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.
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.
Got myself a fiio (IIRC) BT DAC and can’t go back. Sound quality sure differs from a phone DAC.
Still got an ass-long cable though lol!
Audio quality wasn’t even on my radar since I’m not an audiophile, but them being at parity doesn’t sway the argument one way or the other. Good technology typically outpaces the thing it replaces in all aspects. In this case, BT is effectively neutral or worse in many cases which is why I don’t feel like it should replace the old method (headphone jack removal) but rather coexist alongside of it. I feel like we’re going backwards wheh dongles enter the picture. It gives me flashbacks to the very early days of mainstream cellphones/smartphones and all the proprietary connectors that came with it.
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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.
I find the audio quality to be pretty irrelevant when all I can hear is the bump bump bump of the wires bouncing against me with every step I take!
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.
Putting your stuff over speaker has to bother everyone in the house right?
I fucking oove my anc headphones!
I hate batteries though.
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.
So much this
No smart speakers
It’s a mic sitting there waiting for your commands and everything it does I can do myself easier
That’s true, smart speakers and wireless gadget are the waste of the century, things factories can’t even recicly and that fills the world of trash.
I have good wired headphones (10 years old) and good earbuds (5 years old) and use both. There’s a place for each.
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 use wireless headphones just for watching TV, cable doesn’t work well for this use case.
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
You mean, you don’t want a 1984-esque always-on listening device in your home?
I can’t stand the wireless earbuds that you charge in a case or whatever but you’ll have to pry my Sony WI-C400 neckband headphones from my cold dead hands.
I have a really nice pair of wired Sonys (MDR-7506) that I modded with a 3.5mm jack, and bought a small BT receiver that’s strapped to the headband. So I now have the best of both worlds.
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?
Wires get in the way of the rest of the clutter on my desk.
Everything that need a pay subscription to work.
For me it’s anything I have to download an app to operate.
Except for public transport :-D
Smart watches.
Couple of reasons:
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I like my mechanical watches. They aren’t the expensive flashy ones, but I like the way they look and especially like the mechanical engineering. It’s one of the (maybe only?) Item I can think of that I use daily and ‘does something’ without electricity. Smart watches are nothing like that.
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When I want to be offline I can just ignore my phone or flip it upside down. Having notifications on my wrist all day long wouldn’t be good for my mental health. It annoys me so much when I see people looking at and using their smartwatch mid conversation because they are so addicted to it. And I know I would be the same once I start using it.
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It’s expensive and e-waste after a few years.
Agreed on the watches. I had one smart watch (moto 360) and while cool was very gimmicky for actual functionality and I personally believe that was one of the best looking smart watches. Also the notification reason. My phone is on silent unless my spouse is out somewhere.
I loved my Moto 360 (also agree on best looking) for navigation though. It was great having turn by turn directions right there in my line of sight while driving. I have a Samsung watch now that I mainly just use to see text messages, check the time, or count my steps. Unfortunately, Samsung wanted to push their own crappy map service so GMaps doesn’t integrate very well with them.
When smart watches came about I thought it would be cool to be able to look at your watch when a notification comes in. Never ended up buying one and when I see how some people behave, I’m glad I never did. Some people will just glance mid conversation at their smart watch, which imo is just as bad as grabbing your phone mid conversation.
I’m happy with my cheap Casio. Looks heaps better too.
Damn, I need my smartwatch at work because the extra notification on my wrist helps me pay attention to my phone. But that is a symptom of me being in IT at a place that doesn’t have support tickets 😕
Totally agree with you. I’ve had a couple times where I’m tempted to get one but always talk myself out of it. I’m already addicted to my phone enough as it is. A smart watch would just totally mess me up.
I actually find that I use my phone less when I’m wearing my smartwatch than when I’m not. When notifications come in, I need to make sure it’s not work related or something else that requires my immediate attention. If I check a notification on my phone, I’m much more likely to end up doing something else at the same time. Whereas if I check my watch, I don’t have any incentive to do anything else.
Most smart watches go too far but I love my Garmin Instinct. It feels like a modern digital. Just enough cool tools and features but still black and white. With the o2 sensor on it lasts nearly two weeks, a month with it off, before it needs charging. I can track hikes and bikes. Gives me exact coordinates with a push of a button and no subscription or additional monthly fees to use it. If I could afford a mechanical watch for the price I paid for my Garmin ($130 used) maybe I’d own one.
I love my Instinct Solar. I have never connected it to my phone though — I don’t want notifications or anything. I can manually take the workout results and plug them into my phone.
The solar part is really nice. I did a three hour hike in Colorado a few weeks ago (GPS off) and added like eight days of estimated battery.
Solar sounds great. I have a Garmin FR55 and linked it to an old phone with no sim and a throw away email account, so it just syncs each time I get back from a run. Lasts a week even with gps during runs. Also turned off all notifications as I hate that. I stopped wearing a watch about 20 years ago but this (after a bit of getting used to) is actually quite useful.
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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.
Same. I refused to connect it to the internet.
LLMs. Despite how absurdly useful they are, I can recall a time when I had the skills of remembering phone numbers naturally and being able to easily navigate with no maps of any kind.
These skills have deteriorated significantly in the past 10 years, and they’re not the only ones. The common thread they all have is my smartphone replaced them.
I fear losing a skill that is less innocuous, from the new tech effectively replacing my need to practice it.
Try not having a smartphone with you when you leave the house. Actually many starting returning back to basic phones just for calls and SMS.
Kid who doesn’t remember a time without a phone, using a “dumb” phone is impossible despite a want for it. So many things are qr based or require a phone at my college. I learned this the hard way when my phone broke and I didn’t replace it for 2 weeks. Couldn’t even access my accounts cause of 2fa.
I would love to use a “dumb” phone for text only but the most random shit will require a “smart” feature.
As an EV owner, I can’t charge at half the places near me without my phone.
For sure not having a smartphone mean also living without the comfort and the easy access. Try to achieve something that seems impossible without tech I think is the mean cure of the lack of skills you mean before.
No I mean it’s actually not possible to do some of the stuff I needed for school. The only way to access financial aid is joining a queue from online. While at the the office. Nobody is in it to ask.
Similarly I couldn’t access my accounts on campus since I did not have the app that’s on my phone.
You don’t think you’ve used the freed-up brain capacity on other skills that are still useful?
Any of the camera doorbells or security systems that ship all the footage to their own cloud. It’s unsettling to have devices with cameras semi controlled by a third party like that.
I’m lazy but opted for POE cameras in a system that I just hooked up because of this. It took a couple days of crawling around the attic and drilling holes in the wall, but now I don’t have to worry about Amazon or Google selling/giving my personal camera feeds to whomever requests it/cuts them a check.
Yeah, I like having cameras but don’t want that video being sent elsewhere. I ended up getting Tapo cams which are cheap cloud cameras but they also have RTSP streams and local username / password settings. That means I can send the footage to a locally hosted NVR and lock the cameras behind a parental option in my router that blocks all external in and out communication to them.
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 hypocritenot 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.
Google really wants to refer me to a garage door company instead of closing the damn thing.
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.
- Google/Apple/Samsung pay. They’ve had enough data over the years without knowing my banking habits.
- Alexa/smart speakers. Always listening device in the house? No thanks
- Smart doorbell. I don’t want to send data directly to whoever Amazon wants to share it with yet I can’t avoid being recorded whilst walking the dogs round the neighbourhood
- AI. Nervous about where this is heading
As far as possible I try to avoid:
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All things from big tech because privacy, see Schrems II and their terms on use of personal information for own purposes
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Non Open Source tech because privacy or other malicious functions
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Tech that are prone to planned obsolescence because of special batteries etc. and can’t be fixed with for example a custom ROM on Android
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Anything “smart” exepct smartphone.
I dont want more stuff collect my data, and I am lazy to selfhost it.A helicopter. RIP Kobe 🙏
Tablets, I don’t see the appeal of a big phone device that can’t fit your pocket and can’t make calls
i sometimes use one for certain tasks, where a big screen device is needed, but i don’t want to haul around my big laptop.
@mayflower
Anything that has something to do with Meta.
I trying to ditch all non open source software, it’s hard but I’m hopeful.If you’re using Linux, there’s a bunch of open-source code from Meta running on your PC. Same with some small parts of Windows. :)
Yeah, but with Meta’s open source contributions we know what they are and what they do.
I go out of my way to avoid cloud-based products. Which- is funny, because I do a LOT of home automation, and many of the cheap products, are cloud-interconnected shit, which will go obsolete in a few years.
Need… a list of reasons? I got you covered. https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2022/reasons-to-avoid-cloud-based-automation-products/
It’s there a list somewhere of good non-cloud home automation devices… I don’t want to install custom app per brand of lightbulbs ffs
The air fryer 💀
A housemate owns one and I hate it. It pulls such an irresponsible amount of juice you gotta turn a bunch of other stuff off or it trips the circuit breaker. And literally the ONLY thing it actually cooks very well is french fries.
Honestly, this was one of the few kitchen gadgets that seemingly lived up to hype for me. We use ours all the time, even though our oven has convection mode which is essentially the same. The oven takes so long to warm up… where as the “air fryer” is up to temp super quickly. For a small family, the air fryer is used way more. In general I am opposed to kitchen gadgets that are supposedly saving you time or effort versus the “old” way of doing things.
Sounds like janky electrical mixed with a junky air fryer. I love ours as it heats up quick and cooks almost right away. If you think that’s bad, imagine how much more juice your full-sized oven pulls.
That issue sounds to be with under gauge electrical wiring. We run an air fryer frequently in my home with no issue. It does pull a bit of electricity in the short time we use it, but it’s much better than using an electric oven to cook 20 chicken nuggies.
Cheap air fryers suck but a good quality one is super versatile. Fries up chicken well and you can make so much other stuff. Just avoid the really cheap brands
That must be the problem I bet! I didn’t buy the thing though lol
I use mine instead of the oven for anything that fits and can withstand the “whirlwind” it produces. It’s faster, work at lower temperatures and requires no pre-heating.
The Philips i have now was quite expensive though. Before I had some other brand that didn’t work any better than a regular oven.
It pulls less than your typical under counter oven (or an electric kettle). I think you need to check your circuits.
Unless your under counter oven is gas… like mine is.
Oh, nice! Do things taste different when using one of those compered to electric?
Not that I’ve noticed, but maybe the difference is subtle. I should try for a comparison someday! We’re not using gas for any particular reason though, it’s just what the apartment came with and we wouldn’t have the authority to change it anyway
All they are is a small countertop convection oven. They use less power to cook than a full size oven, you just don’t notice it because those are on their own higher powered circuit.
Lazy machine for very lazy people, it cooks good freeze trash food. I know one guy that use it for heat McDonald food at home.
Dumb take. It’s just a small oven which is great 99% of the time and is more efficient than a giant oven. It’s just a toaster oven with a fan inside.
The thing I use mine for most is vegetables. Not sure how roasting Brussels sprouts or making kale chips makes me lazy.
It doesn’t, that guy is just a condescending prick.
Agreed. Enjoy your life and food. Don’t let others shame you for it.
