You don't need tin foil hat when facing the truth :).

Also, while things you mentioned aren't software-related, they're modern tech-related. Like, last 20 years. Fridge motors dry out because they're being made cheaper, with not enough lubricant put into them and no option of opening them up and pouring in the grease. Touch panels are going on the fritz because touch panels suck (that's often very much software), and they shouldn't be put on appliances in the first place. But it's cheaper, so they are.

Worth noting that there wasn't some big price reduction happening from solid appliances 20 years ago to crappy ones today. Price remained roughly fixed, but appliances started to suck more and more.

The big deal, at first, was really with memory. Your alarm clock could ring at the same time reliably. If you invested in a VCR, it could record at a programmed time. If you had a synthesizer it could store and recall exact preprogrammed patches. Pinball machines could downsize in weight and keep truly accurate scores instead of relying on tempermental relays and score reels. And so on, with every category of gadgets getting the computerization treatment. Although not everything succeeded there were lots of straightforward cost and quality improvements, with the main downside being that IC designs are less obviously repairable.

And then pretty much every year afterward, the push was towards cheaper with more software, with decreasing margins of real improvement, with the "smart" device representing an endpoint where the product is often price discounted because its networking capability lets it collect and sell data.

What comes to mind is the Rube Goldberg machines and their expression of a past era of exuberant invention, where physical machines were becoming increasingly intricate in ways not entirely practical. Our software is kind of like that.

Every other week I read about someone's entirely-too-roundabout way of doing X via an IoT device (requiring packets to probably circumnavigate the globe). Meanwhile I'm sitting here opening my garage door with a physically wired switch like a pleb.

I just checked my fridge, it has six buttons and an LCD panel, and in all my (4) years of home ownership, I haven't touched the buttons a single time.

First, the "solid appliances" weren't 20 years ago, but more like 25-30.

And though there wasn't a big price reduction in the interim:

- Refrigerators are more energy efficient.

- Refrigerators have larger internal volume for a given size.

Equivalent improvements have been made to other appliance types such as washers and dryers, but not stoves, as far as I know.

Those improvements are largely orthogonal to declining design and build quality, but it should be noted that there are at least some ways in which newer appliances have been getting better (that aren't just gimmicky features) while prices remained the same.

Conveniently, because macos is ass, it's nondeterministic whether the balance controls display in Sound Preferences to fix the balance issue. You just have to open and close the settings panel in the hopes that it will display.

I'm a software engineer and I don't even know where to begin to debug this idiocy.

Duolingo regularly freezes audio in chrome. Once this happens, no audio will play in chrome until you restart or kill "Utility: Audio Service" with the chrome task manager.

That blew my mind, my $20 Amazon-purchased Bluetooth earphones just work™ with no delay.