10 Things About Today's Tech That Make No Sense
Welcome to MsMojo, where we’ll be looking at the 10 most confusing features of modern technology.
Prioritizing Size Over Functionality
In the late 2000s, smartphones were gaining tons of momentum. After the cumbersome bricks that phones had been in earlier decades, the idea of a thin phone was highly appealing. Now, years later, it’s become quite tiring. It feels like important features are ignored in favor of having an ultra-thin laptop or phone. For instance, the thinner your phone, the shorter your battery life is expected to be. A lot of consumers would prefer to have a slightly thicker device in favor of other features. It also looks quite silly when you get an ultra-thin phone, but with a majorly powerful camera bulging out the back. At least they don’t bend in pockets like the iPhone 6 used to.
Losing Ports
Back when the iPhone 7 was announced, there was global outrage at its lack of an aux port. Now it’s more or less the norm, and it’s challenging to find a new phone with one. This is because they wanted to sell Bluetooth headphones like AirPods. Modern devices seem to boast about having as few ports as possible. For instance, some MacBooks only have USB-C ports. If you want more variety, you’ll need to splash out on an adaptor. Ethernet is also largely a thing of the past. This change is all likely done to make devices as small as possible, but a lot of people believe greed is the cause. The fewer ports on a device, the more adaptors sold.
No Physical Games
If you grew up playing video games, you probably have a few memories of driving home with a new game, eagerly reading the box, and flicking through the manual. Kids of today are unlikely to develop such memories. Even if they do buy a physical game, most are just codes in a box or installers that take hours to launch. This development is a major threat to digital preservation. It’s a lot easier to preserve a physical disc than a digital-only game, owned directly by the company. Not all countries have abandoned physical media; in Japan, they still love it. So if you want to begin developing a retro games collection, a trip to Japan could be your best shot.
Hyperloop
Humans have been designing public transport systems since the Industrial Revolution. One of the best methods we’ve come up with is the subway, which is simply an underground rail network. In the 2010s, billionaire Elon Musk began trying to redesign the subway - by making it much less efficient. His idea was the hyperloop, which is basically underground tunnels that only Teslas can drive through. It was intended to let cars go hundreds of miles per hour across the entire United States West Coast. Musk has dumped millions into this idea when he could just build a subway, and it seems to be completely stalled now. Tunnels still exist in California and Las Vegas, though, but they’re not as exciting as a well-made subway.
MacBooks With No Touchscreens
For years, touchscreens have been common on laptops. This has turned a lot of them into a blend between a tablet and a laptop, with detachable keyboards. You would think, given how pioneering Apple has been for both tablets and laptops, that they’d have jumped on the trend years ago. Well, it seems unlikely to ever become a reality. This is because Apple considers the iPad to be an extra interface for a MacBook. This means we can infer it’s almost entirely motivated by greed. If they merged the iPad with a Mac, then you’d only have to buy 1 product. Keeping them separate means more Apple users will buy both, therefore making them more money.
Apple Vision Pro & AR Glasses
Smartglasses are wearable computers, making them one of the coolest sci-fi gadgets imaginable. Well, in theory. In practice, they are a long way from taking off. Google Glass was the first major brand of smartglasses, launched in 2012, and was discontinued entirely in 2023. Turned out, people weren’t happy about wearing a camera on their faces all day, which was a major privacy issue. Now, there’s the Apple Vision Pro, which is not much of an improvement. It costs $3,499 and is especially cumbersome to wear. It also causes major eye strain and headaches, resulting in many consumers returning them. Maybe someday the tech will be there to justify it, but today’s not that day.
Tesla Self-Driving Cars
Tesla has spent years developing their Autopilot function, which should, in theory, allow for cars to drive themselves. It’s such a dangerous idea that it was abandoned by other companies that tried it years ago. The idea has caused hundreds of crashes over the years, including at least 59 fatalities. As of September 2025, Tesla has altered their definition of “Full Self-Driving,” implying they’ve abandoned the idea of entirely autonomous cars. The fact that they’ve given up becomes slightly funny when you hear Musk had promised it would become a reality every year since 2018. The humor in the situation vanishes when you realize how much suffering the failed concept caused.
Nintendo Restricting & Bricking Hardware
Older Nintendo consoles like the Wii and the 3DS are still played regularly today. That’s because they’re so easily moddable, it’ll take you decades to get bored with them. Now the Switch and its follow-up are so locked down that trying to mod them slightly can get them bricked. People have even had their Switch 2s banned for playing used games. If this happens, there’s basically no way to fix it. This means that vast quantities of precious resources will be going into consoles that are unusable, which is exceedingly wasteful. It’s the pinnacle of greediness, even though it’s proven that the more modifiable a console is, the longer it’ll get played.
Tech You Can’t Fix
In the early days of smartphones, if the battery broke, you could simply pop the back off and slot a new one in. Now, you’ll need to buy a fancy repair kit or melt the phone’s glue to open it up, which will void your warranty. Alternatively, you can get it officially repaired for a small fortune. It’s not just batteries, but the majority of tech is becoming a lot more locked down. This makes it substantially harder to perform your own repairs. This is infuriating because you bought the product, so really you should have the right to repair it. This also has the upsetting effect of increasing the number of electronics that are discarded annually.
Dumping Billions into AI Startups
One of the most exciting new technologies is artificial intelligence. While it’s made great strides in recent years, there are certain jobs it’ll never be able to do, and it’s not particularly profitable. Despite this, investors are still dumping billions into AI companies. This has resulted in a major AI bubble, which many believe is about to burst. It doesn’t help that they’ve been adding AI to literally everything they can. This means that now people have even been dating Generative AIs. In a lot of ways, the burst would be a good thing, as Generative AIs like ChatGPT have an incredibly destructive impact on the environment.
Were there any particularly confusing things we failed to mention? Let us know in the comments section!
