More of a pet peeve, but I thought IT would be way more stable by now. Everything has so many bugs and it's just accepted. I've grown pessimistic about new tech and I would prefer to wait a couple years before getting it. It's not novel if it's broken.
Side thought, I thought we would have hologram phone calls by now.
Phones that can be opened up and have internals replaced, like desktop computers
So like the Fairphone?
Computer phones. As in I just connect to screen and keyboard, and phone is my main desktop.
Cheaper EVs.
Working lab fusion.
Android 16 brings that desktop functionality
If its just for a productivity office type work, samsung phones can do this but it is account locked which is annoying
That's still weak compared to what a phone could really do though.
EVs are pretty cheap now. How cheap did you think?
As cheap as gasoline cars
Slightly cheaper than fuel by 10% for similar cars (including country of origin)
Compassion, empathy, socialism.
Those thin transparent screens you see in sci fi movies.
Ability to live in balance with the earth
Only after the nuclear winter
I definitely thought we’d have Ar glasses by now
this
Guillotines and a lineup of billionaires in straight jackets
Really fancy guillotines, with Internet Access, Bluetooth, and AI, of course.
"I'm Alan, your Virtual Execution Assistant. I can offer you a choice of a Last Cigarette, or Last Words, which would you like to choose?"
Hoverboards.
I think the self tightening shoes would have been doable. But we still didn't get those.
Nike actually did make those. they sell them.
I thought we would be able to redo our dna in adults using viruses or other vectors completely. Where we are now I thought we would be in like 2010. So we are making progress but I thought we would be farther along and genetic disease would be a thinf of the past.
Fusion lol.
Better space tech or at least a moon base.
Modular body parts like in cyberpunk
Technically we have modular body parts. They are pretty damn good too. Just not good enough that people would replace them because they are vetter.
LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.
It's 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments...
I understand that it's probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.
But it's still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.
From my experience, what tends to get messed up is the internal wiring. The actual leds will continue working fine, but cheap/shitty wiring will make the lamp stop working
Oh that's a fun one. Original incandescents lasted a very long time. Too long (over 10,000 hrs, and there are many examples of ones that have been lit for decades!). The various manufacturers actually conspired(spent a lot of money on research and development) to a 1,000 hr operational benchmark. Profits exploded.
This is common (engineered predictable fault.)
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