The physical aspect of laptops - the old ThinkPads were fucking amazing and while their specs may not be much to look at today they were equipped with adequate cooling and could take a fair amount of beating.

I don't want a light thin laptop that I could snap in two with one hand... I want a laptop that isn't going to overheat and can survive a few tumbles when someone trips over the power cord.

Tupperware. Grandmas stuff is still around. It’s probably unhealthy to use but modern stuff doesn’t last.

Depending on your definition of 'better' . In terms of repair ability and ease of maintenance, pretty much all old tech. In terms of price... There is no chance, it's insane how cheap tech has gotten.

The power consumption of old stuff is also extremely bad compared to now. So yeh you can have fridges, washing machines, or whatever appliances from the 70's that still work and are easy to maintain.. They use way, way, way too much power for what they do. In an ideal world where energy is free, sure that stuff is better. We don't tho.

Also, basically everything that uses software while it shouldn't, has a worse user experience than before.

Connectivity or rather the lack of it...

I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don't know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor's to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn't disable that my TV doesn't even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn't even connected to the internet.

XMPP > Matrix | Slack | Telegram

Doorbells. I had to replace a relative's doorbell recently and the old one that lasted 60 years was built 10x better than the incredibly cheap model that all the hardware stores carry.

The options are either a cheapo doorbell that has an LED in it for no reason, a Ring surveillance doorbell, or a very expensive reproduction doorbell sold on some random website.

I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.

Dunno what kind of TVs you're using, but my Sony OLED pretty much behaves exactly like this. The Smart TV features are laggy and shit as usual, but those are still features that didn't exist in the old days so it's not a 1 to 1 comparison.

But with regards to just plugging in a blu ray or PS5 and hitting the input button, that's exactly how my modern TV works.

In fact, I don't even need to turn it on or hit the input button... Since they're both Sony, all I need to do is press the button on my PS5 controller and it turns on my TV and PS5 and switches to the correct input, without having to touch the remote. And vice versa (can turn on/off and control PS5 menus with the TV remote).

Printers

Just don't connect your TV to the internet and plug in a raspi. All the "smart" you could ever want without the bloat

Smart TVs and cae infotainnent systems, for sinilar reasons. Full of bloat, so many bugs and unreliable functioning.

Most electric appliances in the second version. Always some lock-in anti repair bullship.

Using a typewriter was a nightmare, but the keyboard feel was so satisfying.

Books and authorship in general. To make a living these days many feel pressured into using closed source corpo messaging systems like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc to promote some bs brand to sell books because the market is flooded with so much garbage from AI generated to auto translates to just poorly written unedited gibberish.