TechBytes | 2016’s 6 Worst Tech Trends!

Oh yes. We’re at the end of the year where I have an excuse to do a lot of Top 5 lists! In the next few days, I will be posting Top 5 lists leading up to 2017! Since I didn’t get to do posts related to the Holidays, I figured to do these instead. First up, here’s my list of 2016’s 6 Worst Tech Trends!

Bye Bye, Headphone Jack.

For the longest time, there was one port that is the same throughout all of our devices at home. That one port is known as the headphone jack. Even as we entered the age of the smartphone, the headphone jack managed to stay alive. Until 2016 came.

Companies are removing the last common port that all smartphones have. It would have been fine if the port that replaces it is the same for all. Turns out it isn’t: Apple is using their Lightning port and the rest are using USB-C. It’ll be interesting to see if this complication will last.

I still don’t know if the future really is wireless, but if Apple’s vision is the best representation of it then good luck to the rest.

USB-C All the Way!

Another trend that’s currently happening right now is that we’re slowly moving to USB-C as the standard port to use. The bad news is that some companies (Apple being the most obvious) decided to put USB-C ports ONLY. While USB-C will eventually be the common port, it is a HASSLE just to deal with the new port. Since most of your current devices are NOT USB-C yet, you need dongles for EVERYTHING.

This, along with the unexpectedly poor battery life, made the new MacBook Pros the FIRST Apple laptops NOT being recommended by Consumer Reports. Burn. USB-C devices better come sooner.

Trying to One-Up Apple.

Yes, yes. This trend is getting so old that most of them are simply just copying Apple from their design to their market strategy. It’s a trend that keeps popping up so much that I wonder if a company can actually one-up every other company.

Enter the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

Samsung just had a one-two punch earlier in the year with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge and they wanted to do a knockout punch with the Note 7. Furthermore, they wanted to announce  AND release the phone a month before the new iPhones came out.

If they knew what was coming, they wouldn’t even bother trying.

Just a few weeks after it was released, some Galaxy Note 7 units would start catching fire! At first, it felt like they were just isolated cases. Then the number of cases reached 100. It was already reaching mainstream media!

Samsung then did a recall for the phones and put out replacement phones. You would think that the debacle is over. YOU ARE SO WRONG.

The replacement phones ALSO caught on fire! I was shocked when I found out that even the replacements had trouble. The main issue is fitting more and more battery into a thin body. By trying to do that and possibly rushing the release of the phone, they just endangered their whole smartphone business.

I hope Samsung will clean up their act with the Galaxy S8 next year.

Twitter is Still Lost.

Until now, I still don’t know what differentiates Twitter from other social media platforms. Even though Facebook is clearly the most popular of the bunch, Twitter could at least still stand out. Instagram made waves because it centered around the easy sharing of photos. Because it was feeling threatened, Facebook bought Instagram for 1 BILLION DOLLARS!

I am so disappointed that Twitter is having a hard time making money and pleasing the stockholders. They don’t really know how to stand out. Their user base hasn’t really grown that much, unlike Facebook and its 1 BILLION MOBILE USERS.

Even the return of its founder, Jack Dorsey, didn’t help Twitter at all. I hope it finds its purpose soon or it may be irrelevant to most people.

Feature Copying!

And I thought Apple was the only company getting away with copying or stealing a feature. Many companies did copy from each other but one company stood out. This year, Facebook did this in GRAND FASHION.

They did it using Instagram and Messenger!

Instagram got the Stories feature of Snapchat and named it Instagram Stories! They didn’t even change the name of the feature! Gaaaaah!

If you thought that was over and Facebook was done copying, you would be SO WRONG.

The Messenger app recently got a major design overhaul that mainly features the camera above all else. The Stories feature from Snapchat also made its way to Messenger with the My Day feature!

I was really surprised that Facebook managed to copy the same feature to two apps! This, to me, is the most obvious example of the lack of originality in the tech industry.

Facebook’s Fake News Debacle

I was supposed to do just 5 but I can’t just ignore the elephant in the room: Fake News. This insanity caused A LOT of things that we thought wouldn’t happen TO HAPPEN FOR REAL!

An increasing amount of news that we read on Facebook is fake and due to how they just look like usual news to us, we actually read them and believe them!

I was always thinking that Facebook should actively check if a news article posted on the service is real or not. However, I asked a friend about this and this is what she has to say:

“In my opinion, it’s a tricky role to assume. One, it takes away from its character as a platform for all sorts of posts. Two, it opens itself up to much criticism from its users and may even discourage them from continued patronage, given that inevitably, because of Facebook’s intervention, some people because of the quality of their posts, will be excluded from the privileges that other users get to have, and Facebook may not be the best judge of who those people should be. Third, they can’t always be accurate in identifying the aim of a given post, leading to them intervening wrongly.”

She also mentioned that there must be new terms and conditions that lay out rules that are specific against these fake news. At the same time, those same rules must be flexible enough to allow for rapid changes.

I just hope that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook know what they are doing.

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There you go, my list of 2016’s 6 Worst Tech Trends! Did I miss anything? Do you think an entry here is not that bad? Sound off in the comments below!