Dave Lee

Everything tagged #tech

On the day SpaceX overtook Amazon's market cap, this (funny) post on everyday tech gripes winds its way to a serious conclusion that helps frame this next phase of even bigger Big Tech:

Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech · theringer.comThe bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can't escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI

techaithe ringer

Second-hand iPods

The iPod is back, writes Ludovic Hunter-Tilney:

Like the control dial on an iPod Classic, making satisfyingly clicky sounds as you scroll songs, what goes around comes around. Apple’s pioneering series of MP3 players, launched in 2001 and shuttered in 2022, is making a comeback. Searches for versions of the iPod Classic on eBay rose by a quarter during the first 10 months of 2025, while those for its diminutive younger sibling, the iPod Nano, were up by a fifth. 

Those hunting for second-hand iPods in digital bazaars aren’t original owners like me. Instead, it’s Gen Z. Reasons include nostalgia for the Y2K era of their upbringing and the iPod’s alluring retrofuturist design, especially the chunky Classic, supposedly inspired by a 1950s Braun radio. But the main motive appears to be a backlash against the manipulative device that put paid to the iPod.

That device, of course, was the smartphone. Hunter-Tilney says this trend is about Gen Z eschewing the "dragnet" of more modern devices. I think it's something a little more straightforward: an aesthetic. The two ideas are related, though -- the aesthetic is simplicity, focus, calm. And I like it. Problem is...

MP3 players need downloaded songs. Last year, downloaded albums fell by almost 16 per cent in the US. That doesn’t tally with a switch away from streaming music on smartphones. But — and here I cast no aspersion on the new set of vintage iPod owners, who I have no doubt are fine upstanding citizens — a rise in music piracy does.

Of course, for the full Y2K experience, today's kids should be forced to wait 20 minutes to download a song they want, only to discover the file is something else entirely. Happy days.

Update: Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who helped create the original iPod, has offered his view on why it's back in fashion:

techbyothers