I'm not sure I agree with all of that - that single-purpose tech is making a real comeback. But I do have one example in my daily life that supports this: A Garmin watch.

Unlike "full" smartwatches (arbitrarily defined as: You can browse the web on them in some fashion) Garmin devices are intentionally limited but in return, what they do works very well and seems fully debugged. I spent several years recording outdoor activities with the Strava app on my phone, and always there was about a 1% failure rate where for one reason or another, the GPS trace was interrupted or corrupted. With the Garmin watch this simply doesn't happen. If it's recording, the recording is good, period.

It is that, that has somehow been lost. That devices that just do one thing and do it well have been replaced by apps on a device that, in the modern software fashion, are "mostly" debugged, get constant updates that may or may not remove bugs (or features!) and usually don't add anything useful. One app got an update which, on my lower-end phone, changed it from crisply responsive to incredibly slow (5+ second response time to a tap). It worked fine before.

In this, isn't it more that Garmin has been making sports watches for a long long time? And were given the grace by their customer base to just keep making that particular function better.

You could probably find the same with bike computers. Established brands that have a fairly predictable customer base tend to continue to focus on the thing that they do well. If you are having to chase a market that doesn't really exist, you find half baked features that speak to an idea, but often don't actually deliver on it.

For an amazing example of that last, look at how Amazon is destroying their echo market. If they just focused on "voice activated radio and timers," the device would be very different from the "we are trying desperately to make a new market for our smart assistant."

> fully debugged

And here I am each morning having to manually enforce sync multiple times to have my fucking Garmin watch sleep data show up in my iPhone Garmin app. I love this watch (Instinct 2) but it’s far from bug free even in its most fundamental functions like data sync

This is my problem with software now. It doesn't work well enough, and a product's incarnation doesn't have a long enough lifecycle, for it to be worth incorporating into my life.

Heck, my big complaint on here for a while was Google managed to break the timer voice functionality on my Pixel, my second most used function after playing music. They broke it long enough and I had enough meals ruined/issues that I moved to something else. My phone is less used for useful things than it was 10 years ago purely because companies have made it not worth using.

I've started to realize of late that a vast majority of tech is "making things and services that maximize the amount of money taken out of customer wallets" and not "making cool technology that works". They have just as much pride and put just as much care and craft into squeezing money out of consumers as developers and engineers put into their projects.

This creates a market where quality and craftsmanship and customer service reduce competitiveness and eat into profits. We've empowered and optimized a market for the enshittifiers, and they're damn good at what they do.

Out of curiosity, which Garmin watch model do you have?

The OG smartwatch is better

https://repebble.com/