I live in Japan and this is something that I will never get used to. Yes, the people are quiet, but shops are ridiculously loud. Go to any supermarket and there are seven different jingles playing in parallel! Honestly, I don't understand how the employees don't go crazy.
Besides techies I'm seeing more and more people not even having a personal computer at all, doing most of their "computing" on their phone and using their work computer for the rare task that does require a real computer.
The younger generations have actually regressed in computer proficiency, file management, etc.
That depends on your social circle. Among gamers, consoles are losing popularity and PC gaming is increasing, even in countries like Japan (where I live).
What are they going to be replaced with now? You still can't do anything actually useful on a mobile device. You need an actual computer to get anything done besides dicking around playing games or scrolling through apps.
People do “useful” things with mobile devices all of the time with only their phones. Most people don’t define “useful” as running VIM in a terminal and running Docker.
8 years ago, we looked for our house, managed the loan process and all of the documents, signed all of the non in person paperwork, reviewed the options when he had our house built from our phones.
We did the same when we managed the selling process in 2024 and when we bought our current home in 2022.
We arranged a year long “digital nomad” series of trips where we flew to over a dozen cities including flights and hotels on our phones starting in 2022.
And those were mostly marketed toward businesses not consumers. Even your citation says the idea quickly died when computers were less than $1000.
Around 2000, was the time that eMachines were selling $400 desktops and you had promotions from places like MSN making them free if you signed a contract for dialup.
I have a similar experience: a couple of years ago I started to dip my toes into the retrogaming collecting world, and at first it was fun to get all those games that I really wanted to have as a kid, but it soon devolved into trying to track down all those overpriced "rare" games. It got exhausting, and made wonder why am I even doing this? Why would I spend several hundreds on a game or a console that I didn't even knew about until one year ago, just because some random YouTube guy told me so?
Being a kid, really wanting a game or toy, finally getting it and then enjoying it to death was awesome; this is not. As you say, it doesn't feel right, so I have decided to quit.
It doesn't even need to be available on Steam to be fair. You can run whatever games you want. You could even run a Nintendo Switch emulator if you want
reply