Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby needs one might have. Depending on the era you can find the camcorders, point-and-shoot film and digital cameras right next to portable music players, cellphones, HiFi sets and tower components, televisions and devices like DVD players and VCRs, all of them in a dizzying amount of brands, shapes and colors that are sure to fit anyone’s needs, desires and budget.

When by the late 2000s cellphones began to absorb more and more of the features of these devices alongside much improved cellular Internet access, these newly minted ‘smartphones’ were hailed as a technological revolution that combined so many consumer electronics into a single device. Unlike the relatively niche feature phones, smartphones absolutely took off.

Fast-forward more than a decade and the same catalogs now feature black rectangles identified respectively as smart phones, smart TVs and tablets, alongside evenly colored geometric shapes that identify as smart speakers and other devices. While previously the onus for this change was laid by this author primarily on the death of industrial design, the elephant in the room would seem to be that consumer electronics are suffering from a terminal disease: subscription services.

Ownership And Timeshare

In the burgeoning consumer electronics world of the 1950s, everyone was into streaming audio-visual content. This being the once popular phenomena that historians refer to as ‘radio’ and ‘television’, involving the purchase of a compatible device to receive said content on, which was being broadcast via the airwaves. Naturally, this was before the era of on-demand streaming, so you also had to subscribe to a service that would provide you with the time tables for when said content would be streamed.

Although you could buy vinyl records back then, these were relatively expensive even if you already had a record player. Fortunately, by the 1960s affordable cassette tapes for purchase of prerecorded content – as well as home recording – began to appear with Philips’ compact cassette as clear frontrunner.

By the 1970s home video recorders became affordable and surged in popularity by the 1980s and 1990s, with JVC’s VHS format enabling a massive market of both prerecorded content and of blank tapes to record any content from television broadcasts on for later perusal. At this point linear television and radio broadcasts had been largely superseded by people building up their personal audio-visual libraries in addition to borrowing tapes and later DVDs from video rental stores and public libraries.

Until the 1970s digital computers were primarily a government and university thing, with businesses anxiously trying to get into the game as well to ease everything from payroll processing to inventory management and engineering. Due to the high cost – and large size – of digital computers at the time, it was more economical to use time-sharing. This changed  over time from batch processing in the form of university students lugging stacks of punch cards around, to them setting themselves down in front of a terminal like the DEC VT100.

Although these computer terminals looked like computers to the lay person, they are little more than a screen and keyboard tied into I/O buffers that communicate with a remote central computer. With these terminals students could all log into their own student account on the university’s mainframe and thus stop pestering the sysadmins with their stacks of punch cards for an overdue assignment.

For government purposes the same terminal-based approach offered a good balance, while for businesses the target mainframe over at the time-sharing business was more easily accessed by something like dial-up due to the distances involved, with the mainframe’s owner charging for the used resources. This spread the expenses of owning and maintaining these early computers over as many users as possible while keeping costs low for businesses making use of these time-share services.

This lasted until the era of mass-produced home computers arrived by the late 1970s with microcomputers such as the Commodore PET, before culminating with the 1981 release of IBM’s 5150 Personal Computer (PC), which was decidedly the point when time-sharing of mainframes and the use of terminals had begun to rapidly fade. Within years every student, corporate worker and government employee could economically be given access to a fully capable computer system, whether in the form of a PC, Macintosh, MSX or something else, along with dedicated server systems tucked away in the business’ server room or under a desk somewhere.

Even children could now be given dedicated computers to play video games on, which would have seemed a frivolous waste of computing resources in the 1960s to anyone except university students.

Thus, as the 1980s rolled over into the 1990s it seemed like the future of technology had truly arrived, with every home potentially a true Mecca of computing power and audio-visual entertainment.

Terminal Decline

After most of the world celebrated the arrival of the new millennium in 2000, followed by the arrival of the 21st millennium a year later, the remaining euphoria of having made it to the future would quickly run into the quicksand pit of reality. After having had a quarter of the 21st century to sober up, it seems like this is the time to take a look back and question how in blazes’ name we got where we are today.

Over the past years, the living room has metamorphized from something that looks lived in, into the modern-day living room that can alternatively be described as ‘clean’ or ‘sterile’. The theme here is ‘surfaces’, which preferentially are white, black, grey or some other inoffensive color.

As you enter such a living room to be audio-visually entertained, you will pick up the smart remote that turns on the smart TV. Except the TV is always on, as it is smart and probably is always listening and running firmware updates in the background anyway. Ignoring that, your choices of entertainment are:

• A game console that is logged into your Nintendo, Sony or XBox account with likely paid-for digital games and services
• A video streaming service or two, or four, the overwhelming majority of which are subscription-only and/or force you to watch ads like in the good ol’ days of cable TV. Only the ads are much, much worse
• Content streamed off your local NAS, if you’re a total nerd
• A Blu-ray or DVD player if you’re old-fashioned and refuse to join the Digital-Only Content Age

For the overwhelming majority of smart TV users, they are a recurring revenue source for streaming services, with the TV being the device purchased by the viewer in order to access said services. Much the same is true with modern game consoles, where you effectively must be logged into your online account to do much of anything with the console and an increasing amount of games, if only to obtain the latest updates to fix bugs. This triply so if you are one of those people who are into cloud gaming.

As you ignore that your smart TV is basically a cross between a very advanced VT100 terminal and a Telescreen, you glance at the glass-and-plastic slab in your hand as one of your friends just messaged you on a messaging app – which annoyingly again advertises a premium subscription account – about this rad new music album on this one streaming audio service. Fortunately you are already a member, so you add the album for later listening.

That your smart TV, game console, and smart phone are all just terminals for some remote server begins to sink in once your internet access has been cut off. You cannot stream any audio-visual content, and many of your video games outright refuse to run because of a lack of internet connectivity. Ditto for your smart speakers, which have begun to stubbornly ignore your calls for attention.

When you sigh and flip open your laptop to maybe do some work, you find that your software products refuse to even launch, as they absolutely needed to refresh their license key verification this instant. Feeling mildly upset by their accusations of you having pirated their over-priced software after forking over so much cash each month, you slam the laptop shut again. This is when you realize that your project files are stored safely on the now unreachable cloud storage account anyway.

Ultimately you find yourself just staring at the black rectangles and inoffensive geometric shapes that once entertained you or made you more productive, but which now have left you terrifyingly alone with your own thoughts. Maybe you will have to do something drastic soon, like try reading a book, drag out that old CD player, play chess against yourself, or do some sketching on paper. With a real pencil.

Shareholder Value

The move from a boxed copy of stand-alone software and physical products to something with a recurring monthly or annual cost has been a gradual one. Much of it can already be traced back to the overly optimistic days leading up to the dot-com bubble, when the internet was going to make everyone rich and the selling of online goods the new normal.

Although the resulting fallout from this bubble popping was rather extensive, it left the investors who escaped the catastrophe wiser and still positively slavering at the thought of using the Internet for unimaginable levels of that sweetest reward of all: recurring revenue, with people giving you their money every month just to keep what they mistakenly thought that they had purchased.

The challenge is of course that people in general like to own things, and are rather hesitant to buy into anything that makes them have fewer things. How do you make people voluntarily buy into owning less and less, with what they do own having fewer features? The answer would seem to lie in blinding them with shiny new features, while insisting that they really don’t need the features that you are about to remove or nerf.

For example, initially people loved the idea of a smartphone because it meant that they could carry around in their pocket a cellphone, a camcorder, photo camera, portable internet-capable computer, an FM radio, a music player and more, all in a single device. Unfortunately all of these functions have been nerfed in some way or form.

FM Radio

Although regular analog radio on the FM and AM bands has lost a lot of importance these days, having FM radio available can be incredibly useful. Consider being out somewhere with poor cell coverage, not wanting to use up your data allowance for the month, or when everything has gone sideways in the form of a hurricane and the local grid, internet and cell network have collapsed. Especially in the latter case it would be convenient if you could just open the FM radio app on your smartphone to tune into emergency broadcasts.

Unfortunately this feature has been purposefully disabled or left out by device manufacturers, with Apple having opted to not even add an FM radio to its custom SoCs. A quick look at a couple of major smartphone manufacturers  over at GSM Arena for smartphones released in 2024 or 2025 featuring an FM radio only shows two, both budget Samsung models.

Typically only budget-level smartphones have an FM radio feature enabled, as one aspect of the FM radio feature is that it requires its own antenna, which generally is a set of headphones plugged into the 3.5 mm audio jack. This logically means that the survival chances of budget smartphone buyers is significantly higher during a natural disaster than for people buying iPhones or higher-end Samsung and Xiaomi phones.

Audio Jack

The analog audio from a 3.5 mm audio jack is a low-latency, high-fidelity way to experience audio, only limited by the used audio DAC and the headphones or in-ears plugged into the jack. This makes it rather baffling that it’s also among the most vilified features. The reason here isn’t that it compromises waterproofing, or impedes thinness or adds cost, but rather it gets dropped on higher-end smartphones because Apple dropped it to promote their Bluetooth headphones and others followed.

Unfortunately, Bluetooth audio is neither low-latency nor high-fidelity, with newer codecs like LDAC, AptX, and AAC slightly improving the audio quality over the default SBC codec, but keeping all the other compromises. Meanwhile a fraction of the USB-C connectors on phones support the alternative analog audio mode, returning an audio jack to the device with a dongle, yet not re-enabling the use of headphones as an FM antenna and also making it impossible to use the USB-C port for any data transfers, while making the entire setup significantly more clunky, just to get a previously eliminated port back on the device instead of just putting it on there in the first place.

SD Cards

An important feature of a digital camera and camcorder is being able to quickly get the data off it and onto a computer for processing and viewing. Unfortunately in so far as smartphones supported SD card expansion, this at the very least required taking off the plastic back to swap cards. These days the SD card either shares space with the SIM card(s), or is eliminated altogether.

The idea here is of course to increase recurring revenue: the easiest way to get data onto a smartphone or off it is via the device manufacturer’s cloud storage solutions, with a minor fee to bump it up to a usable amount of storage. You’re also not supposed to load your own audio files onto the internal storage either, but use the paid-or-ad-supported streaming solution. Why would you want to be un-cool and not listen to losslessly streamed audio files mangled by some Bluetooth codec through the second pair of wireless in-ears of this month as the previous ones fell out somewhere?

Fortunately, the marketing is very convincing, as you can now listen to or watch anything that you want – as long as it’s available on the streaming service – and you can even use your voice to tell any of your smart devices to play a song or open a movie, because this is what the future looks like. Never mind that you do not technically own much any more, but at least you are happy.

Terminal Life

Probably the biggest question here is whether or not this terminalification is harmful. Sure, this change has meant that industrial design got effectively shivved in the proverbial dark alley – since the user interface of devices now lives on the device manufacturer’s servers – but you now have all these cool features. Things like a smart home full of Internet of Things devices, each of which are first and foremost terminals for the manufacturer’s services, with local control an afterthought, if a thought at all.

Even governments and businesses haven’t managed to escape these changes with their own vortex back to the 1960s. Rather than using a dial-up modem to connect to a time-share mainframe, they now use a broadband Internet connection to connect to a time-share mainframe, except we now call it a ‘cloud’.

It’s often been said that the centralization and decentralization of computer technology in particular is cyclical, with the 1980s and 1990s forming the pinnacle of decentralization. If we are currently in a trough of terminal terminalification, then logically decentralization and determinalification should follow next. One could make the point here that the Right to Repair movement is part of this change, as it wrests control away from manufacturers.

Even so, we still have a long way to go if this is the next stop, with our current physical media revival kerfuffle being just one of the many things that we have to come to terms with. Between the glossy marketing and the often conflicting desires and needs of the average consumer, it’s probably anyone’s guess what the second quarter of the 21st century will look like for consumer electronics and beyond.