I’m fairly neutral about my 2017 VW, it’s not the best car I’ve owned, but it’s comfy, gas mileage is good, it still has physical knobs/buttons for everything, and it hasn’t had any major issues yet.

But VW decided to switch their newer vehicles to the digital cockpit gauges with a goddamn screen in your face - so now I’ll never buy another VW.

Reliability is either stagnating or declining, complexity is increasing, costs are increasing, and new features being added are either useless or straight up anti-user. Why would anyone continue to make the choice to subject themselves to that?

I want to say companies that enshittify get what they deserve, but realistically we’ll just be left with fewer companies that are free to make worse products because there aren’t many alternative options. Google and Amazon both come to mind.

Late stage capitalism isn’t fun.