Ask Lemmy

iPhone 3G. I’ll never forget the day I put the internet in my pocket

Recently, my car. I was driving around a 2006 and recently got a 2024. A backup camera is amazing. The collision detection, touch display, and Bluetooth are a nice bonus also.

On a tangent, is it just me, or has there been a notable uptick in this type of question? Feels a lot like astroturfing, but so far as I can see there's been no malicious intent

iPhone 1.0. I was notoriously good at getting lost cause I'm not great with directions. A couple days after I got it, I was going somewhere in a city that isn't my own. I stepped off the train and pulled up the map app, looked at a couple of street signs, and said, "I'm going that way."

I thought to myself, this changes everything. Younger people who never had to rely on paper maps will never understand how profound that moment was.

A good docking station plus KVM for a good work & home setup since the pandemic hit.

I can dock my work laptop when I work from home and have my two screens, ergonomic keyboard, mouse, webcam etc all attached in one go, then a single button on my desk to toggle to my gaming desktop and start playing without having to disconnect anything, reducing wear and tear on the connectors.

Higher quality electric coffee grinders. I have been using pretty nice hand grinders for years ($100 to $200 range) and while they were good, the consistency and general quality of life improvement gotten from these nicer electric grinders has made a significant improvement in both the coffee quality and my time/life quality related to making coffee daily.

a 3d printer, I've picked up my now favourite hobby when I got it: gun smithing

Automatic litter box! They're so pricey, I always wasn't in a place to do it, but I finally bit the bullet. I don't think I can go back. It's so easy, and my cat wasn't scared at all. I also feel better knowing she always has clean litter. When she comes to bed I can just run the box from my app.

Bonus: it rotates sideways so my cat can keep her head. 👍🏾

Microwave, I never had one, because, I never wanted to eat ultra-processed microwaved food.

But now , I use it all the time:

1. to reheat my tea
2. cook my vegetable (since I learn they retain more element being microwaved than cook)
3. I can stock on pure frozen product, tuna , salmon, raspberry... and eat them when I want without being afraid of spoilage.

So now all my meal are more healthy just because of microwave, which seems counterintuitive, but is true.

Going to get roasted for this, but Alexa devices. The video versions play Netflix, YouTube, Hulu etc and have much better sound than the standard little speaker orb version. They all sync together so you can stream music in each room that has one like having a whole house stereo system.

Being able to verbally add something to the grocery list at any time is a game changer. People aren't taking advantage of that feature as much as they should IMO.

Getting a second monitor for my work computer gave me a 30% boost in my productivity.

A temperature controlled pod for my bed. I used to sleep so hot all night long, constantly moving to find the cool part of the bed.

Now I keep it like as cold as can be all night, and my sleep has improved 10x. Plus my partner likes it warm so her side is nice and cozy. Both of us are happier for it.

Besides upgrading to an SSD like another person said, I guess an electronic pressure cooker was a pretty sweet upgrade. It's incredibly multi purpose, cuts cooking time dramatically, allows me to walk away and forget about cooking with no consequence, and often only requires cleaning a single pot for an entire meal.

Like ya know those old TV ads for kitchen gadgets that try desperately to convince you it'll change your life, but you never actually use them? An electronic pressure cooker is one the few cooking gadgets that actually lives up to the hype.

induction cooktop? I'd say dishwasher but that's probably more plumbing and pumps than "technology".

With all the other gadgets, I'm not so sure. I've had computers, laptops, phones for ages. Of course my first everything back in the 90s or 00s was a big thing. But since then it's just the newest generation, a bit faster and with more extras, but noting substancially different.

A small vacuum and mop Roomba clone. Having two dogs leaving fur everywhere made vacuuming every day a necessary chore but now I only need to empty out their base every day and they take care of keeping the floors clean. I don't have them connected to my Wi-Fi though so hopefully that helps mitigate any hacking attempts.

Bone conduction headphones for biking. Being able to listen to my tunes while I'm riding around is amazing.