Americans Hate Tingle / Technology

• EMV chips for payment cards, despite becoming common in Europe and Australia in the 1990s, took a long time to achieve widespread use in the United States, with many major banks taking as late as the 2010s to start offering chip-embedded cards to customers, in spite of magnetic stripe readers being notorious for vulnerabilities that allow card thieves to easily obtain and abuse unsuspecting users' card info. The cost to upgrade and activate chip readers (many businesses will have terminals with chip readers disabled and taped over) were a couple reasons for this; it's become something of a meme for customers and retail workers to get headaches trying to figure out how they should use their card and instruct customers on which part of the terminal to use, respectively. Retailers only started moving toward EMV when the card companies put them on the hook for fraudulent charges unless they upgraded their POS terminals. Needless to say, Europeans are nonplussed whenever they have to make payments in the United States due to having to go back to swiping their cards, especially with all the vulnerabilities of magnetic stripe readers (compared to EMV) that make card fraud so common in the first place.
  • This began to change in 2015 in the wake of some high-profile card data breaches. In October of that year, a change in the law went into effect that required merchants to eat half of the costs of any fraud that resulted from a man-in-the-middle attack that stole the card numbers from their systems (previously the banks had to absorb the costs). Major retailers began requiring customers to use the chip reader if they had chipped cards^note American Express had been issuing cards with chips since the early 1990s, leading to all sorts of whining about why this was necessary^note the reason for the change had not been widely explained and that it took longer^note Probably a perception created by the unease of having to let go of the card for a few seconds ... it really doesn't take any longer for the transaction to go through.. By 2018 it seems that people have gotten accustomed to this and the backlash has faded.
    
    Of course, to be fair to Americans, the US had jumped out way in front on credit-card security by the late 1980s, when the existence of a real-time network to verify cards and their credit status made the system much less fraud-prone. Laws limited the liability of cardholders for fraudulent charges as long as they reported them promptly. Americans thus never saw the credit card system as much of a fraud risk (provided you took care of your own card, its security code, and monitored your statements) as Europeans always had.
  • This is starting to repeat with contactless ("wave and pay") cards in North America. This is largely due to tinfoil hatters claiming that it would be easy for hackers to clone their card and commit identity fraud without even touching their wallet, and is largely backed by studies by "privacy groups". Compounding to things is the competition from phone-based NFC payment systems, which is faring much better in the west, although the availability of multiple, incompatible standards (Apple Pay vs Samsung Pay vs Google Pay) does complicate things a little. Eventually, the COVID-19 Pandemic made contactless payment more common because cardholders didn't need to hand their cards or cash to a cashier and risk contracting the disease.
    • Speaking of NFC systems, despite having a lot of Filipinos being open to having the idea of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay in the Philippines to make things easy in paying, sadly the said system has yet to catch on in the country due to many factors, including the Bangko Sentral yet to implement the system officially, the banks that have yet to also offer the systems to their customers there (Although a few do have NFC pay systems but not based on those three), other contactless pay systems in use not based on NFC like Globe's GCash and Maya, and Apple, Google and Samsung considering the Philippines as a country that's not yet ready to have the services available there. That's on top of the country's population still pays in actual cash most of the time for buying items, and not everyone has a bank account on top of that.
  • This trope applies to credit cards overall on the continent. While credit cards are popular in the UK (it likely helps that London is a major financial hub) and the rest of the Anglosphere, many people in continental Europe shun them in favor of cash and debit cards, while favoring installment plans or personal loans for large purchases that they need time to pay off. One possible explanation is a cultural aversion to debt and revolving lines of credit, as well as the perception of riskiness which led to the development of EMV above. Americans in turn perceive debit cards as riskier because they're connected directly to the cardholder's bank account. A thief who gets hold of a debit card can clean the victim's account out while their bank account is tied up waiting for a replacement.
• Nokia. In most of the world, they have a sterling reputation for selling billions of the most advanced and reliable cell phones ever made. But in North America, they are only remembered for some rather unimpressive, albeit Made of Indestructium, low-end devices. Blame carriers, who wanted to remove features from their high-end phones to sell piecemeal (such as disabling wi-fi to make people use their expensive data plans) or develop bespoke phones for the likes of Verizon which are completely different from those used in Eurasian regions (BREW instead of Java ME as well as the CDMA wireless standard), and shunned Nokia when they refused to compromise. Symbian, a smartphone OS co-maintained by Nokia, wasn't as popular as it was in the rest of the world either.
• The French automotive industry, while still very prominent in most parts of the world, has been completely nonexistent in the US and Canada since the early '90s. Although the big three French carmakers (Peugeot, Citroën, and Renault) were respectively discontinued at different times and for different specific reasons, the biggest factor for their loss of popularity in North America is that by the late 20th Century, French automakers had earned a lackluster quality reputation compared to German and Japanese brands, leaving them in unprofitable competition against a fierce domestic market. Citroën specifically was destroyed because their SM model did not meet design regulations particular to the US. Although some Nissan models sold in the US and Canada contain parts manufactured by Renault, none of the French brands have consolidated any coherent attempt to return to those countries concretely since they first bowed out. Peugeot and Citroën have since merged with Fiat Chrysler (the company that owns Dodge), so we may see the French try and make a comeback.
• Video telephony. In the US, the technology has failed to catch on with consumers and is widely only used in businesses, largely due to accusations of invasion of privacy. A lot of people feel self-conscious about being on camera, while people often multitask during audio-only calls. However, in Japan and South Korea, video calling is huge. This is largely due to the social protocols and culture of the two countries, who see eye-to-eye contact while talking extremely important. The technology would only become more widespread stateside with the COVID-19 Pandemic and the scramble toward telework making such conferencing necessary. Even then, videoconferencing remains widely disliked; westerners who work remotely generally prefer to conduct business calls with their camera turned off, when they aren't using text-based methods like Slack or email instead.
• High Speed Rail in the US. Because cities in the US are so spread out in combination with lower population density in many areas as opposed to Europe and Japan^note This is more or less because a good portion of Americans tend to live in suburbs and rural areas, and city infrastructure is built around long highways, which makes public transportation less convenient., most people taking trips longer than a reasonable driving distance will fly rather than taking the train. Consequently, most of the intercity rail lines in the country use slower diesel engines. This is one of the reasons intercity rail as a whole fell into this in America in favor of automobile and air travel after World War II. There is one exception: Amtrak's Northeast Corridor on the East Coast, where there are several major cities relatively close together: New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Boston, which are served by the Acela. Even then, the Acela is slower than the TGV or Shinkansen and caters to business travelers, as it has no coach class.
  • The story is more complicated than that. In the case of Europe/Japan, World War II destroyed much of their infrastructure, including complex rail systems dating to the 19th century. In rebuilding, these countries were more able to build trackage and equipment that enabled much faster rail^note Particularly, tracks that were essentially straight lines with very few curves (and those curves that were there are slight), leading to advancements in high-speed rail. The US, both completely untouched by the war and a nation whose foundation was the supremacy of private property, lacked the ability to start from scratch in terms of trackage due to the vested interests in the freight rail business. On top of this, in the aftermath of World War II, car companies, riding high on being the Arsenal of America, leveraged that to their political and economic favor by buying up rail and trolley car companies, only to shut them down years later. Finally, political interests in the US that enabled capital flight to the suburbs in that period favored the automobile over rail because the former justified property sprawl more easily. They were helped by President Eisenhower, who sought to recreate the Autobahn in the US for "national security" purposes. The image of owning a single-family house with its own lawn and a powerful car, combined with a successful business is seen as the "American Dream" has also played a role.
• Mechanical sawmills are as old as the Romans and had a period of rapid development in Western Europe from the 16th century on. In the early 17th century they were introduced to the British colonies in America by German immigrants, yet they remained so conspicuously absent from Britain itself that an Urban Legend arose, claiming that sawmills had been banned by an Act of Parliament at the request of sawyer guilds. Despite several authors denouncing that no such Act existed already in the 18th century, the British continued to rely on Medieval two-man saws to cut timber into the early 19th century, much to the bafflement of modern historians.
• Sony's MiniDisc format was popular in Japan and to a lesser extent in Europe, but failed to catch on outside of a cult following of audio professionals and audiophiles as a more portable, recordable alternative to the Compact Disc. This has been attributed to several reasons: the lack of prerecorded minidiscs compared to CDs, the lack of stereo component recorders/players (most were portable), problems with ATRAC compression, and the high costs of players/recorders and blank media. Despite improvements in playback and smaller devices, the advent of CD burners, anti-skip buffers in portable CD players (a feature pioneered by MiniDisc), and finally the arrival of digital music players like Apple's iPod made the format less attractive to American consumers, though MD players did attract a cult following for their small size and the durability of the media, as the discs were enclosed in plastic cases similar to 3.5" floppy disks. They were largely relegated to professional work as an alternative to DAT for field recording and in recording studios, though even these were also superseded by solid-state recorders and computer recording software. Another possible reason for MD's stateside failure was the greater use of public transportation in Japan and Europe, where the small size of discs and players was more valued than in auto-dependent America. On the other hand, their Japanese popularity can the attributed to how they fit better with the business model of the Japanese music industry. In Japan, albums are far more expensive than they are in other countries, making music rentals a popular means of consuming music; the MiniDisc gave consumers the option of recording their own personal copies of rented CDs.
• The printing press in the Ottoman Empire. While it is a myth that it was banned there for religious reasons, it really was very slow to catch on and it was used only by non-Muslims for a long time, such as Iberian Jews (who introduced it in 1493), Armenians (who adopted it in 1567), and Greeks (ditto 1627), all of whom published in their own languages rather than in Turkish or Arabic. Muslims were reluctant to adopt the printing press because they held calligraphy as an art and considered printed books crude in comparison to handwritten copies. It wasn't until 1727 when the first Muslim printing house in the Ottoman Empire was created (although there had been imports of Arabic-printed books from the West in earlier centuries), and religious books continued to be copied by hand only until the reign of Mahmud II (1785-1839).
• The Germans and Austrians do not like Google Street View. Given both countries' history with authoritarianism, they consider the right to privacy to be sacrosanct (then-West Germany passed the world's first data protection law in 1970), and Google faced an enormous backlash when its Street View cars went out to photograph every street in the country, with people frequently petitioning for their homes to be blurred out in Street View — demands that Google was legally required to oblige, unlike in other countries. Google eventually just gave up in 2011 after only doing the twenty largest cities in Germany, and after having its Street View cars temporarily banned from Austria after it was learned that they were lifting data from unencrypted WiFi networks without authorization. (Street View eventually returned to Austria in 2017, but under very stringent rules; to this day, only a few places in Austria are covered.) This map◊ illustrates it perfectly, with Germany and Austria conspicuous in their lack of coverage in Google Street View.
• This trope hits Apple computers really hard in the rest of the world outside US, averting Everyone Owns a Mac scene there:
  • Especially in developing countries, for example in Mexico: Not only Macs are more expensive in Mexico compared with even branded PCs (not to mention assembled PCs) the only places in that country you will find someone using Macs are music studios, TV and radio stations and universities and even in Mexican universities, the use of a Mac is severely restricted for specific degrees and work niches (like audio and video editing) and many times you will need permission from higher-ups for using one for something not related with its intended use, and sometimes you will need permission to even touch one. Because Macs are so expensive in Mexico and letting anyone who normally only knows how to use a IBM-compatible PC it's not a good idea. Just to get an idea, a regular, assembled, IBM-compatible PC with features similar to those of a Mac costs between 5,000 and 15,000 pesos in Mexico (Approximately 260 to 800 dollars to 2018, including taxes, since Mexico uses the value-added tax regime). On the other hand, a Mac costs in Mexico, already with taxes included, between 15,000 to (depending on the model, which in this case would be the iMac Pro) 117,000 pesos (about 800 to 6,240 dollars at 2018). No wonder that many places restrict the use of these computers due to their high price, and the fact that Macs are integrated computers, the only way to fix or replace one is to take it with the manufacturer, at a very steep cost, while for a IBM-compatible PC the price of repairing one is relatively low, for reasons more than obvious.
  • Even in developed countries like Japan, the prices for a Mac are insanely expensive compared to Windows-based computers. While Macs are ubiquitous in Western film and TV production, in Japanese anime and manga studios, as well as other media development in the rest of the world, the staff are happily using Windows PCs there. If you visit an Apple Store in Japan, the staff will be overwhelmingly American, since tourists from the US are their primary demographic.
    • However, as of recently, the trope has been mostly averted as Mac has caught up and becomes a popular alternative to Windows in Japan, thanks to the iPhone and iPad being popular.
• In the 2000s, Japanese flip phones introduced many features that would later become ubiquitous to smartphones, such as emoji, mobile games, apps, and web browsing. However, these features were unsuccessful outside of Japan because they required significant infrastructure to work, making them only feasible in the compact cities of Japan, and completely useless overseas.^note This isolated development led to the coining of the term "Galápagos syndrome," after how the Galápagos Islands evolved independent from their surroundings. Smartphones would introduce these features on a wide scale outside of Japan thanks to satellite technology, but took a while to catch on in Japan due to a reluctance to abandon the flip phone. Even today, flip phones are still used alongside smartphones in Japan, though they are slowly declining in popularity.
• Samsung devices, especially its phones, are popular in most parts of the world, with Japan and China being major exceptions.
  • While its mobile devices had always been overshadowed by Apple's in Japan, and it also had long given up on the TV market there, the tipping point came in 2015, when TouchWiz 6.0 broke from standard emoji conventions and changed a number of emoji images relating to Japan to either generic images, Korean equivalents, or nothing at all (like the map of Japan). The backlash from this move caused Samsung to not only revert these changes, but also drop its name branding from almost everything Samsung related in Japan (with the sole exception of the Samsung Flow app), instead solely using the Galaxy name for its phones and tablets. Samsung being a South Korean company is only part of the problem, as LG, another South Korean company, not only has never had to drop its name branding in Japan despite being less popular worldwide, but has even managed to carve out a significant share in Japan's competitive TV market.
  • As for China, while it actually held the undisputed lead in market share there back in 2014, a long series of missteps, starting from not adapting to Google exiting China (breaking Google services there and forcing the Chinese to come up with their own alternate store), to not recalling faulty Galaxy Note 7 devices in China only, caused its market share there to erode to almost nothing just six years later.
• Most Americans associate the transition to widescreen television with the introduction of HDTV in the mid Turn of the Millennium, since widescreen televisions were almost unheard of before then. However, widescreen standard definition televisions were actually quite popular in many other countries during The '90s and early Turn of the Millennium. This was due to the US' lower resolution NTSC television standard being less suited to widescreen broadcasting.
• Non-Japanese computers are very unpopular in Japan, since not only the MSX, PC-88/PC-98, FM-7, FM Towns, X1 and X68000 already do a huge competition, as well as consoles like Famicom, Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, SNES, PC Engine, even arcades like CPS and Neo Geo, but also then-difficult to reproduce kanji text and simply the fact the Japanese customers prefer buying a domestically-made product and back then generally regarded foreign computers as inferior in specs, even if computers like the Amiga proved otherwise.
• Although Windows ME wasn't loved in its home country either, the Dutch had an extremely negative perception towards the operating system, to point where they even made their own mocking nickname: "Windows Meer Ellende". ^note "more suffering" in Dutch.
• Zig-zagged with text messaging in the U.S. When SMS was introduced to the country, most mobile phone subscribers shunned it while it became massively popular elsewhere due to the expense of sending text messages. Text messaging later became popular when mobile providers began bundling it into "unlimited" plans, but text messaging has remained popular in the U.S. as mobile phone users in Europe have moved on to WhatsApp. Again, this is due to the expense of text messaging, as Europe has a lower land mass and Europeans and Latin Americans, who are among the app's biggest users, tend to have more international contacts than Americans do. Since WhatsApp runs on top of the internet, it does away with texting costs. Americans see no need for it because they already have unlimited texting plans. Stateside, it's data that's expensive, an inversion of the situation overseas.