I might be exaggerating a but I’ve never been a real fan of Bluetooth headphones or earphones. Sound quality never matched cabled ones (I also have the popular Sony one) and battery life sucks for the time I want to use it
I always wanted to be the cool hipster with cabled headphones and getting mad about phones without audio jack.
Truth is, my cables always got tangled up, especially at work. It was getting really annoying. I bought some open ear headphones from aftershokz because i often listen to music wherever and i don’t want to be isolated. These things absolutely fuck. Battery life is fantastic. Even if they are empty, i can throw them into the pocket charger for 15 minutes and they go for hours again. The sound is good. It’s not full blown headphone quality, obviously. But they are so comfortable and you don’t have to stick anything into your ears. I saw that bose has a similar product and i kinda wanna try them.
I understand it’s a very subjective experience. And tbh, one thing that bothers me about cabled ones is the cable noise when moving. Or accidentally pulling off the headphones from my head, although that’s not a common issue,but for sitting experience they’re perfect. Aside from that, my music preference is very eclectic, so e.g. the level of bass really needs to adapt properly to the genre I’m listening to atm, so the boosted bass Bluetooth headphones just don’t work for me. I’ve never experienced a Bluetooth pair that doesn’t have too much bass.
Ya, bass is always the downside of these things, but i’m not super into that. Also i don’t really like to listen to music very loud. I really don’t like when i feel the cable brushing my arms or something. And i rip them out every time i stand up. It’s so bad. A huge plus for me is also that i can leave my phone somewhere and i can still listen to music.
I have $25 wired IEMS that sound better than my most expensive Bluetooth tws sets. I’ve taken to just listing to podcasts and YouTube videos with my Bluetooth sets at work.
I don’t know, we put in a lot of effort to make our living room clear for our robot vac. We lifted the sofa we got shelves with a space at the bottom but roomboi still just gets stuck on it’s own in the middle of a hardwood floor
Every piece of hardware I’ve used past 2010 or so seems to have just gotten worse and worse, I honestly think I’m cursed.
2013 (? can’t quite remember), Sager gaming laptop with sli gpu config, gpus drew too much power for the battery (I believe), leading to black screen and reboot. Company feigned ignorance, ran unrelated tests on RMA, Socially awkward at the time and was scared to ask for a refund. Convinced to this day it was a scam.
2015, desktop computer I built randomly powers off during usage, no errors, not the power supply, unsolved to this day.
2020-2022 5 cheap ebay thinkpads, all with one hardware problem or another. My beloved T60p was the last to go.
2022-present Framework laptop, ports suffer intermitent failure, webcam microphone stopped working. Replaced webcam/microphone, works for a day, breaks again. Unsolved.
2022-preset Steam deck, had to RMA 3 times for various hardware issues, works now, but the right trigger still rubs against something but I can live with it. Spilled coffee on the left trackpad so it’s sticky; that’s my fault though so I can’t blame it on the curse.
I had a laptop a while back with a fingerprint scanner that would work for one day, then stop working completely. I reinstalled the drivers, and it would work for a day and then stop again. I eventually gave up using the fingerprint scanner until I “upgraded” the laptop to Windows 11, and it worked again. No idea if it still works, since I rarely use that laptop now
You could either have the world’s worst luck, or you are genuinely cursed
Alternatively, you keep spilling coffee on your devices and going into a blind fit of cleaning rage that blocks out the memory of the original coffee spill
I usually buy Asus for computers, and I go for a mid-range business model with dedicated graphics. They’re cheaper than the gaming counterparts, still have good specs, and they are much more reliable and easy to work on.
Had a secondhand Alienware, circa 2017, and that thing looked nice, but it was heavy, bulky, and you had to remove the back cover, drives, battery, WiFi antenna, and a bezel just to swap the CMOS battery. But that’s everything Dell IMHO.
My HP laserjet 1320n is over 20 years old. Every 6-8 months I have something to print and it does it like a champ. I can even print to it from my phone. Idk the last time I put toner on it.
With as cheap as pen plotters have gotten, I’m surprised no one has come up with a reasonably small printer looking one for normal sized paper that functions like an actual printer. the ones you can get need special plugins and vector graphics to plot. There used to be many models several decades ago, and they can still be found and modified to use normal pens, but that’s kind of a driver nightmare. I feel like we’re past the point where people need to be able to print many pages relatively quickly, and I’d rather have a printer that took a while to print but I knew that it would work every single time.
Brother laser printers, higher upfront cost but I don’t think I’ll ever need another. I don’t print frequently so inkjet carts dry up, toner doesn’t have that issue, toner also lasts longer, whenever I have to replace it I’m pretty sure they have 3rd party carts, and they don’t do any subscription bullshit or planned obsolescence so far that I’ve seen. Easy to set up on linux through CUPS and the official brother .rpm or .deb drivers. Cannot recommend them enough as someone who also hates all other printers.
I had to buy a Clicker for college in a day when any number of phone apps, or even the Smart board, would have done exactly the same thing. I think it cost about $150 and the only thing it did – THE ONLY THING IT DID – was serve as an expensive and drastically crippled version of Kahoot. Abject waste of money for all parties involved.
I was coming to post the same. Those fucking clickers were so stupid and overpriced, all so my biochem professor could poll the class AND grade everyone on their results. Results to questions about material that was JUST taught in the same lesson. Good thing everyone benefits equally from lecture, right? Fuck that guy.
Tablets. I’ve owned 2 so far, plus fucked around with a third, fancier one that was borrowed from someone else (in case you care: a very old Samsung one, a Xiaomi model from the late 2010s, and a new-ish Apple iPad for the borrowed one).
They suck as smartphone replacements because they are too big.
They lack button inputs, so they suck as gaming devices or as computer replacements.
You can browse the web… But if you decide to type anything, the large size plus the touchscreen keyboard make for an awkward experience (in ways that it’s not on a smaller phone)
They have lit screens, so they suck as eReaders.
They’re sorta okay as like, personal screens for watching movies or whatever, but like, at that point just use a television??
They can make sorta good drawing tablets, the ones that are pen-compatible I mean… Because I mean, yeah. But the lack of a keyboard is a bummer with how I learned to draw with my other hand on Ctrl+Z, though that’s more a muscle memory issue than anything.
In general, every tablet I used felt like a less-good verion of a dozen other devices, yanno?
Absolutely. I use my tablet almost exclusively as a media device but I do feel it could be so much more. It is nice though to use it while my phone is charging overnight and not wasting battery on the phone while traveling.
In my case it’s more that I get car/airsick very easily – So when I’m out and about, I won’t be watching media on a portable screen. At most listening to music or an audio-book.
And if I’m in like. A hotel. Most of them (at least here in my country) have SmartTVs that will accept broadcasting from my phone. :P
As for note-taking, I can see the appeal but refer to my comment about typing in a Tablet being uniquely awful.
One of the funniest memories from when I was travelling (around 2017) was many tourists holding up their giant tablet devices, fumbling with them to try take photos of things.
See, I thought it might have been my tablets being cheap things.
But messing around with that borrowed iPad (possibly a Pro, the person who lent me it was filthy rich and likes premium stuff) made me go “… This is like, a high quality laptop but worse in every way?”
The screen was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was clearly a powerful (if locked down, cuz Apple) device – but it felt like everything I tried to do on the device was in some major way a compromise to accomodate for a less-than-ideal form factor.
Same. I used to make fun of them as they’re ‘too big’ for mobile stuff but too small for computer stuff, but after getting a killer deal on a Tab S7+, it’s super useful for casual games, watching youtube/plex, drawing, and web browsing. It’s also great to use in the kitchen while cooking or doing other stuff
Maybe not this exact model, but 20 years ago when I was a young gun in college for the first time, I got one of these because I hated cleaning the fucking shower and tub.
It worked about as badly as you’d expect. I don’t know if modern versions are any better, but holy shit they’re a lot more expensive than they used to be. I remember spending like $40 at the time.
I quickly learned to just wipe down the shower after use and clean it more often. Thing was fucking worthless.
Oh, yeah, those are crap. I went with scrub brush attachments for the battery-powered drill I already own. It cost like $20 for half a dozen heads of different sizes that chuck up like any normal drill bit. It’s not as automated, but it’s way easier and more thorough than scrubbing by hand.
I went from a cheap mp3 player that I could just plug in to my computer and drag in music to an iPod which forced me to download the iTunes bloatware create an account and then took 100x longer to transfer music because of the pointless conversion each file had to undergo. This was my first and last experience with a personal Apple device. Ended up putting some old pop music onto it and giving it to my grandmother after 2 days. Uninstalled iTunes and went back to using my cheap mp3 player until I replaced it with a smartphone.
Coming in as a close second place, an all-in-one Sony Vaoi computer that cost a fortune and had shit performance. Took daily nags to Sony before they took it back and gave me a refund. I find that Sony’s hit and miss though. My favourite smartphone (Xperia Play) was Sony, and I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. The Sony Smartwatch was shit.
Amazon kindle. It didnt let me plug it into my computer and upload books to use it without internet access. Everything needed sending through amazon. I should have expected this but it was so locked down and filled with ads to the point it was unusable. I attempted to jailbreak it and it bricked so i threw it away and went back to using calibre on my computer. I would really like an offline open source ebook reader.
I found a paper weight at Goodwill about 2 years ago, and haven’t seen one ad, and I have an email address for it that I can mail any file format. I have not had any issues… maybe because I was a late adopter?
Nah, I had the kindle keyboard and it was great. Still is, if I don’t want to read with a backlight. My first one stopped working after at least a decade, and a couple months later I came across one in a thrift store for like 10 bucks and it still works great.
If you can get one of the early Kobo ereaders, you can flash this Libre OS on it, that would be better.
Also, those early Kobo ereaders (glo, nia, mini and some other models) can support up to 32gb sdcard, that’s a lot of books and out goes the need for cloud storage
i’ve been desperately trying to get my hands on one of those, but I live in a third country and import duties are a pain