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So often, the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park ring true, where engineers and product managers are too preoccupied “with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Someone asked “What was the biggest downgrade in recent memory that was pitched like it was an upgrade?” and people shared the worst examples. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote your favorites, and share your thoughts in the comments. If you want to see more terrible changes and updates, check out our article on bad redesigns.
Image credits: Popular-Recover8880
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#1
Getting rid of headphone jacks on phones. Getting rid of external SD cards on phones. Getting rid of replaceable batteries on phones. Smartphones used to be a lot better in so many ways.
Denise Melek 9 months ago
I only buy phones with headphone jacks. They exist. You don't have to buy an iPhone. If I travel a long time sitting, with cable you are on the better side.
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#2
“Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,”
F**K YOU AMAZON.
Denise Melek 9 months ago
I think with streaming services doing this and raising their prices, the old fashioned ways of streaming will increase again ;)
#3
The change of some products, especially software, from a "you buy it, you own it" to subscription based models, where you lose access once the subscription ends.
Will Cable 9 months ago
They seem to think we'll all carry on subscribing..well if anyone from one of these companies is reading this, WE WONT.
While many of the ideas here were at least pitched as “improvements” it doesn’t take an expert to see just how many problems might arise. Indeed, the classic example of a subscription-based model over just owning the item was almost immediately bemoaned in its time. Now, for better or worse, it’s the norm.
The truth is, when it comes to making money, companies can be pretty unscrupulous about worsening the products we have grown to love. In the past, they may have attempted to swing it using marketing and pitching it like a new feature. Now, some companies will instead hide the corners they have cut. This is most visible through what some economists call “shrinkflation".
#4
All these smart appliances. I don’t see the use in these washers and refrigerators with touch screens and internet connectivity. They have so many points of failure. Just give me a bare bones fridge that will last longer than me.
#5
Touch buttons replacing physical buttons. Especially in cars.
Milady Blue 9 months ago
All the complaints about the dangers of distracted driving, and the manufacturers decide to put in a system that is inefficient and distracting. Touch screens and I do NOT get along.
#6
Tipping culture in US post-COVID. I can't even buy a coffee without being requested to tip. F**k off.
While it might sound paradoxical, after all, to inflate literally means to expand, shrinkflation covers how inflation has caused many companies, primarily GMCG providers, to “shrink” their offerings. The real issue isn’t your money no longer going as far, that is a sad, yet “normal” part of inflation. Instead, unlike the supposed “upgrades” here, which at least had some marketing behind them, shrinkflation tends to be done in secret.
#7
The use of QR codes at some restaurants instead of a physical menu.
#8
Customer service and communication with companies and general. Everything is now an app, a faq or a robot. I've seen commercials presenting this as a good thing claiming it's so easy to get an answer to your questions where in reality if you don't have a standard question you're screwed as no one any longer lists their phone number. Most large companies are impossible to contact.
Molly Whuppie 9 months ago
This. So much. I tried to contact a courier once, because my package wasn't delivered. Rang the phone number, got an automated message that told me to go to the website and fill in a form. I do that, and I get an email telling me to click a link and use the chat bot. Clicked the link which just too me back to the website but with a chat bot now active, then broke my brain trying to talk to it. I must have confused it because it ended in the bot telling me I had to ring the phone number to speak someone about my issue. It was the same number I rang to begin with.
#9
The removal of disc drives in laptops. Sure, the laptop is thinner and lighter now, but I can't use any of my CDs or DVDs anymore.
For better or worse, companies might have made the correct strategic choice. With higher production costs, they could either charge more or shrink the actual item. People tend to not like paying more for the same thing, so they will happily stop buying it. Unfortunately, this does mean that more often than not, the infuriating “half-empty chip bag” issue now applies to everything from chocolate to pasta.
#10
Streaming.
You buy a movie. Bu you don't own it. They can take it away from you at any time, but they charge you the same. Total rip off and should be illegal.
#11
My pay rise that is well below inflation.
Upstaged75 9 months ago
Yeah my company told us they would be giving out a maximum of 3% raises last year - they presented it like it was a great thing they were doing. No one was amused when I pointed out that 3% didn't even cover a cost of living increase.
#12
Windows... F*****g... 11. It's not an upgrade, it's a side grade at best.
The worst part about this is that an unwary consumer might end up spending money and getting a lot less than they bargained for. Your daily trip to the grocery store is probably where this is most apparent, but it can happen when renovating a home or just signing up for some software. The only solution, as hard as it can be to accept, is to vote with one’s wallet.
#13
Hewlett Packard added "anti-hacking safety features" to all their ink cartridges, to guard against the risk of people having their computers hacked by counterfeit ink cartridges (WTF?).
Of course, an unfortunate side effect of that new safety measure is that you can't use any ink cartridge from any supplier other than HP in your printer. But that's a sacrifice they had to make in the name of cyber security.
Like, seriously, I was getting YouTube ads for months in which HP were trying to sell this "feature" as a positive. I don't know how people can sleep at night selling such an outright and obvious lie.
#15
The privatization of public infrastructure in most countries.
Which is almost always pitched as "You will get a better service, and we will get more funding for schools and so on".
What actully happens? Some business owner takes over and runs the service into the ground, only to get bailed out by the government.
#16
Food delivery. Pre pandemic (and pre Just Eat/Uber Eats) restaurants and takeaways would routinely offer totally free delivery over a certain amount, unless you were a fair distance away, and major pizza chains especially never charged for delivery if you were in their catchment areas. Now you need to pay increasingly large delivery fees no matter the distance. My local Pizza Hut started charging £3 - £4 for delivery, stating on their website; "in order to enhance your experience, we are excited to announce deliveries will now cost blah blah blah" or some such marketing bollocks. In addition the roads and pavements are now plagued by s******l bike coureers who have no idea how roads work.
Zedrapazia 9 months ago
I find this one a bit odd. At least where I'm from delivery was never free and always measured by how far the delivery driver that brought my food had to drive. Plus, bicycles make less CO2 than cars (if any at all) so it's good for the environment.
#17
Streaming platforms going subscription + ads, lets just combine the old with the new model and do em both worse! hooray
#20
Electric cars. They’re being marketed as a solution to the issue we face with fuel and they really aren’t. They simply open up a whole new bag of problems.
Hans Georg 9 months ago
Electric cars are not the problem. Batteries are. Hydrogen fuel cells are the solution.
#21
Netflix ditching the star rating for a simple thumb up thumb down system. I stumbled across so many awesome things to watch purely because user rating was so high
Zedrapazia 9 months ago
I really don't understand why this feature got removed. Wouldn't it tell Netflix too what shows would be most profitable to continue with another season? ... Or were they seriously so super butthurt that some things were bad and got downvoted that they removed the whole thing?
#22
Has anyone mentioned wireless headphones yet? Bring back the plug-in ones, no batteries, and saved your phone when you dropped it.
Little Wonder 9 months ago
Yep, I don't use a wireless mouse, keyboard or headphones because I don't want to worry about battery life.
#23
I was promoted to a higher management position that happened to be in the night shift.
They DECREASED my salary, because the night bonus "would compensate the difference"...
#24
Open office plans.
nottheactualphoto 9 months ago
I hate the "open" office. At my last job, I was in a cubicle farm trying to do programming, which involves paying attention. Meanwhile, my co-workers are yukking it up, hollering about football or whatever. Very unpleasant and counterproductive.
#25
People remember the headphone jack removal, but I'm also pissed about laptop manufacturers removing so many ports and telling us to use port hubs. I'd rather carry a laptop that's thicker than carry a separate hub just to connect a mouse and a pendrive.
Also pissed off at how anti-repair laptops have become. The keyboards these days have to be repaired by opening up the whole a*s mobo. Before you could pop it out and swap.
Upstaged75 9 months ago
I just started a new job and had to buy an external USB port because my laptop only came with ONE! So I can plug in my mouse, but absolutely nothing else. :( My last work laptop weighed a ton but at least had enough ports. And a CD/DVD player too.
#26
Getting notifications about suggested content. Facebook likes to send me notifications now like "Hey that guy who you had one class with in high school and never spoke to just posted something!" Reddit likes to notify me when there's posts on subreddits I don't follow. I wish notifications were just for things I actually give a s**t about like someone messaging me or replying to a comment I made.
Zedrapazia 9 months ago
If it's an app, the notifications can be changed in the settings menu of the app (usually not within the app tho). I find the email ones far more annoying. Occasionally Quora sends me random emails and I don't even know why I seem to have an account there, and no matter how many times I disable mails, they always come back
#27
iphones getting rid of touch ID. It's faster than face id, it's easier to wave a stolen phone/police-snatched phone at your face than it is to drag your hand into position and other brands have shown there was no practical need for it.
cerinamroth 9 months ago
I'm not a fan either because FaceID doesn't recognise me lying down in bed with no makeup, no glasses and a double chin, lol.
#28
Pretty much every sale these days. They jack the prices up and then discount to the same price they were before. It's pretty common here in Australia.
#29
Google 5 years ago vs now.
Seems like its getting worse every day.
Molly Whuppie 9 months ago
I remember when google first arrived on the scene, and their selling point was "no ads"
#30
Definitely streaming services. We were all fooled by Netflix's initial success. It had nearly everything at a low price and was super convenient, so convenient in fact that rental shops pretty much went out of business in a few years. But aside from those few years it has ultimately become a huge L for consumers. Other companies wised up, everyone and their mother were starting a streaming service, tons of movies stopped being available and to have decent availability you have to spend 50 bucks per month on streaming alone, packages became more expensive overall, tons of properties just fell in a dead zone where they're not available anywhere through legitimate means, ads started appearing in paid plans, and now it's pretty much just cable TV again.
In retrospect rental stores were not that inconvenient. They were everywhere and they had almost anything. They rarely didn't have a title at all, and at least for me the cost is more or less the same across the long term. Yeah if you were watching stuff constantly through rentals it would be more expensive, but it's been years since Netflix had more than one thing per month I bother watching.
Hans Georg 9 months ago
And content getting worse is also a problem. I wished they had more of those good classics.
#31
Dish detergent/washing up liquid. For the past few years, I was sure all the "New and Improved' and "Now with x More" was false. Newer detergent doesn't seem to go half as far, or cut through grease as well. I used to buy a bottle maybe once every 5-6 months; now, I'm buying a bottle every 2-3 months -- and I'm doing the same amount of washing up. Fast forward to two weeks ago when I found a bottle of Tesco generic washing up liquid in an under stair cupboard from 7-8 years ago, unopened and still perfectly usable. I popped that boy open and did a 1-to-1 comparison with the same liquid I bought last week. I could immediately see a difference. The liquid in the old version was thicker, and obviously much more concentrated. The old stuff took a single pass to clean greasy pans. The same pans took at least three passes with the new stuff, and still didn't come away with that squeaky clean feel. Insult to injury, the new bottle had 60ml less, and I'm going to guess it cost more. Tdrl: Newer dish detergent is junk, and I have the old stuff to prove it.
Zedrapazia 9 months ago
In the European Union, chemical things sometimes become less effective due to law changes that reduce how much a chemical can be concentrated or what chemicals can be sold in the first place. For example, to avoid poisoning the fish or making the water supplies unclean. However, that every once in a while ends in a bit of a nonsensical situation. For example, they outlawed a weed killer because it is toxic to nature - which is kind of the point of a week killer.
#32
Working and finding work with a college degree.
Geoffrey Scott 9 months ago
Those younger Panda's that may be reading this...trades (in the US anyway) will PAY for your training, for the most part, and start you at 45k/yr. No debt.
#33
I work for 7-11. We used to sell burritos at 2 for 2.30. One day we had a "sale" at 2 for $3! When that sale ended the burritos were now 2 for 3.40. They raised the price twice but treated one like a sale.
WonderWoman 9 months ago
Lots of places employ this tactic to increase prices. They have a faux sale and when the sale ends, viola, new higher price. Walmart will do a 'roll-back' for a few weeks, then new higher price.
#34
Adverts on Amazon Prime. I’m sure they are trying to make them so annoying that you pay extra to go ad free…
nancy 9 months ago
If you download the movie, and turn off your wifi, would it be ad free? I haven't tried it yet. I've just been shutting down the show and restarting (at the same point) to avoid the ads. I plan on getting rid of prime once I'm done watching a particular series if the ads are still there.
#35
I hate that all 3 major consoles now require you to pay for a subscription to play online
Literally all the other features of ps+ are good enough for people to buy it why would you force people to buy it for online that used to be free
What do you think ?
Zedrapazia 9 months ago
I'd say the loss of physical media is another pretty bad thing starting from the same trends. A problem by subscription models, and absolutely devastating for preserving anything, because so many things, series, movies and videogames, just vanish and become lost media you can hardly access anymore (without resorting to piracy). Plus, it can be taken away from you at any time, even though you paid for it and own it, so to say. I've recently started buying DVDs, Blu Rays and console games on disks again because of that, and bought a good Blu Ray Player. These disks are an advantage in anything, they belong to me, I can use them no matter where I go and whether I have internet access, I can buy them cheaper as secondhand and I don't have to pay for them every month again and again.
Anony Mouse 9 months ago
Oooh I have one - Quickbooks revamped their customer service to provide highly skilled tech support to the customer faster and more efficiently! (They closed all their phone lines, fired all the US workers, outsourced the jobs to Cebu, failed to provide training for the call center workers, and made it impossible to contact them if your program isn't working.) They're about to shut down their desktop model and force everyone to use their buggy, awful online version that costs 4X what the desktop version does (which itself has gone up 400% over the last 3 years.) I used to think no company could hate their customers has much as Delta, but Quickbooks/Intuit has made a strong case.
Zedrapazia 9 months ago
I'd say the loss of physical media is another pretty bad thing starting from the same trends. A problem by subscription models, and absolutely devastating for preserving anything, because so many things, series, movies and videogames, just vanish and become lost media you can hardly access anymore (without resorting to piracy). Plus, it can be taken away from you at any time, even though you paid for it and own it, so to say. I've recently started buying DVDs, Blu Rays and console games on disks again because of that, and bought a good Blu Ray Player. These disks are an advantage in anything, they belong to me, I can use them no matter where I go and whether I have internet access, I can buy them cheaper as secondhand and I don't have to pay for them every month again and again.
Anony Mouse 9 months ago
Oooh I have one - Quickbooks revamped their customer service to provide highly skilled tech support to the customer faster and more efficiently! (They closed all their phone lines, fired all the US workers, outsourced the jobs to Cebu, failed to provide training for the call center workers, and made it impossible to contact them if your program isn't working.) They're about to shut down their desktop model and force everyone to use their buggy, awful online version that costs 4X what the desktop version does (which itself has gone up 400% over the last 3 years.) I used to think no company could hate their customers has much as Delta, but Quickbooks/Intuit has made a strong case.
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