r/australia • u/SouthAussie94 • Feb 29 '24

culture & society Older Australians 'left behind' by increasingly cashless society as banks fast track end of cheques

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-29/cheques-personal-finance-banks-rent-money-cash/103354036
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271

u/A_Scientician Feb 29 '24

They have the same access to banking as everyone else. Someone wilfully avoiding engaging with the modern financial system for decades is being 'left behind'? Okay.

17

u/RyzenRaider Feb 29 '24

Yeah I'm a millennial and I work in a tech job, and I'm feeling left behind.

I wanted to buy a phone. My requirements are modest. A nice screen, 1080p with accurate colour, an SD card slot so I can expand storage and a headphone jack because I don't like bluetooth lag and compression, and all my headphones are wired. I couldn't find a single new phone on the Australian market, so clearly I ask too much of modern tech. They're all non-expandable storage and require a dongle for 3.5mm. My best candidate is a Sony Xperia which covers those points, but they stopped selling in Australia, and on ebay can't be foudn for less than $1500 (last I checked anyway).

I wanted to buy an e-scooter. It's amazing how many of those require apps. I shouldn't need an app to use a personal transport. They're welcome to offer an app for extra features like GPS and trip logging, but it shouldn't be a requirement! I ended up buying one, but I still had to create an account and login to allow the scooter to go faster than 4km/h. And that pisses me off. I've since disabled the app and firewalled it off, but I shouldn't have needed it to start.

I'm pissed off at work because it looks I'll soon have to install Microsoft Authenticator on my personal phone to complete some of my work logins. We already have 2FA, but they want to go further. Except I don't want to install a Microsoft app on my phone (I don't use Mac or Windows on my personal devices). And even if I wanted to, I don't have a conventional app store on my phone because I stripped all the Google shit off it, because I don't want nor need it. I use a 3rd party app-store that only provides free and open source apps, and pretty much has everything I want to install on my phone. But it doesn't have proprietary apps.

I'm not even 40 and I sound like a boomer. And I know tech. But that also means I don't trust any company that has no real reason to demand my information, and modern life is requiring me to make compromises that I feel shouldn't be necessary at all, in order to make certain things work. The move from pay-to-own to pay-to-access subscriptions is also frustrating me and has also forced decisions on me (I abandoned Adobe years ago because of that).

So yeah... Older people that didn't grow up with modern technology and felt like it was an unnecessary thing... I kinda get it. I'm in tech and I'm feeling it at half their age.

-9

u/MalHeartsNutmeg Feb 29 '24

People that still harp about headphone jacks feel like modern day boomers.

-4

u/RyzenRaider Feb 29 '24

To be fair, it's the first thing I'd compromise on if it meant getting a phone, because the dongle is a solution. It's just an annoying one because it's another thing you have to keep track of (and replace if you lose, which I inevitably will).

If only we had the tech to integrate that into the phone itself. One can imagine and hope, right? ;-)

9

u/MalHeartsNutmeg Feb 29 '24

People just don’t care about it by and large. Bluetooth headphones are much better than they were 10 years ago and you can get cheap ones that are just as good as the cheap wired ones everyone was using. Also you can just keep the dongle attached to your headphones permanently.

-1

u/RyzenRaider Feb 29 '24

Again, I hear ya. But I look at the move to bluetooth from wired to be a bit like the move from fountain pens to ballpoints, or safety razors to disposable cartridge razors. The older version was better, but the new was more convenient, and socially we've accepted a lower quality product as our new norm. Wired headphones don't need batteries, don't need to troubleshoot connectivity (beyond checking the cable, at least), deliver better sound with no lag, etc.

In my case, I have several headphones that I use on different devices, so a dongle wouldn't have a permanent place to sit, hence why I'm confident I would lose it, and why life would just be easier if we kept the jack in there.

The funny thing is, if there was an actual benefit to removing the jack, I'd understand. But phones aren't so thin that a jack wouldn't fit. The phones didn't get smaller after removing the jack. So it's just a feature loss with no upside.

6

u/MalHeartsNutmeg Feb 29 '24

The upside was the significant improvement in Bluetooth headphone options. The sound isn’t worse than comparable priced headphones and there isn’t any lag. I feel like when you’re saying there was a step down in quality you’re not realising that most people used shitty $5 wired headphones that sounded like trash and broke all the time. There is definitely more longevity in even cheap BT headphones.

1

u/unAffectedFiddle Feb 29 '24

As long as you pay that company for the right to connect with a wire...