this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Nobody wants to invest 2 months paycheck into hardware that the developer is going to drop support for in 6 months.
Hardware is too expensive for the average Joe to buy and those of us who can afford it are tired of being burned by companies that provide subpar service then drop support for the thing. Cool, bleeding edge tech means little if there is little use for it or if nobody can afford it.
On the nose.
I used to love the bleeding edge, then my father (retired engineer) enlightened me on why important (electro-mechanical stuff) runs on older, slower, (but insanely reliable) engineering.
It's that insanely reliable part. Kind of a hare vs the tortoise kind of thing. It's more important to be able to predict when the tortoise arrives, than to be unpredictable like the hare, even if the hare finishes first 90% of the time. That last ten percent could be a massive cost.
Look at the ECU in a car - over the 40 years I've been working on cars (and my brothers and friends), we've seen exactly ONE ECU failure, and we think that was caused by an external event (a voltage spike).
I've bought a few "new tech" solutions only to have the company disappear within a couple years. For example, software for replicating a Windows install that could then install on any computer, retaining all the config and software. It was intelligent enough to update drivers as needed. They were around for 2 years, and the license has to validate against their servers. Bastards. Lol. (I'm guessing Microsoft acquired them to keep people from using it).
There are free solutions that are open source, hell there’s older commercial solutions from Acronis and whatever Symantec calls Ghost these days. You made a poor choice in selecting a losing horse in a race that’s been run many times - how is that a reflection of the state of modern tech? You didn’t choose the Hare, you chose poorly.
The article and this discussion isn’t about reliable solutions vs new fangled stuff that doesn’t realise, it’s about what we do now that stuff realised and we didn’t think about what we signed up for. I’m really glad your dad encouraged you to think about the value of well-worn approaches but you’re being extremely reductive as are many in this discussion. What I find interesting about that is I feel this trend towards reductive thinking probably reflects a world seemingly happily with sliding the Overton window right inch by inch.