Technology we hate with a passion

They used to be not so horrible -- 30 or 40 years ago. Prior to WYSIWYG and wireless computing, they usually just worked when you plugged them in and sent a job to them.

Businesses and end-users are finding fewer reasons for having hard copy. But today's printer devices are so complicated, including their support software, it makes it often a frustrating and self-defeating experience on the rare occasion you need to get a printout, scan, or fax with one of these things. And it doesn't seem to matter if you are dealing with a $50 inkjet or a $4,000 workgroup color laser.

Whether it is the bloated and buggy driver software, badly implemented firmware, expensive and proprietary refill cartridges, constant jams, or unhelpful error messages, printers just plain suck.

iTunes. Why must we continue to be saddled with this utterly awful, legacyware piece of trash? Bloated and buggy, this remains the only way to access and archive your music library if you've bought into Apple's music and device ecosystem. It's also the only way to back up your iOS devices apps and settings or restore them as well without paying Apple extra money for iCloud space, so unless you are committed to hard resets we're all stuck with this thing. It needs a total rewrite, or a distributed cloud services replacement.

It doesn't matter if your car is made by Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, Honda, or one of their premium brands -- built-in automobile navigation systems are crummy. Not only are they outrageously expensive options (which you are usually forced into buying if you want a particular vehicle trim), but they are expensive to update and have complicated user interfaces that are frustratingly difficult and slow to use. They are so awful that many drivers opt just to use their smartphones for navigation, using apps like Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps instead.

Some companies such as General Motors are now offering in-car entertainment systems that support Apple's CarPlay and Android Auto. But if you own an older vehicle, you can't update these cars to accommodate this software unless you replace the entire AV stack -- which may not be possible on your car.

Wi-Fi -- can't live without it. And as our homes and lives become more and more connected, integrating Wi-Fi with just about everything seems to be a curse we are all going to have to live with.

But how many of these Wi-Fi devices behave properly and stay reliably connected? How often do we find ourselves plugging and unplugging to "reboot" some of the simplest devices to make them work again? Or constant firmware updates to keep them from disconnecting? When does this end?

We hate badly implemented wireless stuff, but we may hate bad cables even more. Whether it is flimsy connectors like USB Micro-B or TOSLink with the fragile "doors" or easily-frayed/destroyed-with-regular-use, overpriced Apple OEM Lightning cables or the cheap power "bricks" that every router or set-top manufacturer bundles with their product that takes up more than one power receptacle on a strip (rather than supplying one that has a simple cord with the brick in the middle), we are utterly plagued by these things. And they go bad at the worst possible time, too, requiring us to always carry spares.

With the rising popularity of connected devices, we also find ourselves with the ever-increasing piles of e-waste that litter our cities because we have no easy way to reclaim the components or dispose of them efficiently. How many of your devices do you really think are going to last more than a few years before they either go bad, the manufacturer abandons and stops supporting them, or some kind of incompatibility is introduced into your environment because an integration standard isn't being followed? Maybe it's just plain stupid to rely on smart devices.

A device or application can have the best usability and utility objectives, but if the manufacturer phoned it in on the user experience, it ruins the entire product. Confusing web UIs or flaky, unreliable configuration apps are enough to make you want to discard a device or product entirely.

VOIP and video conferencing is a double-edged sword. It enables remote work like never before, but it also comes with tremendous frustration by forcing people to attend conference calls with technologies that are really ill-equipped to handle the strain of variable remote bandwidth as well as over-capacity hosting environments. Ever since we moved to digital multiplexing sound quality has reduced dramatically, especially when video is introduced or when used over a wireless connection. Echoes, stuttering, voice interruptions, frequent disconnects, frustrating key codes: Welcome to the modern workplace.

If you have to introduce a proprietary standard because that is the only way you can introduce value or differentiate with your product -- you're doing it wrong. You are doing everything wrong.

Apple is one of the companies that is notorious for doing this, but it's not the only one. Sony, Keurig, Nespresso, all the inkjet printer companies, and anyone who makes "refills" or accessory connectors or specialized file formats or any technology that attempts to validate a connector or add-on or consumable as coming from the originating manufacturer: You suck.

What is worse than spending $500 on a flagship-class Android handset, only to find out that the next version of Google's mobile OS either isn't supported on it, or the OEM just plain refuses to update it in a timely fashion?

Mobile OS-wars aside this has to be one of the worst aspects of Android. Sure, you could make the argument that the OSS community can always take up the slack if you "root" your device, but how many people really are going to go through the trouble to do that? And you could brick your device in the process, with no manufacturer recourse if you do. Sure, you could buy a Pixel, which guarantees direct updates from Google, but you are also going to pay a heck of a premium for one, which kind of defeats the purpose of going with the Android platform.

At first, voice-enabled tech was an interesting novelty. Now, it seems all of our devices, not just our smartphones, are getting it -- whether we like it or not.

When the technology works, it's fantastic. But more often than not, the assistants have problems understanding us or have connectivity issues to their cloud processing centers, rendering them useless.

We've now been reduced to a bunch of screaming lunatics oft-repeating ourselves by telling a cylindrical-shaped speaker, which is always listening for that creepy wake word to turn off the lights.

Nothing is worse than solutions without a problem that don't actually work as designed. Near-field Communications (NFC) is one of those promises of mobile technology that never actually achieved what it set out to do, and it doesn't actually improve on the experience it was meant to replace.

Put a thick case on your smartphone, and NFC data transfer doesn't work. Update your Android, NFC doesn't work. Have your settings wrong, and NFC doesn't work. Attempt to transfer anything between different mobile platforms, NFC doesn't work.

Try to use an e-wallet standard at a store that uses a different one, NFC doesn't work.

"We don't support Apple Pay"

"We don't support Google Wallet"

"We didn't enable the terminals for this yet, even though we've had them installed for a year"

"Oh, sorry. We have our own app. You should sign up for it and get rewards!"

Why is this preferable to using a credit card, exactly?

Apple is largely to blame for this trend, ever since the first iPhone was introduced -- but virtually all the mobile device manufacturers have now followed suit. As my grandmother used to say, just because everyone else is jumping off a bridge, doesn't mean you have to as well.

Yes, we want our smartphones to be sleeker and lighter -- but not having field replaceable batteries is a tremendous hassle, requiring people to carry huge supplemental battery bricks to augment the daily charge routine or worse, having to visit your wireless telco provider to replace or repair the phone for what should be a fairly simple process. And it is increasingly frustrating to see that these integrated, non-removable batteries are not holding their charge only a few months after the device purchase, even from premium device manufacturers like Apple and Samsung. And this isn't just limited to smartphones -- tablets and laptops are now unfixable, too.

With the "appification" of our lives comes the nonstop intrusion of notifications across every single device we use. Whether it's that silly game you only play once a month, Facebook updates, sale deals from the local grocer, or reminders from your operating system software vendor's update notification service, it seems like we are constantly being prodded and peppered with these requests to inform us about what seems like minutiae. And we can't just turn all of them off; we have to individually set each app to not bother us. It seems like we have to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping our devices and apps from irritating and distracting us than actually using them for what they are designed for.

We get it -- millennials love to text, and now, every generation seems to be catching the disease by sheer association with them. There's no escaping it if you have a teenager, or work with 20- or 30-somethings. Don't call. They don't want to hear your voice because the very thought of interacting with you in such a personal way scares the hell out of them.

Many articles have been written about the perils of this particular communication medium -- how it has destroyed face-to-face communication and vocal conversation, how it distracts from the important aspects of day to day life, etc.

All those aside, text -- as it is implemented using SMS on smartphones -- stinks because, unless you use a service like Google Voice or use a third-party app like Facebook Messenger, you can't retrieve and respond to your messages across all your devices. But even so, you have to contend with the dreaded "autocorrect" because of the oh-so-helpful text prediction algorithtms these apps use.

How many ducking times do I have to tell you ice holes, I want to speak on the phone?

We've all had this happen to us: You click on a link that brings you to a news or other content site using your smartphone or tablet, then you see the first few lines of text -- which are immediately obscured by a full-page Javascript ad splash that clearly was designed for a PC, not a mobile device -- and it makes you wait 15 seconds before you can return to the content. Worse, the script is so badly implemented you can't click the ad away. It makes you want to scream.

Please make these go away.

Passwords are a necessary evil in computer security -- and they require at least some level of complexity to be effective.

But we all know that website or corporate application that makes you change your password every 30 days, which has to be 10 characters long, mixed case, with at least one numeric and a non-alphanumeric character, and cannot have any characters or word combinations from your 10 last previous passwords.

Oh, and yeah, you need to do this for multiple sites, not just for one major authentication mechanism.

The guidelines for these passwords -- published in the National Institute of Standards -- have been around for 14 years. But the original creator of those standards, Bill Burr, now totally regrets writing those recommendations, because they cause more trouble than they are worth.

First they make you register to a content site by having you create a password and fill out personal information. That's bad enough.

Then they make you use this ridiculous technology to make you prove you're human, which would be fine if you could actually read the damn text or image they are showing you. But instead you find yourself squinting and cursing under your breath by the tenth time you've had that page refreshed so you can try and try again.

This is not enabling technology. This is sadism.

When did these things become the preferred method of content generation and presentation for every news and entertainment website imaginable? What happened to long form articles?

Oh yeah. Squirrel.

Look, we understand why in this day in age publications need eyeballs, and that the key performance indicator for drawing ad revenue is page views. We get it. We engage in it ourselves. You're reading one of these damned things right now.

But if you're going to do a web gallery/slide show, at least have the slides deliver some decent content. If you only have a hundred words of content, it doesn't need 37 slides, dammit!