Welcome back to another edition of Tech Nostalgia.
If you came here looking for a technical breakdown or a how-to guide, I suggest you quietly exit and check the next article – only on Medium.
@medium, love ya to death.
Now, if you’re still here, then you get it. You remember what it felt like to hold a device and think, this thing is mine. Not because it had your fingerprint on it, but because it responded – it pushed back. It clicked. It let you scroll with your thumb like a benevolent god surveying your kingdom.
Let’s talk about what we’ve lost. And what we’re pretending we haven’t.
Let’s start with the cold glass truth.
Today’s devices are all just… slabs. Palm-sized glass rectangles. Sensitive to touch, sure – but if the screen’s off, you’re talking to a brick. And if you’re a man of a certain age (read: pre-iPhone era), you know exactly what I mean.
Every device, no matter the brand or hype, looks the same. There’s no soul in it. No defiance. No hardware flirting with function. Just a glossy face waiting to be smudged and ignored.
And yeah, I know – all things change, we grow up, blah blah. But I don’t think it’s just nostalgia talking. I think a lot of us secretly miss the era when gadgets felt like gadgets. When using something meant you were doing something.
Let’s rewind. Not to the Stone Age – just post-Y2K.
Back then, tech came in flavors. You had categories. Specializations. Entire drawers filled with gear that felt like a Batman utility belt in early-2000s suburbia.
• The personal assistants (Palm, Sony Clie, Windows Pocket PC) that needed more help than they gave.
• The media gadgets – CD players with “anti-skip buffer memory” that gave you exactly 20 seconds of jogging before the beat dropped… literally.
• The remotes – a separate one for your TV, speaker, DVD, VHS, light dimmer, car, and possibly your blinds.
(Shoutout to Harmony remotes – you are missed.)
Everything had a form, a feel, a purpose. And when something beeped or clicked, you knew what you just did. Feedback. Resistance. Control.
Let’s talk about the BlackBerry.
If you’ve never punched out a message on that QWERTY keyboard and heard the faint “PING” of a BBM… I’m sorry. You missed something spiritual.
There was a power in those tools.
The kind of power that doesn’t just obey – it collaborates.
You didn’t hope it would respond. You knew it would.
Then came Apple. And yes, Steve – rest in peace – did do us a favor by putting the user at the center of product philosophy. But the product? The actual thing in your hand? It got flatter, smoother, more beautiful… and ultimately more passive.
Design became a game of minimalism, of stuffing more silicon into a sleeker shell. Of removing buttons, ports, haptics – anything that might make the device feel real.
And so, the great merging began. Devices combined. Functions collapsed into single screens. And we slowly accepted that one device that kind of does everything… doesn’t actually do any of it that well.
But then – a flicker of hope.
The foldable phone arrived. And I, like every tech-loving nerd with unresolved gadget trauma, felt something. I broke a sweat. I ordered immediately. I committed. Four models later, and I’ve returned, battle-scarred and broke – to report that the fold is not the second coming. It’s just more screen. More of the same. More surface. More flash.
It feels like innovation, but it behaves like stagnation.
And the thing that hurts most? It could’ve worked. But what we got was a heavier, more expensive, more fragile version of the same lifeless slab – now with a crease.
So where does that leave us?
Waiting, mostly.
Waiting for the return of gadgets that want to be touched.
Devices that challenge us a little. That reward curiosity.
That don’t require a full boot-up sequence just to remind you what time it is.
I’ll write more soon about gadgets that deserve your attention (whether or not they deserve your money is another story). But until then, I leave you with this:
We already lost a decade. A whole decade of no real evolution.
Of pretending consolidation is innovation.
Of pretending that 5-in-1 is better than 5 great things.
So, whether you agree or not, whether you shout “YES!” or angrily scroll away…
Just know that I’ll be here. Waiting for my next click.
Until the next one —
Dad, You Shrunk the World.
