Filtered milk. Tastes the same as ordinary homogenized milk but double (or better) the shelf life. Very convenient if you only use small quantities at a time, e.g. for adding to tea.
Microfiber cloths. Much better cleaning than traditional cloths. In many cases all you need is water, or use them dry for dusting. Reusable too.
SSDs. In my opinion, the biggest computer upgrade in my lifetime. Access latency goes from obvious to imperceptible. A great many interactive tasks involve waiting for IO, and this is far more pleasant when you don't feel the delay.
Cheap but transparent audio DACs/amplifiers. This is essentially a solved problem at headphone power levels. Most modern designs have zero perceptible noise or distortion.
Good one. I more-or-less stopped caring about disk latency once I gotnmy first SSD - it was truly a marvel.
I had to look this one up. I don't think I've ever seen filtered milk in the US, but it looks like the ones sold here are specialty high protein/low lactose milks which I can't imagine tastes the same.
They also appear to expire 9-14 days after opening which doesn't seem all that different from other milk with practice?
Fairlife tastes excellent. I switched for the extra protein as I'm a bodybuilder. I bought the 3.25% fat version at first because I love the silky mouthfeel of a whole milk cappuccino. Then I found the 2% Fairlife satisfies in the same way as 3.25%, with less fat calories, and froths up beautifully in the pitcher.
> They also appear to expire 9-14 days after opening which doesn't seem all that different from other milk with practice?
Anecdotally I think it's better. I've never had to toss one (but they are half gallons) while I find myself tossing sour regular milk frequently.
I wouldn't want to drink ordinary milk after it's been open for 14 days.
The only thing that's come close to the "wow!" factor that SSDs invoked was the Apple M1. Many Windows laptops STILL haven't caught up to its performance, and I don't think ANY have caught up to its iPad-like battery life!
Laparoscopy, electric bikes, water bottle tech (steel vs soft plastic), audio & video editing/ CGI /etc (not sure what to call this one)
This one got much worse: now you have to install an app (fast food) and/or join a data-harvesting "loyalty program" (grocery stores, Target, others) to get what should be the normal menu prices instead of the batshit crazy list prices. This affects most of the same places that had coupons (plus, actually, there are still tons of coupons? I don't really understand this item)
Coupons are intended to compete for the business of price sensitive customers, and always have been.
On the other hand, the cluttered desktop does involve some nostalgia. The ergonomics of a desk phone were better than any smart phone or Teams app can provide, in terms of quickly making or answering a call. And long into the paperless era, I still keep pencils and scrap paper for quick sketches even though my work computer has a freakishly expensive Microsoft Visio on it and you can get adequate drawing software right in your web browser for nothing.
Simply not being reachable because you weren't near a known phone... that has its upsides and downsides. I'm not entirely sure that being on the "elecronic leash" 24/7 has made life better. Especially as I get older, I kind of miss the slower pace things used to have, where you walked over to someone's desk to ask questions, where "google" took the form of calling people or companies and asking (and they had knowledgeable people answering the phones, etc). The world functioned, and pretty well, back then too.
Most people's main "computer" these days is a smart phone with a similar price tag and a much shorter shelf live.
Even $1k smartphones would be a small part of the market; you're basically talking about things like the iPhone Pro, which is not the mainstream option.
But the dollars were ~twice as big ~30 years ago. A $1k pocket supercomputer today costs roughly half of what a $1k desktop PC did in 1995.
My phone is always on silent and I have almost zero notifications allowed. It has built in CallerID so I know exactly who is calling. Unless it's from a very small list of people it goes to voicemail and maybe I return the call later. Also many things that used to be calls are now a couple texts back and forth, again something I can ignore and deal with later.
I like being available but I have no need to be constantly interrupted by my phone. I much prefer my smartphone to landlines because the features are so much more useful to me.
It's a real blast from the past. I'd forgotten you used to be able to pay $7000 for a laptop, and $100 for a 10-megabit ethernet card.
Crazy how it's perfectly ok to use a computer from 2015 today. But it wasn't ok to use a computer from 1995 in 2005...
Reading through IBM computer brochures and fooling around with the desktops and laptops in our local Costco were favorite past-times of mine.
Cheap desktops existed but were universally terri-bad. Low spec Celeron processors with anemic memory and disk space. They _just barely_ ran Windows and ground to a halt after most users got done installing their IE toolbars and some form of Office. (Remember when Office Professional was EXPENSIVE?!)
Cheap laptops didn't exist before netbooks. Like, they just _weren't_ things.
You can get an M4 MacBook Air these days for $999. A laptop that can do just about anything, including and up to CAD and photoshop work, for at least $1000 (today's prices, NOT today's real prices) less than a middling Thinkpad 600 that had maybe three hours of battery life and was good enough for word docs but not much else.
But know what? Probably I'm happier living in 2020s. Technology allows me to watch more 80s movies that I would do if I lived in the 80s; it allows me to know more 80 bands than most of people who I know that actually lived in the 80s; I'm not restricted to watch only 80s movies or listen to 80s music, I have available everything from the 90s, 70s, 60s, 50s and so on; using a mechanical typewriter is fun but it might be a nightmare needing to use it. And so on.
In fact, I love the past because the present allows me.
The one line about the EU made me laugh though:
> EU: the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive
The fact that it just says this in passing from the perspective of a tourist and without any addendum like "And countless other improvements for Europeans brought about by EU regulation" makes me think of that famous New Yorker cover~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
So on the contrary, it seems to me listing "countless improvements for Europeans" as an everyday life improvement would be an extreme overstatement of the American (?) author's empathy, or perhaps a performative indication that they think about the lives of others even when explicitly trying to focus on themself.
I see that fact as more of an invitation to write your own. Do Europeans feel annoyed at the omissions of XYZ? Go right ahead and make your own! There's no patent on the idea of 'writing down a list of things that have gotten better'. I'm not going to sue you if you write down a list of ordinary things that have gotten nicer in the UK. In fact, I'd be happy to link it in the external links section if anyone makes a decent list for some other country in the same spirit. (I would prefer it not be tech-heavy, though. Things like "did you know PCs and smartphones also got really cheap in the Third World or the EU, and SSDs are pretty sweet compared to HDDs?" are not particularly interesting to anyone and do not need to be pointed out.)
- Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle.
- it’s surprising how cars in the 80s didn’t actually have cup holders. I always thought that was just a joke until I bought an 80s car and learned I’d need to buy the cup holders aftermarket
- frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables
- sugar free sodas
- Brussels Sprouts taste much better now: https://www.bhg.com/news/brussels-sprouts-less-bitter/
> - sugar free sodas
I am not convinced this was actually a good thing. After all these decades of studies in ever more obese human populations, it should not be this hard to find any benefits at all, and there should not be so many warning signs. You certainly can't see it in any obesity rates or soda tax results (or my relatives...), the experimental weight loss results have always been oddly unimpressive, and there are lots of concerning results about the effects on microbiomes (https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/microbiome/2022-suez.pdf) or on cardiovascular health (https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2024-witkowski.pdf https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10334259/), which is all very weird if they are 0 calories and don't affect insulin metabolism, as you would expect unambiguous, immediate, large benefits (contrast this with, say, GIP/G1P). So, maybe sugar-free will finally wind up being a wash or slightly beneficial, but it's not going into my list either way.
(Also, I eat mangoes and frozen vegetables and a little reluctantly eat nü brussel sprouts, but I don't drink soda, so it's against the spirit of my personal list to begin with.)
Not in the US, but _slightly_ sceptical of this one, because (a) I'm pretty sure that they were available in supermarkets _here_ (Ireland) in the 90s and (b) because there was a Seinfeld episode about them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mango - 1993, Kramer is banned from his favourite fruit store, is horrified at the suggestion that he buy supermarket mangoes).
> frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables
Again, we're talking the 90s, right? I'm pretty sure that had already happened; that'd be more 70s-80s.
In the 90s, American would've known that mangoes were a fruit and (probably) that they were orange. But they would not be in a standard grocery store. I suspect a big part of this was that for a long time the US banned mango imports from India, and that was lifted in 2007.
NYC is a bit different because it's much more multicultural and not really representative of the typical US experience. Plus, the fact that they had Kramer obsessing over mangoes was a bit of "he's a weird guy, of course he'd into a weird fruit". Living in the midwest, I think the first time I saw a mango for sale in a grocery store was probably ~2010.
re: frozen veg
they definitely existed in the 70s and 80s, but flash freezing technology has made them significantly higher quality in recent years and expanded the number/type of veg that you can find frozen. And on top of that, in the last decade has had the advent of 'steamer pouches' that make microwave cooking super-easy and they've really taken off in popularity.
Induction Stoves. We've switched to an induction stove and love it. We cook a lot and I'm fairly sensitive to gas. The air quality in the house is so much better after doing a lot of cooking, but also the second order effects. No more face and arms feeling singed after looking over 3 flame burners. No more sauces getting singed on the side of pots or pots being burned on the sides due to gas. No more concern over draping clothing or hair singing. Fast heating times and a cooktop that doesn't stay hot for too long after you remove the pot.
More stuff I'd like to see on the list:
Digital Photography and Videography. Now a single person or a few people can do what used to take an entire staff to do. Short films and CGI are viable with just a few people. A photographer can take pictures of events that used to take studios with photo lighting to handle.
Disagreements with the list:
Ubiquitous HVAC use is more of a curse than a blessing. Ubiquitous HVAC has led to badly ventilated, badly designed apartments/houses that need constant HVAC usage to even be moderately livable. Central HVACs also often cannot deal with hot/cold areas in the house. Awareness is growing over the need for clean indoor air and that people enjoy air CFMs higher than most guidelines purport. Along with growing use of mini-split HVACs, ERVs and HRVs, this is a great direction. But too many cheap homes throughout the world are designed only around blind central or single unit HVAC use and that is just bad IMO.
This was one of the first appliances I got after buying a house. I LOVE using it. No fume, no waste heat, and, most importantly, I never have to worry about the range being left on by accident ever again! The cooktops won't turn on if there isn't a ferromagnetic surface on top, but even if they somehow did, the glass cooktop is cool to the touch.
Between this and our heat-pump dryer, I wish I could remove gas in our house for good. Unfortunately, gas furnaces are still much better than heat-pump options.
There are a few downsides to that but it's a hell of a lot more convenient! As a kid in the 70s/80s any battery powered toy spent most of it's life unpowered and useless (except coin-cell powered LCD devices which always seemed to be immortal)
I lived across the atlantic for many years, and was able to call with people important to me every day, for free, even with video.
Further, I can have a cultural exchange and shared cultural reference points with billions of people across the planet.
That said, people still use calling cards to save money on international calls!
- Neural Machine Translation
- English as the lingua franca
This one is kinda life changing if your life isn't ruined by getting caught with a joint.
They don't really cover it, but one literally life changing one has been medicine; a lot of things that were a death sentence (and often a very nasty, slow, painful one) in the 90s are now quite treatable. Particularly cancers, but also there've been big improvements in cardiac treatment, and the treatment of certain diseases (particularly HIV).
…not making a dozen phone calls playing Phone Tag, to set up something as simple as a play date
Well this is why hardly anyone was bothering with setting up play dates back in the day† and were letting kids roam. Different culture facilitated by poor connectivity and scarcity of content.
† The title says the 90s but many references in the text go back to 1980s.
Now, someone will plan a birthday party or something, the kid will invite 15 other kids from school, and it's not unheard of that only one or even zero people actually come. You also see adults doing this. Totally flaking out and not showing up, with not even a call or text in explanation! Culturally that would have been an outrage back in 1980.
Adults didn't have to manage our time and friendships.
Browsing through a collection at the library or a friends house, it’s shocking how quickly you find that people will converge on “oh, let’s watch this!” rather than endlessly scrolling through thumbnails and previews on Netflix and never committing
We do this because of the very effect you mention: otherwise, we'll burn enough time to watch a good chunk of a movie, just scrolling.
But something that I miss is just findings something at random. Lots of movies and bands that I like would never be recommended to me by those algorithms.
Ordering a mattress online is great, though.
I can't think of any major city in the US, at least, where that isn't true.
But like, if having a car is so terrible - why not migrate to an ebike?
Edit: showing my age, cos that's 80s, not 90s. In fact I think pressure cookers got popular in the mid 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Tomorrow_(1949_fi...
McDonald's coffee is no more safe today than it was in the 90s. The temperature is the same and the cups are largely the same. What's safer now is that most cars have cupholers, so people aren't holding their coffee cups between their legs to try and get the lid off in order to add cream.
They and other coffee vendors still get sued semi-regularly for burns though.
Which, as many things in modern cars, can be a good or bad thing, depending on context.
This is exactly right. So many "improvements" are cool or interesting, but either provide no meaningful improvement to one's life (e.g. streaming vs. VHS) or actually detract from our lives on balance, e.g. smartphones.
Streaming TV shows means I can watch them at a convenient time for me, pausing at leisure, not having to waste time on adverts. In practice this means my wife and I can work through series 45 minutes a night, perhaps only one or two nights a week at whatever time it happens to be after kids are down.
Smartphones can be used in unhealthy ways for sure, but they are almost unreal when you consider how things have changed in the last few decades (looking at my own time):
90s: Shared house lines were the norm, long distance calls expensive-ish, international definitely.
Early 2000s: Personal cellphones pretty common.
Mid 2000s: Home VoIP becoming accessible through Skype, but not mainstream, generally requires a full PC, inconvenient, either for computer enthusiasts or family wanting to do free overseas calls. You would have to hope or arrange other person to be online with Skype at the same time.
Late 2000s: Smartphones are a thing, voip from your pocket is finally accessible, not everyone has smartphones yet, but you can use Skype credit to call anyone in the world at a reasonable cost.
Mid 2010s: smartphones are pretty much ubiquitous, FaceTime (and later equivalent on WhatsApp) mean that you can now talk to almost anyone with very high quality video anywhere in the world basically for free.
What does this mean for me? I regularly FaceTime my parents completely casually with my young children, sometimes just before sleep or in the afternoon or whenever, no ceremony or hassle.
My wife’s sister moved to New Zealand (we live in South Africa) 7 years ago and they FaceTime more than once a week on average with nieces and nephews.
I lived in Europe from 2006 to 2012, and I wish I had in 2006 what I have now in smartphones, maps for most everywhere always available), translation tools always available.
Having experienced the advent of cellphones in my lifetime, they are almost unbelievable to someone who grew up with the full sized PCs which were a lot less capable than a device which now fits in my hand.
> I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpeners
I store these things on the shelf near the desk, rather than on the desk itself, but I still use them often enough.
> hotels and restaurants provide Public Internet Access by default
Nevertheless there are commonly problems with them, although what these problems are differs in different places.
> USB cables mean that for connecting or recharging
I think there are many problems with USB, including security issues and many others. I also think that it is better to have addressing by where they are connected to, and for charging to be done independently from data connection (although there are times where you want them together and this is useful, but the way it is done makes it difficult to separate them).
Having only a few different plugs is helpful, but it would be more helpful if these were better plugs rather than the worse ones.
> Software Patents have been expiring (eg. GIF, arithmetic coding, MP3)
I think patents are no good in general, but nevertheless it helps that they have expired.
> everything is available Subtitled, not just TV
This is good. Subtitles and captions are not only useful for hearing impaired but for anyone. Accessibility features in general can be useful for anyone.
> RAM: programmers able to assume users have 4GB RAM rather than 4MB RAM
Having more RAM is helpful. But, it is still a good idea to write programs that do not require so much RAM (or so much disk space), though. Unfortunately, too many modern programs do use more RAM and disk space than they should need to do.
> all cars have electrified Power Windows; I don’t remember the last time I had to physically crank down a car window
I prefer the manual windows; they work even if the car is off or doesn't work.
> LED lights are more energy-efficient, cooler & safer, smaller, turn on faster, last longer, and are brighter than incandescents or fluorescents
I think they are too bright and wrong colour and other problems. I like incandescent for general purpose lighting. (LEDs are still useful for some indicator lights and that stuff, but even then too often they have blue lights when other colours would do better.)
> the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive
Although it does not affect me, I know some people who have been to Europe and believe that the older way is better.
> Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not and probably will not be indefinitely extended again to eternity to protect properties like Mickey Mouse or Sherlock Holmes
It is good that they have done this allowing them to be public domain, although I think it needs to be rollback even more.
> Low-Flow Toilets
I had read a article in 2600 where someone modified a toilet with 6 lpf, but they needed to flush twice to work, so they changed it so that it will be 10 lpf. Making it 10 lpf will save water then, compared to the 12 that was needed before, isn't it?
> most programs have a usable FLOSS equivalent and in some areas FLOSS is taken so for granted
In some cases they didn't but I and others have written some (e.g. Free Hero Mesh, which is a clone of Everett Kaser's MESH:Hero game, and I think it is much better than the original). However, often the FLOSS equivalent still has some problems (often failure to support non-Unicode text properly, but others are common as well); but they also often have many improvements than other programs as well.
> There are not many things in food that have gotten worse, and most have gotten better
Well, also often many items have been discontinued even if they were of a good quality.
