Vitor Zanetti

There’s a 2010 Hyundai Azera parked on the street a few blocks from where I live. I pass it almost every day, parked in a road that is fairly wide for a neighborhood — about 9.5 meters, and the car sits there exposed to weather and the casual indifference of passing traffic; its owner keeps another vehicle in the garage. The Azera wasn’t a cheap car when it was new… In 2010, only certain people bought one: businessmen whose careers were already behind them rather than ahead, appellate judges, maybe a surgeon with a thriving clinic. Not doctors in general — they didn’t make enough for that. A thirty-year career in law would get you there. But not a lawyer. Never a lawyer. The Azera represented something specific, a statement about having arrived without needing to announce it. The car still works and the owner still drives it. He could probably afford to replace it, but replace it with what? A 2018 Camry? The Camry, where I live, isn’t the American Camry — theirs is somewhat compromised, interior trim only appearing in the highest configurations if it appears at all. Here, they come fully loaded by default. Whether that’s good or bad depends on what you value. The Corolla exists, but it’s a different vehicle entirely, a different atmosphere, a different buyer. And the Azera owner knows this, and knows what he has, and what replaced it. Yet, every morning, he gets in a car that doesn’t need to justify its existence and drives it away.

Is this mediocrity? If so, it’s not by accident.

Somewhere between Steve Jobs holding up the original iPhone and Tim Cook navigating the obligations of a public company beholden to quarterly earnings and shareholder expectations, Apple stopped asking “How do we make this perfect?” and started asking “How quickly can we ship this?”. The inflection point isn’t mysterious — Jobs died in October 2011 and, by 2013, iOS 7 arrived, and regardless of what anyone thought of skeuomorphism — an aesthetic that aged like milk left in the sun, then spoiled again, turned green, then purple, then vanished — it was clear that something had shifted. Not in the interface design itself, but in the underlying philosophy. See, Apple had become a public company in the fullest, most unforgiving sense: hostage to a market that doesn’t think for itself and is terrified of change. The market wants predictability. Apple was built on innovation, and you can’t serve both masters without comprise, and the compromise is visible everywhere you look now.

Look at macOS Big Sur. Then look at Monterey, then Ventura. Then whatever numbered humiliation they’re calling it this year. Catalina was the last operating system that felt aesthetically coherent, the last one where you sense a designer’s hand making intentional choices rather than a committee implementing directives from people who don’t use the software they’re approving. What came after was the iPadification of the Mac, i.e. a systematic dismantling of everything that made macOS a tool for professionals rather than a toy for consumers. The operating system has become a mess: cluttered with half-implemented ideas, features everyone needs but can’t find anymore because someone decided visibility was a problem that needed solving. System Preferences became System Settings, a change that carries a subtext — preferences implies adjustment within a designer’s carefully considered framework, settings implies infinite ability to change everything, remove safeguards, turn the system into whatever chaotic configuration the user desires, but nobody wants that! People want to adjust, not dismantle, and most importantly, for the designer’s choice to remain intact, just calibrated to their specific workflow. The rename seems to have been about appearing to offer control while actually removing coherence. Additionally, the redesign added clicks where there were none, by scattering related options across different panes. Something close to an archaeological expedition, to be frank. And for what? To check a box on a roadmap? To demonstrate activity? To justify someone’s continued employment in a department that has clearly run out of ideas and started rearranging furniture to simulate productivity?

This is what “good enough” looks like when institutionalized: a company that once defined excellence now defines adequacy, and the market, terrified of volatility, allergic to actual innovation, applauds because, and solely because, the stock price went up. Apple still makes products. Exceptional hardware, often. But they also manage a portfolio, and this are not the same activity. One requires taste, the other spreadsheets. And when a public company must choose between the two, the spreadsheet wins every time. This is not because Cook lacks vision, but because the structure he operates within doesn’t reward vision but predictable growth, and predictable growth comes from incremental updates which are incompatible with revolutionary risks.

The Ford Panther platform (Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis, Town Car) ran from 1979 to 2012 with the kind of evolutionary refinement that has been completely abandoned in modern automotive design. These weren’t exciting cars, they were excellent cars. This is where the boys get separated from the men, and yes, that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true in the way uncomfortable truths tend to be. The Panther cars were body-on-frame, rear-wheel drive, powered by naturally aspirated V8 engines that didn’t require a computer science degree to diagnose. You could fix them with hand tools in a parking lot. Twas the goal. They last for hundreds of thousands of miles as a baseline expectation, instead of an achievement worth celebrating. This is phenomenal. Specifically, for someone in a country where personal importation means paying roughly 400% of the vehicle’s original price — registration, taxes, compliance modifications, shipping — a Panther car is a dream car rather than a grandfather’s sedan, which is precisely the point. These cars represented a philosophy: engineered for longevity, not for lease cycles. Ford didn’t kill the platform because it was bad, no, they killed it because it became financially unviable and technologically irrelevant. By 2012, the platform couldn’t meet upcoming emissions and safety regulations without a complete re-engineering, and after thirty two years, it had become too ancient to compete with modern, fuel-efficient alternatives that the market and regulators now demanded. But let’s not pretend the replacement was equivalent. The cars that followed were designed to last exactly as long as the warranty, then begin their slow, predictable mechanical decomposition right on schedule.

The 2010 Hyundai Azera belongs to the same philosophy: engineered for longevity and built before cost-cutting became the only competitive strategy that mattered. Hyundai still makes reliable cars — nobody can dispute that — but they’ve lost something. The spirit. That dog in them. Actually, it’s more like a cat. A cat with pedigree, quiet and assured, the kinda that doesn’t need to announce itself. Okay, over with the free marketing now, because that cat doesn’t live in the contemporary Hyundais anymore; it moved out when the company decided “good enough” was sufficient and redirected resources toward making vehicles that look advanced in the showroom but require dealer-only diagnostics the moment something really goes wrong.

Modern cars have touchscreens where buttons used to be. What’s surprising isn’t that touchscreens are there because they’re better (they aren’t), but because they’re cheaper to manufacture and simulate innovation. Never mind that using them while driving requires taking your eyes off the road, that they fail in extreme temperatures, when the software glitches or when the company stops supporting that model year’s infotainment system a given number of years after the purchase. Japanese infotainment systems have long been laggy — a peculiar technological blind spot for manufacturers who otherwise engineer with obsessive precision — but the current generation isn’t just slow; it’s actively hostile. Lexus and Toyota, in this case, ship cars with systems so unintuitive, so obviously designed by people who don’t drive, that you can feel the company’s contempt radiating from the center console. Lexus in particular is a brand built on isolating occupants from the vulgarity of the outside world that now forces drivers to navigate three submenus to adjust the climate control. Volvo, meanwhile, installed massive touchscreens in vehicles whose entire brand identity was built on safety, apparently unconcerned that removing tactile controls makes their cars more prone to accidents — not less safe in a crash, but more likely to cause one because the driver is staring at a screen instead of the road.

Europe’s Euro NCAP finally noticed this and announced that starting January 2026, physical controls for essential safety functions — wipers, indicators, horn, hazard lights — will be required for a five-star safety rating. Not because regulators suddenly developed aesthetics preferences, but because touch interfaces in cars have become a measurable safety hazard, and someone finally admitted that this regulation was necessary. It really tells you everything. Manufacturers replaced functional controls with screens not to improve the driving experience but to reduce costs and create the appearance of progress. The screens aren’t there for drivers, they’re there for quarterly earning calls, reviewers who spend fifteen minutes in the car and declare it “futuristic” and buyers who confuse novelty with quality. 

In the software world, Adobe stopped selling Photoshop and started renting it, not because subscription models benefit users — they don’t — but because they benefit Adobe. Predictable revenue and permanent dependence, briefly explained. The software doesn’t need to get better anymore, it just needs to stay necessary, and if you try to leave, cancellation fees are applied. For a digital product. Not a car lease, not a gym membership — software. You pay to access what you already paid to access, and if you stop paying, Adobe keeps the money and you lose the tool. This isn’t a business model. It’s vassalage. Autodesk did the same with AutoCAD and every other application in their ecosystem, turning professional tools into ransom notes. The software itself hasn’t meaningfully improved in a decade, but the price keeps climbing because the exits have been systematically sealed. Nobody else makes software that does what AutoCAD does. Nobody else makes software that opens AutoCAD files properly. So you pay. Every month. Forever. Or you leave your profession.

The “good enough” strategy revealed: make it just functional enough that people don’t revolt, just broken enough that they need support, just locked-in enough that leaving costs more than staying. This is the monopolistic endgame; the least-bad option market.

Spotify pays artists pennies per stream, amounts so negligible that musicians need millions of plays to afford rent, but it pays Joe Rogan $250 million for a podcast because celebrity is more valuable than art, and art is only valuable when it can be aggregated into a subscription service that extracts maximum revenue while delivering minimum compensation to the people who create the thing being sold. Netflix removes the movies you liked without warning. Amazon Prime Video now has ads despite the subscription fee. YouTube Premium costs more every year while delivering the same experience: a platform actively hostile to both creators and viewers, mediated by an algorithm designed to maximize engagement, not satisfaction. The service degrades. The price increases. The content disappears. And people accept it because the alternative is fragmentation across seventeen different services, each one slightly worse than the aggregator everyone left behind.

And it’s not just the large platforms, because every trivial application now demands a subscription. Notes apps. To-do lists. Weather forecasts. Who pays for a notes app when Apple Notes exists for free? Who needs an app badly enough to subscribe monthly? Apparently, enough people to make it profitable, surely the same people who would pay for heated seats as a subscription if manufacturers could get away with it — and they’re trying. BMW attempted it, but the backlash was immediate and severe enough that they backpedaled, but the attempt itself revealed the finale: everything becomes a service, nothing is owned, and the idea of purchasing a product that simply works without ongoing fees becomes as picturesque as expecting a car to last thirty years.

That Azera owner has an artifact from a different economic philosophy, one where manufacturers competed on durability because customers expected it and would punish companies that failed to deliver. That expectation now has been successfully eroded. Customers have been trained to accept that products are disposable, that software will always be buggy, that services will degrade over time, that companies will extract maximum value while delivering minimum quality. And this training has been so effective that people now defend it by making excuses for corporations that don’t need excuses and wouldn’t care if they had them. When everything is mediocre, mediocrity stops registering as a problem. The baseline shifts. People forget what excellence felt like. This isn’t accidental. It’s the logical outcome of flooding the market with “good enough” until “good enough” becomes the only frame of reference. People born after 2010 probably have never used a computer that wasn’t slow. They might have never used a computer at all! They’ve never owned a phone that didn’t require nightly charging. They’ve never experienced software that did exactly what it claimed without requiring an internet connection, an account, and permission from a server that might not exist in five years. To them, this is normal. Not because it’s good, but because it’s all they know. And this is where the real violence happens — not in the products themselves, but in the generational amnesia they produce. If you never experienced a Toyota that lasted twenty or so years, you don’t know to demand one. If you never used software you truly owned, you don’t know what you’re missing when everything becomes a subscription. If you never drove a car with physical buttons, you don’t realize how much cognitive load has been added to the simple act of turning on your windshield wipers.

In the end, the companies producing “good enough” products aren’t just selling inferior goods. They’re redefining what people think they’re entitled to expect. This is the endgame: not merely to sell less for more, but to make people forget that more ever existed, and once that forgetting is complete, once the last person who remembers what quality looked like is gone, the market can settle into its final form: permanent adequacy, infinite extraction, zero accountability. The Azera owner resists, even if unknowingly, contemporaneity, because he’s holding onto the last artifact of an economic philosophy that no longer exists. He knows what he has. He knows what replaced it. He knows which one is better. And every morning, he quietly refuses the future being sold.