>My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention.
That's not a good example, nor is it parallel to the dynamic the article describes.
Your car stinks a lot less than cars did 10/30/50 years ago (emits less in the way of pollutants or CO2 per mile driven), is less likely to kill you in a crash involving the same size cars/velocities (despite weighing less!), needs less maintenance, lasts longer, and can notify you of potential collisions and sometimes avoid them.
It's probably only worse in terms of education needed to perform maintenance or nominal sticker price.
But devices have also gotten smaller, lighter and more efficient, and software can also do much more today than it could a long time ago. I think the analogy is fine.
When the analogy was built off of saying that saying that cars are bad my metric X, when the claim was that software has gotten worse by metric X, and cars have actually gotten better my metric X, no, it's not a good analogy.
And yes, there are some ways in which hardware has improved. But the claim is that, judged by what you're using it for, most UX-apparent aspects have gotten worse. Is there a clear way this is wrong? If you look at most UX-apparent metrics, it hasn't. Latency from keystroke to character render has gotten worse. App start time has gotten worse. Lots of other latencies have gotten worse.
None of the nightmares described in the article were typical of software UX.
These would be arguably fine if the additional features you get were a necessary cost, but they're not.
I'm also not sure that devices have gotten more efficient in all respects. Each version of iOS gets more energy-intensive, for example.
> Latency from keystroke to character render has gotten worse. App start time has gotten worse. Lots of other latencies have gotten worse.
Do you have sources for this? I mean, I'm not sure there aren't rose-tinted glasses here.
> These would be arguably fine if the additional features you get were a necessary cost, but they're not.
> Each version of iOS gets more energy-intensive, for example.
I would argue that multitasking, camera postprocessing, widgets, background app refresh, and others are all features worthy of more resource usage. Many of those are things you can choose not to use if you want to save power.
>I would argue that multitasking, camera postprocessing, widgets, background app refresh, and others are all features worthy of more resource usage. Many of those are things you can choose not to use if you want to save power.
For all those features turned off (before and after), the usage increases with each version.
That's not a good example, nor is it parallel to the dynamic the article describes.
Your car stinks a lot less than cars did 10/30/50 years ago (emits less in the way of pollutants or CO2 per mile driven), is less likely to kill you in a crash involving the same size cars/velocities (despite weighing less!), needs less maintenance, lasts longer, and can notify you of potential collisions and sometimes avoid them.
It's probably only worse in terms of education needed to perform maintenance or nominal sticker price.