Seems like you don't remember email on your PC.

> Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all.

Seems like you don't remember Napster either. Where were you in the decade 1995–2005?

Seems like you don't remember email on your PC.

Or simply sms without autocorrect. OP has a point, but this indeed is a bad example. As far as I can see autocorrect for messaging being wrong didn't replace anything, it's something new which just doesn't always work properly. Which is exactly the point of the article.

Not that I'm too happy with it: for some reason my SwiftKey's gesture-recognizing algorithm seems to be getting worse over time, while next-word prediction becomes better.

The golden age of digital music ended in 2016 with the death of what.cd

But this is very much an example of the author's point.

Without researching it yet, I bet you can find simpler, better designed bathtub and shower controls from the 1930s with better usability than what we find today.

We have an old oven in our basement, and our current upstairs oven broke recently. It was very pleasant to have a single, analog nob I just had to turn to "400" to start the oven heating to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The new oven has a numeric keypad, and requires finding the "bake" button in the matrix of identically shaped buttons.

If you imagine the modern version being invented first, the nob version could be marketed with a Johnny Ive style video talking about the relentless focus of simplicity and usability of this innovative new design!

For some reason, the style fell out of favor. Not even to high-tech showers, just to single axis systems which blast water at high heat and trickle it for cold.

This sort of thing really is a usability failure, providing a slightly cheaper and simpler product for the median consumer while harming anyone with vaguely non-standard intentions.