Patrick's playground

Every now and then I lament the badness of current things, and then I remember the things we had that we can't get anymore ...

• ISDN Telephones were a wonderful upgrade to analog Telephones. 8kB/s dedicated bandwidth with low latency. Compared to that all VoIP things I've used were just horribly cheap shoddy crap of unspeakably bad quality. Luckily ISDN has been discontinued and is no longer available to consumers, so we have no reference for what good audio quality means.
• High-res displays like the IBM T220. Look it up, it's a time traveller! And, of course, it was discontinued, with no modern device coming close.
• Mobile phones that we recharged every week like the Motorola StarTac I bought a few years ago. Now 24h seems to be 'ok' ...
• Washing machines that took 30 minutes for one load which is not energy-efficient, so instead the modern ones run for 1-2h. Not sure how that helps, and it looks like they use more water too. So we just hide the problem and PROBLEM SOLVED?
• ThinkPad Notebooks

And many other things that were better in the past, but have regressed now to a lower quality, less-feature, harder to repair state.

Can we please have more future?