Designs changed, they grew, they answered consumer demand. Now? We get a faster phone that comes alongside an OS update that won’t make it feel any faster, but will make your old phone feel slower. Buy, buy, buy! If you don’t buy now, you’ll be crawling in the past with each update necessary for security, but crippling your device. You have to update, or you’ll be hacked. You have to buy, or you’ll be frustrated by slow speeds. You’re trapped!

TVs are bigger. Now they have ads. And unless you change your settings (and turn off motion smoothing), they may look worse than your old ones. And don’t get me started on how lousy “smart” features are. I turned the wifi on my TV off specifically so it wouldn’t load ads every time I booted it up and I could just get into what I was turning it on for, my Apple TV or my PS5. Batteries swell and ruin an entire device instead of being something you can swap out in 10 seconds. The logic board cracked, just buy a new one! You can’t even find better versions of old tech anymore! If you want a great cassette player, you have to buy an old one because the new ones are large, bulky, and have poor sound quality in comparison to something a few decades old. Tech lost its step. It’s just not as profitable to make good tech as it is to make devices that fall apart quickly.

Wherever you go, tech just isn’t interesting anymore. There’s nothing aspirational to it. You either get a new phone because your old one isn’t working, or you don’t. You keep your computer until it turns to dust. Why bother “upgrading” when the new devices don’t offer anything significant over the old ones? My MacBook’s from 2019, the last one that could take an eGPU and upgrades to make it last longer. It often outperforms my work computer, an M1 MacBook Pro from 2020. My iPhone is the iPhone 13 mini, the last one made for hands and pockets. Our tech just gets worse, why upgrade?

But Not All of It?

However, there are some nuggets in the sea of bland aluminum and glass. A few smaller device manufacturers have decided to make things that are unique, and, as a result, they’ve improved phones, gaming, and other areas in tech. Unfortunately, they’re so small, it can be hard to show them support. Maybe raising some awareness can change that.

It Just Clicks

What got me thinking about this post was a single product: the Clicks keyboard for the Razr Plus. If you haven’t looked into it, go ahead and do so now.

Cool, right? Maybe it’s not for you, but at the very least, you can admit that it’s unique.

The Motorola Razr Plus already is one of the few pieces of tech today that still turns heads. It’s something actually exciting and can improve how we use our phones. Being able to use the small outer screen as your whole phone? Genius. Finally something new. Well, it came out in 2023 and hasn’t seen significant changes or competition yet, also apps still have to catch up to the changing screen sizes, but… “new.”

But nothing made me feel the excitement there was around cellphones in the 2000’s like seeing a closed Razr Plus with a keyboard below it. That tall Blackberry form factor that also can fold out into a full phone if you want to watch a movie or see something in widescreen. It’s exactly what Blackberry would have needed to survive to modern day. It’s exactly what we need to bring back the physical keyboard that we all clearly want. You might not think you want it, but if you’re typing on your phone often, you probably curse out autocorrect twice a day. They took physical keyboards away not because they’re not useful, but because touchscreens were cheaper and they could sell larger screens as a feature that excuses a higher pricetag.

I used to work in an electronics store. I was around all the phones as they were at their peak level of cool. The phones the size of a lighter that flips out like a pocket knife? The square MP3 player phone that slides out to be a rectangle with a qwerty keyboard under it? The Sidekick? Razr? Walkman phones that were great MP3 players and had phone functionality when you slid them open. Amazing.

I had the era of peak cellphone excitement growing up. Now? I’m still rocking an iPhone 13 mini as my daily driver because Android is a privacy nightmare and the feel of the OS is still bad. The precision required for interactions, the lack of feeling consistency between apps, the way nothing is as reliable? Awful. But I could get used to that if they weren’t just data collection devices. I’d be using my Razr for more than app development if Android wasn’t such a poor competitor to iOS. And yet, the Clicks solution tempts me. But not enough to buy it because, I mean, Android’s awful. I’m still trapped by iOS. Stuck. Like everyone else.

For the first time in a long time, I’m excited for a phone evolution. The Clicks keyboard for the Razr Plus is an idea I hope carries over to future flip iPhones. Maybe it’ll be the future best phone experience. I’ll have to review it once I get mine because of course I preordered it. It’s the best thing to happen in phone tech in a decade or more. It’s a shame they never made Clicks for the iPhone 13 mini, because that would have been excellent too. Still, not as good as the Razr’s potential. I can’t wait to give that a try.

Make a Play Date with Playdate

I’ve already gushed in one post about the Playdate by Panic, but it deserves more time on your screen. The Playdate is a portable game console with a crank.

The Playdate gets games online via the Playdate Catalog or Itch.io. It comes with 24 free games, there are two free games on the Playdate Catalog, and plenty of others for free on Itch.io. Developers make incredibly unique games as well as retro classics.

The Playdate’s 1-bit screen looks great in even low light, the crank is a blast, and developers focus on one thing: making great games and apps. This is an indie gaming paradise, and if you’ve found most AAA game studios disappointing, it’s a great way to discover new indie favorites. Games made by people who really care about gaming, not about making a fortune.

I’ve had mine now for a little over a year and still carry it with me on trips. I often play a game or two during the day, and I’ll often pick up a new game during Catalog drops. It’s an exciting platform that takes all the good out of gaming and packs it in your pocket.

Honorable Mentions

CMF is a Nothing brand that makes lower cost electronics. They have headphones, a smart watch, and, more to the point, a phone. The CMF Phone 1 is a simple mid-range phone on paper. It has Nothing’s version of Android, which looks great. But what really makes it stand out is the fact that you can remove the back easily. Swap it out for different plates for colors, a battery pack, add a kickstand, and potentially more. There are already people making their own accessories that attach directly to the phone. 3D printing has allowed people to come up with an idea and make a completely custom phone thanks to it. It’s this level of enabling creators to make something unique that makes the CMF Phone exciting. It’s still just a standard glass touchscreen phone, but at least you can accessorize it. Nothing consistently turns out unique products, and the CMF Phone 1 is worth a shout-out.

Speaking of 3D printing, have you heard of Ploopy? They make one of my favorite pointing devices, the Ploopy Adept. It’s a trackball that comes in a variety of colors. If you don’t like the colors it comes with, Ploopy has made it easy to print your own. You can print out larger buttons, different shapes, different angles, whatever you want. Because Ploopy made the platform and open-sourced the designs. While mine isn’t really customized very much, I love that it’s open to it. It’s a fantastic trackball, one I’ll have to spend an entire article reviewing at some point. What makes it stand out is that it’s not made to be a product that’s sold and replaced. It’s made to be customizable and durable. It’s made to work for you. Not enough tech is made to last years and meet your needs.

I couldn’t mention exciting tech without mentioning the iPhone 13 mini. Now, it would have sold a lot better as an iPhone 13 Pro mini—or if Apple did any marketing for it—but, still, the iPhone 13 mini was the last iPhone I considered worth spending money on. It fits in a hand, in a pocket, feels great, and is just large enough to be useful. Unfortunately, Apple cancelled it. Some say it was due to low sales, but Apple abandoned it the moment they made it. My guess? It’s more due to the low margins. Apple sold it at too steep a discount because they didn’t think size alone would be a selling point. The effect was that consumers saw it as lesser, and Apple had smaller margins on it. Cancelling it was an easy choice, but failing to make the mini the right way was a mistake. I still say it’s Apple’s best iPhone, even as they try to slow it down.

Where Do We Go Now?

You don’t get to choose. Most of these companies have become so large, acquired all their competitors, and run so many services now that the actual tech they make doesn’t matter. You can’t compete with them. No one can. So they just churn out crap every year because they have to real reason to differentiate. But you can do something. A small act of rebellion. When you see something truly novel, something that changes how you think about a particular piece of tech, consider picking it up instead of something made by one of the larger tech companies. Reward innovation. If we don’t, there wont be any left.