I've done a lot of thinking about this, and I think much of the nostalgia for that era is actually rooted in limitations and the way that they made certain things exciting.

Owning a new album was exciting, because previously you couldn't listen to that album.

Getting a new mp3 player whose storage was suddenly measured in gigabytes was exciting, because previously you couldn't carry around that much music.

Getting a new phone was exciting, because it probably had a camera, or internet access, or the ability to edit files, or some other fundamentally new feature that your previous device couldn't do.

Spending a Saturday curating your music collection and updating metadata was exciting, because that couldn't be done for you automatically.

Each stage where some barrier was overcome - be it a small, personal barrier or a large, technological barrier - came with this intoxicating sense of progress and improvement and possibility. If you assembled the solution yourself from existing products - software or hardware - it was all the more potent of a feeling.

These days everything just works, amazingly well. That's a testament to progress, but it's also incredibly boring. There's little left in consumer tech to solve, by consumers or by companies. You have one miraculous device that does everything you could possibly want in your digital life, and does it really well, out of the box. It has as much bandwidth as you're likely to use, you can stream enough media to fill a thousand lifetimes for less than twenty dollars a month, it can shoot photographer-quality photos and orchestrate your smart home and play console-quality video games and run a fully-features office suite.

Progress is what gadget-lovers like us miss. Tragically, the the very act of indulging it erases opportunities for it.