Boy I love paying a fuck ton of money for poor audio quality and shitty battery life.

Man I love being forced into technology that isn’t better than the old thing and solves no problem (rather creating new ones) for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses because everyone was told this is the cool new thing so eat up piggies or FOMO.

Call me old (I’m not), call me a Luddite (I’m not), I don’t care. You’re wrong.

Sometimes new things being pushed by the market aren’t the next leap in technology. Sometimes they are shit or pointless and should be abandoned, like 3D TVs. NEW DOESN’T ALWAYS EQUAL PROGRESS.

I feel the same about AI or touch screens being bundled into everything. Instead of the products they infect becoming better, they simply waste processing power that could have make the product perform better at the job it was originally designed to do.

A good example of this is when I once house sitted for a wealthy person. Their stovetop was all touch controlled. You want to know what doesn’t work well with touch controls? Heat and water. What do kitchens and cooking on stove tops involve a lot of? FUCKING HEAT AND WATER.

So here I am cooking, shit, waters coming to boil. Shit, a tiny droplet of boiling landed on the touch controls and it thinks it’s a finger. Shit, it thinks the finger is turning the temperature to max. Shit, it’s not responding to my actual finger now until I wipe the water off. Shit, the pasta is now starting to overcook. I could just turn the element off, but shit, the off button is also touch operated. I how have remove the pot off the element. Wipe the control. Wait for it to cool. Hold my finger on the touch controls to readjust it to how I want. And turn this fucking thing off. It’s all so slow. Why do this when a physical dial is so much cheaper and gives you instant control over the temperature with none of these problems?

Fuck it. Roast me for complaining about this. You know I’m right.

The annoying thing is there is a lot of cool things we could be developing, I actually like the progress of technology when it’s done right. But the problem is it’s all being developed with impressing the market in mind, not for actually making things better.

  • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    I used to hold this opinion but my wireless headphones are really good, plus they have a spot for a jack in case I need it. I used to go through cables like every month because they would get twisted and the cable would snap. With my wireless headphones I don’t have that problem anymore. I do think that wireless headphones should come with an option for a jack though.

    • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      Yeah I think people are forgetting how inconvenient cables of wired heaphones dying really were. Sure wireless headphones have their drawbacks but overall IMO they’re an upgrade.

      • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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        4 days ago

        I don’t think it’s always that so much as remembering how infuriating earlier wireless headphones were, every single pair I used to get in my teens lasted barely a year before something started making them unusable.

        And compared to when wired headphones start experiencing problems there was way less of a dying period, when the wireless died it was just the end of the line right away, which sucks if you dont have the money to get another pair right away.

    • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      I find it really hard to find good ones, but then most headphones in general are balanced terribly for Early Music. The PXC 550s are decent throwaways, I’ve found, but yet to find any I’d consider “good”. Earbuds proper are pretty much universally trash.

      • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        They’re Skullcandy something or rather, not sure of the model. I think they were like $50, which is expensive but easily worth the cost given the money I was spending on cords alone. They last for about a day, used to be two days a few months ago but the battery life is going down I think. I charge them while I’m at work so I generally never have to worry about them being dead.

      • ClassIsOver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        4 days ago

        Nothing Ear(open) is what I use, and it solves almost all of the problems I’ve ever had with earbuds, wired or not. They have a loop that goes over your ear so they’ll only fall out if you try putting something like a sweatshirt on, they don’t actually go in your ears so you can still hear other things and they don’t get gross because they aren’t actually touching your inner ear. The only big issues are that they won’t go super loud, and they don’t have noise cancellation.

          • ClassIsOver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            4 days ago

            I’ve turned off the AI aspect and user data sharing on them, same as I’ve done on every one of my other devices because that shit will be the death of many of us. As for the price, I get it. They’ve lasted me a long time, and with the battery life they and the case have, they’ve been more worth it than any other pair of wired or wireless headphones aside from the Logitech G Pro X gaming headset I bought a few years ago. Those don’t serve the same purpose as the earbuds, though.