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 fucking oove my anc headphones!
I hate batteries though.
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?
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.
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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.
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 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
I have good wired headphones (10 years old) and good earbuds (5 years old) and use both. There’s a place for each.
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.
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.
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’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.
Apple anything
Same. Don’t want to stuck in their ecosystem.
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.
There is a LOT of Linux and Open Source advocates on the fediverse.
Yeah, decentralization is the complete opposite of being a closed-garden. Also Apple has done zero contributions to open-source, or helped the greater good at all. I’m typing this from an AOSP rom which would not be possible if the base of Android was not open-source.
Apple does contribute to open source though, for example CUPS and Webkit among contributions to projects like Clang. Granted they aren’t benevolent beings by any means, but they do have open source projects that actually benefit people much like Facebook does with zstd.
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.
And why?
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.
Source?
OP is somewhat mistaken, it wasn’t a leaked email since it was revealed in the Epic v. Apple case, but here’s one of many sources you can find on the topic.
That’s interesting, but it’s hardly what I was imagining based on what the user I replied to was saying.
The source linked quoted an Apple exec explaining that the cost/benefit analysis of building a piece of free software on a platform that generates them no revenue doesn’t justify them spending the resources to build the software.
I get it, we all want corporations to be benevolent entities that give us free software out of the kindness of their hearts, but if we’re going to criticize one of them for not doing so, I think it’s more clear-minded to criticize the system as a whole.
Why in the world would anyone expect Apple to spend development resources building iMessage for Android (for free), especially if they’ve determined that it will hurt user retention? Because we want them to? It sucks, but not like “evil mega-corp manipulating users” sucks, more like “corporation making decision that literally every other for-profit corporation would make in that situation” sucks.
I’m not trying to morally justify it, I’m strictly speaking in the context of “use products from x instead of y because y did bad thing”. In that context, that’s a bad argument if it’s true that x is just as anti-user as y is.
And if we’re specifically talking about using Apple products vs using Google products here, you’d have to be taking crazy pills to think that Apple is more anti-user than a company who’s entire business model is the commoditization of vast amounts of personal data gathered for the purpose of more effectively manipulating literally everyone, including non-users of their products, into increasing their consumption.
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.
I never wrote they are objectively inferior. I even admitted they can be marginally better in some areas. My point is they’ll vendor lock the hell out of you and the trade off isn’t worth it.
Meanwhile you wrote two walls of text to defend company that uses your children and technology worse than ICQ (released in 1996) to make you buy their products. You’re free to do so, but I’m not sure which one of us is salty :-)
Probably my fault you didn’t see this because it was buried deep in the wall of text, but I clarified that I’m definitely not trying to morally exculpate Apple.
In the context of which of two companies you choose to do business with, you shouldn’t criticize one while ignoring the immoral actions of the other. If we’re just talking about the things apple does wrong, I’m right there with you. But if we’re talking about which mobile phone ecosystem is less predatory than the other… at least my relationship with apple is a voluntary business arrangement with exactly two parties. That’s actually the reason I moved all of my stuff out of the android ecosystem in ‘21 after >10 years. Seeing ads across a dozen websites related to a private medical diagnosis made me realize Google just knows too much about me, and I do care about my privacy after all.
That’s obviously just my personal opinion but my point is that if you’re looking for an ethical tech company, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
I don’t believe in ethical companies. Microsoft was cool once, then Google was cool, now some people seem to think that Apple is cool.
Best way to not get burnt is not to get vendor locked with one of them. Android allows me to install Firefox(real one, not Safari re-skin), replace launcher or even entire OS with Graphene. Google sucks in many ways, but if I’m not happy with them I just install software from another vendor. With ios I have to throw away half of the hardware I own.
I don’t believe in ethical for-profit companies either.
The open nature of Android was the single biggest reason I used it for the decade that I did. If I were to switch back, I’d buy a pixel.
But android isn’t as open as it used to be. Yes, you can still unlock your bootloader, root, and install custom roms, but Google is now actively fighting against users who want to do so. On my pixel 3, it became a never-ending battle to keep apps like my banking portal working while rooted, and to keep rooting working through updates. At least once a month, I’d be out of the house and have my phone fundamentally break in some way.
Eventually, I reached the point where I needed a smartphone as a tool more than I needed one as a toy to tinker with, so I left it stock. But stock android sucks from a privacy perspective. I realized that I wasn’t using 3rd party App Stores and I wasn’t rooting my phone, so the largest benefits of avoiding an iPhone weren’t really a factor to me anymore.
I was also extremely disappointed in the hardware, quality control and longevity of new android phones, especially compared to the iPhones being released. So I switched. And was amazed at how glad I was.
No police showed up to my door to force me to trade my Sony headphones in for AirPods or my Dell laptop for a MacBook. I already had an iPad because at the time, it was the only serious tablet of you care about using a stylus, but that had been working beautifully for me without any other apple products.
I think it’s silly to list the fact that an OEM has a ton of products that work well together as a reason not to buy any of that company’s products. If you don’t want to get locked in, don’t buy an Apple Watch. As far as I know, nothing else requires an iPad. And anyway, the resale value on apple products is so solid that if you did totally buy in, selling all your apple hardware would get you more than enough to buy matching hardware of a similar age from other manufacturers. Sell your two year old iPad and you can probably get 3 two year old Samsung tablets, assuming you can find any that still work.
The web browser thing also hardly locks you in. If you really don’t want to use safari, that’s a decent reason not to want to use iOS. For me at least, safari is the browser I would choose to use, so I don’t really care that I can’t use Firefox.
I want to use my things how I want to use them. Apple does not let me do that. They actually get in the way of how I want to use my things.
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.
Likewise
I still have an old dumb tv, but if this one breaks I’ll have to try and find another one to hook my roku up to.
Any smart home stuff. The story with Amazon shutting down someone’s account and all their devices is terrifying. Frankly I should probably unplug my smart speakers.
The Apple Watch is neat for health stuff but I don’t see a need for another device to charge.
OLED and Mini/MicroLED screens for PWM sensitivity. Even LED lights are starting to hurt my head.
VR/AR is just Ready Player One stuff.
If you are willing to put in a fair amount of effort, you can have a smart home without accounts anywhere.
Most of the account based stuff is based upon open specs.
But you have to be somewhat technical and patient.
To expand a bit, search “home assistant” or “hubitat.”
Both are great, but home assistant is open source, and has the bigger community who support more devices. It is a bit more DIY than hubitat, but they have released their own hardware to go with the software, so its getting easier all the time. You can also run it on your own hardware if youre handy.
Hubitats advantages are an all in one hardware/software package and a philosophy that aims to emulate the cloudless Smartthings of yore (the old lead player in stand alone home automation until they lost their damn minds). It is still a ways DIY, but is not FOSS. Still, active community and tons of supported devices.
I tried home assistant a while ago and I couldn’t wrap my head around yaml that it uses and I couldn’t seem to get conditionals to work like I wanted them too. I’m not a great coder but it was not nearly as easy as I wanted it to be.
Id recommend giving hubitat a try then. Its more gui focused, with tasks being “if this, then that, except if…”
They support a wide range of apps/devices out of the box, but also have direct to import community code/addons. A lot of the smartthings devs moved over to hubitat, so the community is solid.
Unless youre in a rush, they often have $100/hub sales around major holidays too.
The health stuff is a bit overblown anyway. On a day to day level it’s just junk data.
There’s so much variation between both between people and also for one person just depending on how they feel that you can’t tell what a particular number means.
There’s some argument that heart rate is useful for high-end cardio, where you want to keep track of exactly which heart rate band you’re in to be sure that you’re at capacity but still clearing all the lactate from your system. However, given how much these numbers can vary if you haven’t slept fully or you have a bit of a cold, or you overate, you’re probably better off learning to pace yourself.
The health stuff on the Apple Watch is basically just for entertainment at this point. Which isn’t to say it can’t be useful, I definitely know people who have gotten more active because of the “gamification” of things like the activity rings.
If your watch reports say, a single atrial fibrillation event in any otherwise healthy individual, it doesn’t do a whole lot for you. Even if you bring that information to your doctor, they can’t be expected to do much with it. They could strap some additional monitors on you, but if it is a very rare event there isn’t much chance of it recurring when they are actively looking at it. In some cases, the anxiety caused by worrying about it can actually cause more issues than just not knowing.
I actually like my watch a lot, but more for just a notification device/convenient payment interface rather than a health tracker.
Smart watches.
I do not need an additional notification screen. I see 0 benefits
As somebody with adhd those shit is helpful as fuck…
Smartphone rings
i Check it
After checkin (and not replying) i doomscroll…
Smartwatch gooes on
checkin the notification
decides that its (mostly) not important and keep Doing whatever i am doing right now
I sent my bother a text the other day. I got upset that he didn’t immediately respond, because I knew he had a smart watch.
I realized that I was getting upset for a condition neither of us set. I eventually heard from him and his watch didn’t really matter.
I also think the health monitoring is kinda creepy.
I needed to keep track of the time and I don’t always have my phone on me so I got a mechanical watch instead. It’s great! No having to charge it, no chance of it tracking me and I got a new hobby/interest out of it.
I love my smart watch for checking a notification that I can’t pull my phone out to check as my hands are usually wet and gross from my profession so it only makes sense to me.
Also, they work great as fitness trackers these days too, if you’re into that kind of thing otherwise a mechanical watch will work perfectly fine.
overpriced. limited utility. inferior to smartphones.
One solid benefit is heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring
Most social media.
I used to use reddit, I have moved all my presence over here. That’s about it.
I have a FB Messenger account because that is how a lot of my family keeps in touch with me, and I have this. I had a proper FB account back when I was in uni and Facebook was still only for uni students, but I think I dropped it shortly after that.It’s not some grand principled stance, I just don’t get most of them because I am apparently an old man. Like Instagram, why do I want to share pictures with just random people? How am I networking with anybody by doing so? I honestly don’t get why it is so popular.
Same. Except I still occasionally use reddit, just not as much as I used to.
I only use FB messenger as it’s big here for communication and FB to post photos of my kids for my family to see which has only been recently, since I had kids. Before that I didn’t even touch FB.
Other than that, social media doesn’t interest me at all.
Does Facebook count because I was once in trouble with the police here for something completely unrelated to the Internet and they asked me several times for my Facebook account which didn’t exist anyway
Made me think they were fishing for anything and anything they read on there would have likely ended up twisted against me.
So yeah I refuse to use it.
They were definitely hoping to try and find you posting something illegal on Facebook. People do it all the time for some damn reason
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.
You don’t think you’ve used the freed-up brain capacity on other skills that are still useful?
No, I don’t think the brain really works that way, except in the very broadest sense.
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.
Voice commands on anything. It just feels silly.
Voice typing long messages is IMO faster than using a phone keyboard, even with gesture typing.
Voice typing is a game changer if you break a hand. I did a semester of college writing several essays a week with 99% voice typing.
I have only very recently come around on that. When voice commands first came out, they were absolute garbage. I am still conditioned to never expect them to work, and am always pleasantly surprised when they do.
To be fair, I largely only use them for things like setting my alarm, because I still have an engrained expectation that they won’t work otherwise.
Depends…
Patent of a Baby?
Voice command is ya friend
Having a smart home?
Voice command is awesome for being lazy (unfrotunatally i love my privacy so i cannot use Stuff like that right now…)
Cooking something and both Hands are gross as f***?
Hell Yeah Voice command to Set a Timer :D
I think it’s the one area I’m a Luddite. I really should use voice commands on my smart home stuff because the apps are trash. But it still feels weird. Silly mental block.
Facebook, Twitter and now Threads. Have no interest and zero use for that stuff.
Self driving cars or honestly the majority of car tech introduced in the last 5 years or so, such a lane keeping assist or other drivers “aids” which ultimately seem to distract drivers more than ever help them.
Only thing I left on in my newish car is the lane change/blind spot warning and the “you are about to ram someone” alarm. Can’t remember the official names. They rarely actually help, but when they do, it can mean avoiding a collision.
the blind spot detector is a game changer for SUVs and other vehicles with limited visibility. I don’t feel safe without it anymore.
I drive a 2006 Corolla.
How bad are you at driving that you need a computer to let you know when you need to pay attention?
Lol that’s rude. I drove a 94 Corolla for like 20 years. Regardless of what an expert driver like you thinks, these sort of safety features are useful. Not often, and usually one would notice the issue without them and avoid a collision, but there’s that occasional situation where they can save your life.
I’m sorry for being rude. I must have been in a bad mood.
I’m not an expert driver, just a careful one. I’ve never had any driver assistance at all and don’t really see the need for them unless you’re distracted while driving.
Like, the only way they’d save my life is if they could avoid a front end collision, getting t-boned, or rear ended. They just seem annoying to me.
- 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
Anything “smart” exepct smartphone.
I dont want more stuff collect my data, and I am lazy to selfhost it.Apple Ecosystem. Since I learned that iTunes changes mp3 files when “sync” to iTunes I stopped using apple products. That was back when iPhone 5 was released.
Anything with a camera or mic in my house.Mit’s plenty bad my phone doesn’t have hardware switches, who tf wants to pay to wiretap their own house?
