The Atlantic [unpaywalled] – Instruction Manuals: In Memoriam. Are we better off for that?: “Just the other day, I had to read the manual. I’d borrowed my neighbor’s hammer drill to make some holes in a masonry wall, and I didn’t know how to swap the bits. Fortunately, the drill’s carrying case came with a booklet of instructions, which I followed with great success. Many holes were thus produced. This got me thinking: I used to read the manual fairly often; now I almost never do. I own a smartphone, a handful of laptops, and a barrage of smart-home gadgets; for several days this winter, I also played around with Apple’s brand-new, ultra-high-definition VR headset. Yet not a single one of these devices, each a million times more complicated than the drill, came with any useful printed matter—usually just a “Quick Start” booklet and, if I was lucky, a QR code that linked to further help online. The instruction manual’s decline has been slow and plodding, like the act of going through a manual itself. (The universal joke about instruction manuals has always been that no one ever reads them.) Technological advances, especially in electronics, have made it easier for products to tell you how to use them as you go…”