We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower

> The VHS player in my basement could be fixed with a screwdriver and a service manual (OK, sometimes an oscilloscope). Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.

This seems like a pretty weird example, right? WiFi routers don’t connect to the internet. If your modem can’t connect to the internet, something has probably broken outside your house. That’s the sort of locally-unsolvable problem that everybody last century was familiar with; the crappy copper telephone wire that was never designed to let the Internet blast through it and it will eventually rebel and start giving you noise.

If your router doesn’t work, I don’t know. Cheap routers are not a new invention or sign of the times, I think.

VHS players, if I remember correctly, often died in mysterious ways (they have all sorts of little motors and finicky sensors in them).

I don't know, I think the point of the example is one of transparent engineering. VHS players could break for any number of reasons but the manufacturers used to put in effort to make them repairable. Obviously a much simpler piece of hardware, but the relative effort felt much greater.

When I used to use Google Wifi, it regularly struggled to connect or establish/maintain connectivity to the outside world, even though my modem was successfully connected. Similar to nest devices, you often have to power cycle them several times to get them into a good state

VHS players went through a typical consumer electronics evolution. The first ones were large, heavy, and repairable if you knew what to do. By the end they were lightweight plastic and you didn't even consider repairing one, as an hour of time at a repair shop would cost you more than buying a new one. They were disposable.

I guess. All I know is, when I was a teenager we had a broken VHS player that I wanted to fix. I was a clever kid, so I took it from a broken VHS player, to a broken VHS player that was also in many pieces.

Lol yeah, very familiar

WiFi routers a) do connect to the internet (as many of them are integrated modems as well as WiFi) and b) are often mentioned as “connecting” to the internet as a colloquialism that means “a device on my WiFi can’t reach the internet because the router has an issue”.

> If your modem can’t connect to the internet, something has probably broken outside your house

Of all the internet-only connectivity outages I’ve had that lasted for longer than a few minutes, nearly all of them were resolved by a modem or router reboot. These are ordinary, non-customized modem/routers from 3-4 ordinary ISPs serving ordinary apartments in a major US city, using ordinary mediums like DSL, cable, fiber.

The fact that a reboot resolved the issue means that the problem wasn’t outside the house. Of all the remaining, long and not-fixed-by-reboot outages, one was a hurricane, one was a bad amp … and all the remaining dozens were arcane technical issues with the modem, router, or devices on the network that required ISP troubleshooting to fix.

I suspect that this is not an uncommon distribution, which means that this isn’t the same problem folks in the last century faced; today, the shitware is coming from inside the house.