[alisonatwork]

I think it's the same reason why phones killed cameras and portable music players. It's neat to have dedicated devices that do one thing well. It's even neater to have one device that can do all the things. It's easier to transport, easier to store, easier to clean and so on. From a sustainability perspective it's probably also generating less waste, although I don't have enough knowledge in materials science to confirm that notion.

I sometimes wonder if this impulse is part of the appeal of LLMs for the people who use them for everything - not that they're actually better at anything, but just that they're kinda good enough at all of the things to make it easier to consult them than to consult dedicated sources of information.

[tetha]

Mh, this sparked an interesting thought.

For my phone, I'm happy, because it replaced about 6 things without losing much quality. I could get myself a better camera (my parents in fact have one). I in fact have a more compact and repairable MP3 player that runs off SD cards and batteries and it still works wonderfully. With the death of the 3.5mm audio port that thing can actually drive the good headphones better than my phone, heh. But that's just more stuff to lug around.

On the other hand, for my hobby music, I by now prefer single-purpose things. My audio interface has the job of digitalizing audio. These three pedals each have their own unique job and function, and I own them for that purpose. There is a bunch of very dedicated stuff around, a good tuner, a good metronome with googly eyes.

I'm kinda observing the same at work: Sometimes, I just want to get rid of a problem. Just throw a magic zero-config box at it and have it be gone. And in other contexts you want or need to have control over many parameters, and then having small, little single purpose things is very, very useful.

Some monitoring box very likely would want to err on the zero-config magic box I guess?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> It's neat to have dedicated devices that do one thing well. It's even neater to have one device that can do all the things.

... less well.

[pjerem]

In the meantime we’ve lost pretty much any innovation in the physical space.

I have a great illustration with a simple product I cannot find : a _modern_ … alarm clock.

I’ve been searching for the ultimate alarm clock in a while with the following list of must have :

- FM/AM and DAB+

- Decent sound/speaker

- Nice ringtones (with decent sound) and not just beep beep beep or a radio station …

- A brightness suitable for an alarm clock (that’s something we aren’t able to make anymore it seems or nobody cares anymore)

- Physical buttons that you can use in the dark

- Good build quality

And that’s all.

It’s not an unreasonable list of features. In fact, most alarm clocks on the market have most of those features, nothing in this list is exceptional. Yet, I totally fail to find one that have it all.

It just feels like objects are all the same now and that nobody cares.

Sure, you can use your smartphone as an alarm clock. But even if you wanted (I don’t) it doesn’t check all those requirements.

[ValentinPearce]

At this point I'd settle for one where the button on top just lights up the numbers without playing awful compressed babbling brook sounds at full volume.