As we kick off 2024, it’s not too late for an old-fashioned airing of grievances.

As I look through my piles of phones, computers, gadgets, and apps, here are the biggest things I’m pleading with tech vendors to finally fix:

LESS LAGGY SOFTWARE

Have you noticed that everything just feels sluggish now? Try, for instance, switching between two Slack channels, or scrolling through your Google Photos albums, and marvel at how everything takes just a little too long to load. Or, watch this viral video (and read this accompanying blog post) on how a 23-year-old Windows PC is snappier than a modern Windows 11 machine at loading basic apps such as NotePad and Paint.

These are minor nitpicks, sure, but they’re indicative of how everything’s just getting a little bit worse, and how big tech companies have lost sight of what made their products delightful to use in the first place. Remember when companies like Google obsessed over shaving fractions of a second off load times? Bring that mentality back, please.

A CREDIBLE GOOGLE PHOTOS ALTERNATIVE

Maybe I’m still just bitter about the end of unlimited storage, or maybe I just want to reduce Google’s role in my online life, but I’ve been pining for a solid alternative to Google Photos—and it just doesn’t exist right now.

iCloud Photos isn’t cross-platform, so that’s out. Microsoft is asleep at the wheel with OneDrive’s photo management, which doesn’t even have face recognition. Other major cloud-storage providers are too focused on enterprise use to really care about photos, and self-hosted tools such as PhotoPrism are too much of a hassle. Companies such as Proton and Skiff are already taking on Google’s other online tools; perhaps photo management could be their next step.

A WEB BROWSER THAT DOESN’T SUCK

Chrome and Edge are privacy minefields. Safari is just another mechanism for ecosystem lock-in. Vivaldi and Opera are too bloated. Brave is too sleazy. Firefox is missing a crucial feature for web app users.

In 2024, is it too much to ask for a simple, cross-platform, privacy-respecting web browser that doesn’t depend on some repellant underlying business model? Surely, someone can make it happen.

A WORKABLE SOLUTION TO COMPANIES GETTING HACKED ALL THE TIME

In mid-December, Comcast announced that hackers accessed data on nearly all its customers—in some cases including birth dates, partial social security numbers, and answers to security questions—and the saddest thing about it is that you can’t even be shocked anymore. T-Mobile alone has been breached eight times in the past five years, and surely we all remember the Equifax security breach in 2017 that affected 40% of the U.S. population.

We shouldn’t have to adopt a fatalist attitude about this, nor should we accept password resets, free identify-theft monitoring, and piddly little settlement checks as the norm. The SEC’s new disclosure rules are a start. But how about some real consequences when companies lose our personal data on such a large scale—something that would encourage them not to collect so much of it in the first place?

A MORE FOCUSED SMART HOME

Smart homes have been a mess for a while now, in large part because they’re trying to do too much and wind up doing it all poorly. It’s time to admit that an interconnected system of lights, locks, switches, and sensors is never going to act in concert as well as we’d like, and the benefits aren’t going to be all that substantial anyway. (Even Matter, the industry’s ambitious attempt at building a common smart home standard, has just created another mess.)

In 2024, let’s see a return to more-focused smart home systems that set out to solve specific, practical problems, such as energy savings, battery backup, home cleaning, and connected entertainment. I don’t need all my smart home gear to work together; I just need it to work.

HARDWARE INNOVATION THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE AI

2023 was a dull year for consumer electronics. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, and streaming players have all stagnated as most of the excitement has been on the software side with the rise of generative AI.

That hype will surely spill into hardware this year as companies look to shoehorn AI into their gadgets. But can’t there be room for innovation that doesn’t involve spitting out generic text and imagery? For a time, it seemed like gadgets were back, but now they’ve become boring again. If the most anticipated gadget of 2024 is a $3,500 augmented reality development kit, we’ve got a problem.

PC CHIPS THAT AREN’T CONTINUALLY EMBARRASSED BY APPLE

A full three years after Apple started shipping laptops with its own M-series processors, Windows chipmakers still haven’t produced a credible response. Sure, Intel’s most heavy-duty processors can compete with Apple’s on raw performance, but they get trounced by Apple’s MacBooks on battery life. If you’re buying a Windows laptop today, you can have great performance or long battery life, but not both. (Sometimes, you get neither.)

There’s no guarantee that Apple’s rivals will catch up in 2024, either. Intel’s Core Ultra chips are supposed to bring efficiency gains, but early results aren’t a knockout, and both Intel and AMD seem to be focusing more on AI nowadays. Qualcomm is talking a big game about its Snapdragon X Elite processors, but Windows support for ARM chips has historically not been great.

A STREAMING GUIDE THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

While every major streaming platform is trying to build its own universal TV guide, not one of them has it all figured out yet. Roku’s is too disjointed, Fire TV’s is filled with sponsored garbage, Google TV doesn’t support enough streaming services, and Apple’s dual home screen concept is too confusing.

I realize these companies aren’t fully in control of the situation—the streaming services themselves often get in the way—but the problem of figuring out what to watch and where to watch it should be solvable by now.

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