i will never understand that stupid craze about expensive engagement rings… i engaged to my wife without a ring. It was just a very emotional situation, i was sure that i wanted to ask her… and then i just asked. No ring, no special event planned out or something… just asked her, and she said yes.
People paying cars worth of money for a ring is so unbelievable for me.
Back when my wife and I were still dating, she found a cheap ring she loved. It was just a normal jewelry ring with her favorite stones in it, not a fancy engagement ring or anything. But she loved it so much, she told me that if I ever proposed to her, she gave me permission to steal it from her and re-present it as an engagement ring. Which I did.
I felt bad about it though. I took the ring to propose, but my plans fell through and it took me a few more days to arrange a new proposal plan. She had forgotten all about our conversation, so the whole time she was tearing the house apart, looking for her favorite ring. She loved that I “found” it and gave it back to her with a proposal.
I gave my wife a ring made out of coconut. Cost me $2 and she instantly dropped it off the balcony if the resturaunt we were at. The Thai owner of the place climbed off the balcony into the boulder field underneath and spent 20 minutes looking for it. Even after I explained that it was only a cheap coconut ring. He said the price isn’t the point, it’s the memories!
He found it, what a legend.
I got my fiancee a gold cat bell instead of a ring. Granted it was a bit pricey but it has special meaning to us and it was definitely not worth cars amount of money like some people spend.
I’ve never seen any of the SS 10gig or USB PD icons, but I’ve seen the rest. I’ve got Thunderbolt icons on at least 2 icons and SS USB 3.1 icons on many normal USB A ports.
Last I looked, these (and the “blue plastic for USB 3” convention) weren’t mandated by the spec. So it’s not that they’re violating the spec, but that they’re optional.
And that’s the real issue with the USB spec, almost everything is optional. This would be fine if cables were largely interchangeable, but they’re not.
What they should have are a handful of very well-defined tiers. Cables should maybe have three (basic, mid-range, high end), and ports can have a couple more.
The problem is that there are too many separate dimensions to define the tiers.
In terms of data signaling speed and latency, you have the basic generations of USB 1.x, 2.0, 3.x, and 4, with Thunderbolt 3 essentially being the same thing as USB4, and Thunderbolt 4 adding on some more minimum requirements.
On top of that, you have USB-PD, which is its own standard for power delivery, including how the devices conduct handshakes over a certified cable.
And then you have the standards for not just raw data speed, but also what other modes are supported, for information to be seamlessly tunneled through the cable and connection in a mode that carries signals other than the data signal spec for USB. Most famously, there’s the DisplayPort Alt Mode for driving display data over a USB-C connection with a DP-compatible monitor. But there’s also an analog audio mode so that the cable and port passes along analog data to or from microphones or speakers.
Each type of cable, too, carries different physical requirements, which also causes a challenge on how long the cable can be and still work properly. That’s why a lot of the cables that support the latest and greatest data and power standards tend to be short. A longer cable might be useful, but could come at the sacrifice of not supporting certain types of functions. I personally have a long cable that supports USB-PD but can’t carry thunderbolt data speeds or certain types of signals, but I like it because it’s good for plugging in a charger when I’m not that close to an outlet. But I also know it’s not a good cable for connecting my external SSD, which would be bottlenecked at USB 2.0 speeds.
So the tiers themselves aren’t going to be well defined.
My headphones (Sennheiser Momentum 4) have Bluetooth support. When using Bluetooth mode with the latest firmware update, they sporadically shut down while using in Bluetooth Multipoint mode.
I used headphones for decades very happily with a 1/8th inch jack.
They weren’t perfect.
Some devices used a 1/4 inch jack. This at least was electrically-compatible, so one just needed a cheap, appropriately-shaped piece of metal to adapt them.
The 1/8th inch jack connector took up enough space that the smartphone guys eventually mostly banished it from phones, to try to get a bit more space in the device.
There wasn’t a standard impedance. While most consumer devices used more-or-less the same impedance (and if you had to, you could just adjust the volume up or down slightly with different headphones) some higher-end headphones required a headphones amplifier that could push more power.
When you plugged a device in, it briefly shorted the connector, and made a lot of noise.
It wasn’t wireless (which could be seen as a minus or plus, depending upon whether you wanted ability to walk away from a computer).
It couldn’t transmit power (well, not much; there was a convention for doing so that didn’t become widespread). That became more significant with the rise of headphones with active noise cancellation, which would need at least some way to get power to the headphones.
But honestly, those were mostly pretty minor problems. Headphones just worked in virtually all cases.
I didn’t have to worry about whether-or-not my headphones supported a given sampling rate, the number of devices that could connect to my headphones, wireless interference, or physical plug compatibility aside from the 1/8th inch and 1/4 inch issue (well, and occasionally 2.5mm headset connectors on phones). USB audio didn’t resolve the calibrated volume issue, one of the few annoyances I had with the analog connector. I have one set of Bluetooth headphones that start breaking up when I leave the room with the transceiver and another that work flawlessly across the house. I have charging rates to worry about, and whether the device is smart enough to have a battery management system capable of prolonging battery life by shutting off charging at appropriate points. The protocol and physical connector for telephone jacks has changed twice over the past several hundred years, once to add a ring (for stereo) and once to move from 1/4 inch to 1/8th inch. The Bluetooth and USB standards, while providing for some level of backwards compatibility, have changed like some people change socks. There are different audio protocols (and in some cases competing audio codecs, like LDAC vs aptX). Lossy compression becomes an issue with Bluetooth. Some devices don’t support some sampling rates; analog headphones don’t care. Having (effectively) zero-latency pass-through mixing is guaranteed doable with any analog headphones with the appropriate mixer, so that one can hear some other audio source live; that’s not an option with Bluetooth or USB headphones.
I do like active noise cancellation, and occasionally the wireless functionality can occasionally be handy (though in general, it isn’t a game-changer for me). But I feel like the user experience has gotten a lot more problematic, in general.
iPhone 15, Samsung A series phones and tablets, most Motorola devices, most oppo devices, most realme devices, most nothing devices, most xiaome devices, and many more
You’d be surprised. My mouse only needs 2.0, but uses a C connector for compatibility. It provides an A to C cable with only 2.0 wiring, which is a decision I assume they made to allow the wire to be more flexible as it can be charged during use or used entirely wired.
Same with my keyboard, and I appreciate the compatibility. If it doesn’t need anything faster than 2.0 speeds, there’s no reason to include more expensive parts.
Not completely, not at first. If he cupped his hands or used a horn he could hear people talking. But towards the end of his life he would play the piano while resting his head against it. It’s kind of sad, really.
lemmy.world
Oldest