I'm only familiar with technological history from about 100-200 years ago, so I don't know how much daily life changed before that. I want to know if there was a massive leap in quality of life, or if there wasn't much difference at all.
This is a very broad question, so I will focus on my own area of expertise, namely swords and duelling, which touches on broader technological topics like armour and metalworking.
The western European metallurgy of 500 AD was essentially Roman, although with the collapse of imperial commerce in the west, the economics of metalworking and procurement would evolve for some time. But the basic technology of steel smithing was known throughout the Roman world, and dispersed into non-Roman regions like Germania and Scandinavia quite readily.
Late Roman/early medieval steel forging for long-bladed weapons like swords involved two distinct processes, layering and pattern-welding. Layering was a technique for building up a strong steel by hammering irregular raw steel out, folding it back on itself, and repeating the process. The steel might be folded on itself in sandwich-like layers or it might be twisted together like cables. The purpose was essentially to "knead" the steel and smooth out irregularities that could otherwise form a weak point. Pattern-welding, on the other hand, was a technique for combining two steels with different properties into a single piece. Steel smiths knew how to forge and temper a hard steel that could cut through softer metals, but they also knew that this hardness also made the steel brittle and prone to shipping and breaking. A softer steel was more resilient against breakage, but would not cut as well. Pattern-welding let them combine both hard and soft steels together in a variety of ways (soft core + hard edge; soft core + hard jacket; alternating layers of soft and hard steel) to gain the benefits of both sharpness and toughness.
This was a complex and labour-intensive process, and therefore expensive. The longer the sword, the more prone it was to breaking, and therefore the more expensive it was to make it resistant to breakage. Roman swords had already begun the evolution to longer lengths as the classic gladii were replaced with longer spatha, which was widely adopted throughout early medieval Europe (and was, in fact, derived from earlier Celtic styles). And swords would only grow longer as the middle ages progressed, and equestrian warfare became the norm (although that was not yet the case in 500).
But the high expense, and the loss of empire-level procurement and industrial production meant that long swords were produced in a more artisanal fashion, rather than as large procurements of standard patterns for common soldiers. They were actually fairly rare weapons of prestige, and it made a lot of sense to treat them as heirloom objects. In consequence they had longevity, and did not evolve very quickly. Axes and spears made much more economic sense, as their small weapon heads did not require nearly so much metallurgical technology in order to perform well. Shorter daggers and sword-like weapons such as the seax also required less metallurgical wizardry to perform well.
Similar metallurgical issues affected the construction of metal armour, and armour plate also became rare and prestigious. As with smaller weapon heads, you could mitigate the metallurgical issues by relying on smaller armour pieces, and metal armours of the early middle ages were typically some sort of mail, with larger pieces reserved only for the most vital spots such as the head.
By 1500, everything had changed. The key technological revolution happened somewhere around the 11th Century, when steel smelting was revolutionized using new types of blast furnaces. This lead to an influx of relatively cheap, high-quality steel, and that completely overturned the economics of medieval arms manufacture.
Now you did not need to spend all that effort layering and pattern-welding your steel to make serviceable blades. That meant that a) poorer people could afford to purchase swords, b) richer people could afford to purchase swords in bulk, c) swords could get longer without much added expense. In consequence, swords began to evolve rapidly as they fulfilled more military roles, and grew to hand-and-a-half and even gigantic two-handed lengths. Pattern swords reappeared in armouries, and once again began to outfit regular soldiers. But the rapid evolution of swords also meant they were more disposable. Passing swords down through the generations no longer made sense when the old one was designed for a completely different set of military circumstances, and a new one was comparatively affordable. In consequence, fashion started to take a role in the design of sword hilts.
Armour also began rapidly evolving in the late middle ages. Larger pieces of tough steel were easier to produce, and plate armour actually ended up becoming more economical than mail (which still involved lots of manual labour to weave and rivet the links). By the 1500s, even common soldiers were being outfitted with pattern plate armour. Spanish soldiers of the 16th Century, for instance, were outfitted with steel breastplates, morions (steel helmets), steel shields, a long cut-and-thrust sword with a moderately developed hilt, and a pike or halberd. By comparison an early medieval man-at-arms would have been fortunate to have a leather or padded coat and a wooden shield to go along with his axe and spear. So the technological differences there are quite significant.
The number of technological advancements made between 500 and 1500 AD is sufficiently large that even a basic summary of them would fill a small book (Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, by Frances and Joseph Gies). Did they change the quality of life much? That's harder to say. On one hand, slaves were entirely unnecessary for the economy due to the massive increase in mechanisation. While the Romans had some quite elaborate water powered industrial complexes, these weren't anywhere near as widespread or common as in the later Middle Ages. Water and, towards the end, wind powered mills ground grain, fulled cloth (pummeled it to close up the weave), broke up ore, powered bellows, cut wood, pulped linen rags for paper and performed many other tasks besides. This freed people from a lot of menial jobs and made slavery non-viable. Other improvements, such as the horizontal loom and spinning wheel, also helped reduce the number of people needed to perform a given task.
On the other hand, a lot of the really major improvements in quality of life can be traced down to the relative stability and economic development of Western Europe in 1500 compared with 500 AD. The West was economically backward throughout the Roman period and largely sustained by the Roman government's transport subsidies. During the Middle Ages the West was able to build up its economy to the point where trade balances corrected themselves and the West was able to compete on a more equal footing with the rest of the world. While technology played a role in this, I'm not sure whether technology drove economy, economy drove technology or if there was a point where the emphasis switched from one to the other.
With that said, the visitor to 1500 AD from the year 500 will notice some huge changes. Most peasants own one or two horses, which are used for everything from ploughing to pulling massive wagons. Oxen are hardly used as beasts of burden at all, although in some areas with hard to plough or poor soil they remain in common use for ploughing. The horse collar has allowed for larger loads to be pulled and, since horses are generally faster than oxen in everything, this has sped up farmwork and land transport. These large numbers of horses are sustainable because the wheeled plough allowed much heavier soils to be worked and this in turn allowed true three-field cropping to dominate, producing a surplus of oats. While the Romans had a form of three-field crop rotation, it never seems to have been widespread outside of some areas due to the thin and often poor nature of Mediterranean soils. The treadle powered spinning wheel, combined with the horizontal loom, has also increased cloth production, so that better qualities of cloth are available at cheaper prices and the labour required has similarly gone down. A single spinning wheel, for example, might produce five times as much yarn per day as a drop spindle, while the horizontal loom could weave a wider and longer piece of fabric with no need to constantly readjust loom weights and unwind yarn - that happened automatically off spools.
In towns - and also villages! - you'll find that much larger sections of the population are literate than even at the height of the Roman Empire. This is because the introduction of paper (from Spain, via the Islamic world) in the 13th century and the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century has allowed the mass production of books and the scale has been very rapidly ramped up. As much as 50% of the population in cities such as London were literate in vernacular languages and 40% of the population could likely read Latin. And read they did; somewhere between 40 000 works and 15-20 million copies had been printed by 1500, in addition to innumerable pamphlets, lists, bills and newsletters that rapidly spread new ideas, made suppression of them virtually impossible and saw large scale propaganda wars being fought such as, for example, during the Wars of the Roses, where an incredible number of these warring narratives still exist.
Iron was in much greater abundance too, with the blast furnace greatly increasing the amount of iron that could be produced, and much bigger operations being run. Huge workshops, rather than relatively small scale smelters, now produced 60 000 tons of iron or so each year, and the forerunner of the rolling mill was introduced in the first decade of the 16th century to produce small barstock to more quickly and cheaply manufacture nails. Even the poorest peasant in 1500 likely owned more, and better quality, metal than a moderate to wealthy peasant in 500 AD.
Firearms had also changed the arms of warfare. While crossbows continued to be used into the 1520s and even later, by 1500 firearms were well on the way to becoming the dominant missile weapon on the battlefield and cannons are the only siege weapon worth mentioning. Walls have become lower and thicker, often sloped, in order to counter them, though most older fortifications still exist as they did a century earlier.
Ships are massively larger, capable of carrying ten or twenty times the average of cargo ships in 500 AD - although it should be noted that there were many much smaller ships in 1500 AD, just as there were quite large ships in 500 AD - and they are much sturdier, being built frame first instead of hull first. In part these sizes are the product of an improved economy. Ships of the 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD could be every bit as large as ships of 1500 AD and it's entirely possible that there were as many ships carrying ten or fifteen times the cargo of ships from 500 AD as in 1500 AD. The increased durability and speed of the later cargo ships (carrying more masts and sails), however, has made sea transport faster and less risky than in earlier centuries. Navigation has also greatly been improved by the use of compasses, tables of latitude and accurate charts, which makes sailing to ports previously not visited or returning to them much more accurate than before.
In economic terms, the peasant in 1500 AD does have a higher standard of living than one in 500 AD, but this has a lot to do with the Black Death. Such huge portions of the population had died that labour was at a premium, while demand for common goods was greatly reduced. The result was a net increase in wages and increase in the standard of living, especially as the fully monetary economy of 1500 AD - compared with the monetised economy of 500 AD - meant that wages were paid in coin rather than in kind and allowed the wage earners to more easily spend their wages and resulting in less wastage. Inflation, whoever, was already beginning again as money began circulating faster without a similar increase in consumer goods and large amounts of silver from German mines and, in a couple of decades, from the New World, increased the amount of coinage in circulation.
Unfortunately, none of this answers your question. There were massive technological changes, certainly, and the standard of living was definitely better in 1500 AD than in 500 AD, but how much of that was because of technology and how much of it was due to environmental factors and economic growth? What drove which, and did this switch at any point?
I don't know. I've written a lot of words to get to this point, and I hope it hasn't been too boring, but the truth of the matter is that this would be an excellent thesis question and I don't think it's been fully studied or considered. Hopefully, though, I've given you some idea of the ways in which technology did change the lives of common people at the end of the Middle Ages, regardless of how that change was ultimately achieved.
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