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