Smart speakers with personal assistants like Amazon Echo etc. Not remotely useful enough to be worth placing spying Equipment all over my home.
Wireless headphones. So now I’m supposed to recharge my headphones and get worse sound quality for it? In a few years they become e-waste, while good wired headphones can last decades. No thanks.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but you have to admit that wireless headphones are convenient if you’re on the phone with someone and cooking dinner, or doing laundry, for example.
I persisted with my wired earbuds until only very recently picked up some wireless ones and can say they’re better in every way. Unless you only ever use them while sitting still. Exercising, gardening, mowing the lawn, working on the car or in the garage, anything where you’re moving about really. Not having the stupid wire getting caught on anything or accidentally pulling your phone out is a godsend.
Audio quality is fine for 99.9% of people. I think some people are stuck on views from 5 or 6 years ago. The tech has come a long way.
They certainly have their place but they can’t/don’t check all the boxes to replace wired headphones. It’s not like having a thin cord running from your ears to your pocket is a big enough issue that having to charge another device before eventually throwing it in the garbage after a couple years is a worth tradeoff.
Bluetooth and nfc audio codecs have gotten so good that unless you’re running high impedance headphones with an amp/dac, wireless is effectively indistinguishable from wired, at least for most applications, and especially if using a mobile device.
I love wireless headphones because I’m the specific flavor of clumsy that was catching my headphone cable on drawer pulls and doorknobs like 3x a week. I still have good wired headphones I use for serious music listening, but for most day to day stuff I went wireless and they honestly have lasted longer than a lot of my wired earbuds because I am such a shambling disaster.
I could see that, though personally, I just put the phone on loudspeaker in those situations. I mostly use headphones for music and general media consumption.
I find that for calling someone the mic quality is unusably poor on Bluetooth, especially when you’re washing dishes or doing something else with background noise. I use my wired earbuds connected to my phone in my back pocket so I can still walk around. The built-in mic in the earbuds that came with my phone a few years ago is pretty great.
The only time the wireless ones are more useful than wired is when you’re changing your shirt or flipping your head upside down to do your hair or something.
Yup. I begrudgingly began using wireless headphones beacuse I don’t want to have to carry around an adapter to not use them once they killed 3.5mm on phones… Granted I really only use headphones while working out or mowing the lawn or something so it’s whatever. Still hate having to worry about having charged headphones, turning on Bluetooth, figuring out if my headphones are off or ok because of the awkward button pushes to turn them off, on or get into connect mode. It’s just overly complicated.
I have become so clumsy with the wires, it was less wasteful for me to buy wireless earbuds with wire only between them. The modern codecs are high quality and I only use them outside, so the nuance would be anyway lost.
Smart speakers I do not have. I feel weird talking to devices and I would have to do it in English because they support my native language poorly if at all. I’m not sure if they even are officially available here.
Everything unnecessarily connected to the Internet should have this on them, because they have very little security auditing and all support is dropped very early on the lifetime of the appliance. https://kissa.depili.fi/internet_asbestos_52x32_cmyk.pdf
Wireless headphones. So now I’m supposed to recharge my headphones and get worse sound quality for it? In a few years they become e-waste, while good wired headphones can last decades. No thanks.
I tend to avoid any wireless peripherals, I still have a wired mouse because I don’t need to think about charging my mouse and whether it’s going to run out of charge.
Wireless mice are such a weird one to me. Like your mouse will never move more then a foot away from it’s normal spot so why do you need wireless?
I agree with all of that. Also, wireless headphones discharge when not in use, there’s no way to turn them OFF, in standby they deplete the batteries in a few days. If not used very frequently, like every day, they are never ready to use, they must be charged. There’s nothing like good wired headphones, in my case as I have an LG V20 which has a really good hi-fi dac that drives every wired headphones I plug in, going bluetooth is a huge downgrade in sound quality.
Everything that need a pay subscription to work.
Virtual assistants, e.g. Alexa, Cortana, Siri
I don’t want to interact with the companies they represent basically at all, let alone give them nearly unfettered access to my electronics and their data.
I confess to having an iPhone and other apple products, but they will Always have that “finish setting up” message forever because I will NEVER turn Siri on. Ever.
I mean I’m openly a hypocrite not a purist either when it comes to these companies, especially Google and Amazon. Like my phone is an Android and I posted an Amazon link the other day. But, I’m still trying to find ways to get them out of every possible aspect of my life. I’m just done with their particular brand of bullshit.
I’ve dabbled in the virtual assistants because I wanted to see what they can do. Siri (it’s been years so I don’t know if it improved), Alexa, Google, are all horse shit. Every time I try to use them it works like garbage. They either trigger incorrectly or try to implement something I don’t want. The few times they do work correctly I don’t trust them because of all the other garbage experiences so I have to double check what they did. That negates the entire point from a time and convenience standpoint.
I have never used Bixby, I’ve used the Google assistant a few times but other than that, no thanks
I use Google assistant to set timers and alarms, and check the weather. Besides that, nothing. The times I tried, I wrestled with it for a few minutes until I did it myself.
I use Google assistant in my car all the time. It came with android auto built into the head unit. So I can tell it to navigate to a location, play a specific song on Spotify, call my wife, read and respond to text messages… All using voice commands. I don’t have enough smart home devices to make it worth having an assistant constantly listening at home, though.
I don’t use the apps on my smart TV because I have a separate streaming device and I don’t trust that the smart TV apps will be updated properly.
Just make sure you check the release notes for firmware updates for the TV, and install them if they fix any issues you’re encountering. Obviously it can’t auto update without an internet connection, so it’ll never tell you if there’s an update itself.
Apple anything
Wow I’m surprised you didn’t get downvoted into oblivion. Personally I agree with you and I’m guessing most lemmy users are android users judging from this comment.
Same tbh. Maybe because the android crowd is more open to the idea of decentralization, where Apple users don’t mind walled gardens. Of course I’m stereotyping hardcore right now.
I’m forced to use an iphone and ipad for work and I fucking hate it. I honestly don’t understand how people find it “more intuitive”. So y’all hate the ability to go back or easily exit out of things?? And the inconsistency in swiping functions between models and versions is maddening!
Swipe from up on the iPad brings up menu A but on the iphone SE it brings up menu B but on the iphone ## it brings up menu fucking C.
Aaaahhhhh so frustrating!!
Note: I am also ND so… probably something to do with it.
The only thing I like about apple is their apple pen for making illustrations on procreate. For me, nothing is comparable.
Everything else is a nightmare though. Even if the apple pen is awesome, I just can’t recommend anyone to buy such an expensive device considering you can’t really repair it and cannot do anything apple doesn’t want you to.
Leaked emails indicate, they use iMessage to actively lock down users in their walled garden. This is area with literally zero innovation (or even regression) for past decade. At least.
Giving money to Apple basically equals to strangling innovation in exchange for getting (sometimes or even rarely) marginally better UX in boring, well explored areas.
Also once you are bought into their ecosystem you are stuck with some mediocre products like iPhone, because if you want alternative, you have to throw away watch, tv and speakers and then redo entire home automation due to lack of elementary interoperability.
That’s some real salt there buddy.
You are definitely entitled to your opinion, but ‘apple hardware and software is objectively inferior’ isn’t much of one.
It’s especially disingenuous to present those opinions like they’re established fact, when they definitely aren’t. You may not think that Apple is particularly innovative or that their UX is particularly good, but I think you’d definitely be in the minority there, especially outside of niche online communities filled with people with an axe to grind.
I’m pretty close to being as much of a power user as someone can be within the use case that I have for general purpose computing. I also feel like I probably know the mobile/desktop software space better than the average person on the street, I’m a SWE by trade.
I honestly think that the gap between the UI/UX design on Apple software and the UI/UX design on windows in particular, but android to a lesser extent, is the most compelling reason to use apple. And I also think it’s ridiculously out of touch to claim that Apple’s innovation’s (especially in hardware) aren’t significantly better executed and consistent than the competition. Sure, they don’t throw every half-baked idea into every new product they release, only to abandon that idea in 18 months for a new batch of experiments. I think that’s one of the reasons Apple users like Apple products. Personally, I’m not buying a phone because I want to spend two weeks trying out a bunch of gimmicks and then never using them again unless I’m showing my friends the cool thing my phone can do.
But, of course those are my subjective opinions and I’m not faulting you for disagreeing. There are people out there who thing Outlook is good UX, and they’re entitled to that opinion lol. But I do think it’s a little silly to disagree in a way that makes it obvious that you think that anyone who disagrees with you has no idea what they’re talking about.
