This seems all too often the case with development work in general. I see the same type of unreasonable expectations in devops.
Maybe it's compounded by the software industry liking to hire young people with less experience but more free time. They may not yet have the soft skills to navigate unreasonable demands and give hard answers, and logistically a single person can more easily pull extra hours.
I've found that as I get older it has become easier to push back on unpaid overtime type work (or simply not do it). Because it would be damaging to my family and relationships if I didn't, and that's a powerful motivator for me.
But at the same time it's hard to compete with the output of people who somehow can grind all day every day, and through the weekend. I don't know if there's a way to level the playing field as long as employers are allowing and even encouraging this kind of unpaid self sacrifice.
This is objectively wrong. DevOps continues to be the best paying field to work in. This is also accommodated by the fact that employers do not hire inexperienced people to DevOps because you probably don’t want them screwing up the whole release pipeline.
Look up latest SO survey results and you’ll see that DevOps is very nicely paid even across Europe.
Nope. (And arguably it shouldn't: a stall at low altitude is much worse than a stall at high altitude, because you lack recovery time. Most fatal stalls begin below 1000ft AGL, which is where this plane was. So your stall avoidance system shouldn't shutdown just because you're at low altitude: that's when you want to avoid stalls.)
What is the infosec analogue to swatting? To me it seems part denial of service attack (distracting resources with false event), and part amplification attack (a small action triggers intense potentially violent response)
The fact that it's possible for a child to trigger a "swat" where people can and have died highlights a significant vulnerability in the procedures currently used by police.
Why isn't more effort being put into making these processes safer for civilians?
Why isn't more effort being put into making these processes safer for civilians?
I think the initial presumption, was that no one would be such a douchebag as to make such crank calls. In today's world, this is obviously a bad assumption. In today's world, we should presume that people are going to make such false assertions, and if there's a way someone can exploit an unconfirmed assertion, someone, somewhere will.
This is also why trials in the media are bad, and why due process is important.
As I suggested elsewhere, what if a plainclothes android could walk up, knock on the door, and calmly ask questions? (While SWAT are out of sight and not yet aiming their guns.) I think this isn't too far outside of our current abilities. Uncanny valley would be reduced in this context. All you'd need is a stone faced, but calm and pleasant demeanor. We already have walking robots, but the walks would have to be humanized. (The Uncanny Valley would be in full force for the body language part.)
EDIT: Actually, you could completely avoid the Uncanny Valley and even eliminate the need for AI. Just make the bottom part from a Segway. The top could be a literal teleoperated Muppet.
> I think the initial presumption, was that no one would be such a douchebag as to make such crank calls. In today's world, this is obviously a bad assumption.
It's always been a bad assumption; deliberate harm up to and including murder by deliberate false report to legal authorities is probably as old as legal authorities, and if your jurisdiction has a crime of false reporting (and it's pretty much guaranteed that it does) it's because the government is very much aware that this is a thing.
If police response procedures don't account for that, it's not because they've assumed it doesn't happen, it's because they've assumed that that when it happens they will have someone else ready at hand to blame for ant adverse effects, so that they have no need to mitigate them.
This is a two part solution. First, tighter controls on phone systems. Why are you allowed to spoof your number as if you're a local calling the local police department? This is dumb, police departments need a way to say "huh, this guy is calling from 2000km away, are we sure he's legit?". Second, police need better processes for identifying when to deploy force. Why can't they send a stealth car to scope out the scene before deploying a full swat team? Chill the fuck out on treating every call like a foreign army is invading.
The second point is related to the first point. The police are being intentionally given bad information by the swatters in order to get the response of force by police (the reason why it’s “swatting” and not just calling the cops on someone).
If a ‘swatter’ called the police and said “Hey there’s a domestic disturbance going on next door”, then the response is basically sending a nearby squad car to check it out. That’s a pretty boring “prank” for a swatter if 2 cops just ring the doorbell and ask questions.
Thus the police have to be told something so serious sounding they would need to send SWAT. Something like “my neighbor is on drugs with a knife against his daughter’s throat threatening to kill his family, hurry!”.
These swatters are intentionally targeting people, so they can also BS enough personal details to make it sound plausible.
Human decency to not abuse this highly-serious system is not enough of a barrier to keep swatting douchebags from exploiting the system, so while the system needs adjusting, from an enforcement side this case is also a public reminder that swatting is not a cool prank that has serious consequences.
> Chill the fuck out on treating every call like a foreign army is invading.
I don't know if you're being serious or not, but some things are time sensitive, and a slow or underpowered response can be fatal.
It's not like the police force gets a kick out of deploying SWAT. Yes, obviously the response needs to be more precise, but hopefully not at the expense of quick response to real emergencies.
> but hopefully not at the expense of quick response to real emergencies.
An overpowered response at the expense of innocent lives are not in any way better. It's actually worse, since the people responsible for the killings don't face the consequences like everyone else.
From what I understand, many people who are potential targets of swatting (high profile live streamers, etc) notify their local PD. I'm assuming following that, if a call comes in, the PD will take a more relaxed approach. This of course is a double edged sword, but it's at least something.
> From what I understand, many people who are potential targets of swatting (high profile live streamers, etc) notify their local PD. I'm assuming following that, if a call comes in, the PD will take a more relaxed approach.
I'm assuming that local PDs probably treat people calling them and saying “I’m totally not a criminal but people are likely to falsely claim I'm not only a criminal but one engaged in the kind of dangerous crimes that would justify a SWAT response”, without any supporting evidence that there are particular people likely to falsely target the particular person with that kind of action as an indication that the person is more likely than average to be a dangerous criminal.
The procedural vulnerability you describe stems from a philosophical dilemma around policework.
If an officer should choose between "low risk to self, high risk to civilians" and "high risk to self, low risk to civilians", which choice is appropriate?
SWATting works because American police have decided, for whatever reasons, that "low risk to self, high risk to civilians" is the appropriate path to take.
Should the police send an unarmed officer, an armed officer, or an armed SWAT team to respond to a phoned-in report of an armed hostage situation?
If they send an unarmed officer, the officer could die, but civilians won't (by the officer's hand).
If they send an armed officer, the officer could die, and civilians could too (by the officer's hand).
If they send a no-knock SWAT team, the officers won't die, but civilians probably will (by the SWAT team's hand).
And so this ties back to police militarization and a question that you will be hard-pressed to see police and police unions confronting openly: Should officers put the lives of citizens above their own lives — even if that means they occasionally die while responding to a call without a SWAT team, when it turns out to be real rather than fake?
I believe that, yes, police officers should select a "higher risk to self, lower risk to civilians" path than they do today, increasing the risk of police deaths in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths at the hands of police officers. I make this statement even though I have former police officers as family and friends, because I'm tired of American police killing more American citizens each year than terrorists do [1]. Your view may vary. Those of police certainly do.
The core issue, where officers must either accept a higher risk of death or a higher risk of killing civilians, remains unsolved — and undiscussed — in America today.
I suspect the solution is even simpler: make the penalties for mistakenly shooting unarmed civilians significantly higher. The death of an unarmed civilian should be career-ending for the officer(s) at fault at the very least. If the penalties are higher, than that'll drive officers to prefer less-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, batons) and only use actual lethal firearms after assessing that yes, the situation warrants it.
I also say this as someone with family members who have served as law enforcement officers.
How do you justify that our special forces for instance in France or Europe dont kill innocents so carelessly ? And don t tell me criminals dont have guns here. Something is definitely wrong with the US police - to the point where Im worried as a tourist
Could it relate to the number of incidents local police encounter? I imagine special forces are called upon far less frequently and for situations less vaguely defined than police.
Police training curriculum in the United States has been steadily leaning further towards the "less risk to officer, more risk to civilians" philosophy of policing each decade since the War on Drugs was launched ages ago.
You're wrong in one respect, though. They're not killing carelessly. They're killing intentionally, and are trained to do so when they feel it necessary. That their training seems to encourage them to feel it necessary is a side effect of our failure as a society to confront the philosophical problem.
> police academies spend about 110 hours training their recruits on firearms skills and self-defense — but just 8 hours on conflict management and mediation
So, as of 2006, they're assigned 14x as many hours of training at reflexively shooting attackers before they get shot in return as they are in determining when to risk being shot to defuse a conflict. Of course they're prone to shooting — they never learn when it's not appropriate to!
I am not a police officer. If you're a police officer and your local department has better a training ratio of violence:deescalation than the nationwide 13.75:1 ratio from 2006, hooray! But you're probably an outlier.
Officer finds person asleep in car with gun in lap. Officer summons more officers. They study the sleeping person and prepare their weapons, determining that the gun has either 0 or 1 bullets left. The person twitches as they wake up. All six officers fire.
The police are trained to fire when someone's muscles twitch. It's hammered into them over a hundred hours of training to kill before they are killed. They exercised their weapons training competently.
Was it appropriate for the officers to draw their weapons and take aim for kill shots?
Answers vary, because that's the same philosophical problem. Either the officers take a less violent approach that puts them more at risk of being shot and killed, or the officers take a more violent approach that puts them less at risk of being shot and killed.
(In this specific example, it's clear that the officers were behaving inappropriately for quite some time prior to the shooting; I do not attribute all of their actions to this problem, and focused on highlighting the philosophical issue rather than analyzing other factors such as racism etc.)
Caveat - run a Unix machine you don't care about (i.e. a disposable VM) out of disk space.
It's much easier to recover a machine if the storage is segmented. Yeah, a single partition is more convenient, but multiple partitions are more resilient.
Two of the reasons in this era were prioritizing which filesystem you wanted to overflow first, and because you necessarily used network mounts for lots of stuff (home dirs, project dirs, GNU tools, expensive software), even on workstations.
Sun was hugely into NFS, which was both a blessing and a curse -- you'd spend 4-5 figures each on a fleet of workstations with only 105 MB local drives, and they'd tend to all end up hanging frequently, because of a server burp or network burp. It didn't even have to be a burp on a filesystem you were using -- it only had to be (stale) mounted.
(I'm not this old, but I had the excessively good fortune to have access to super-cool computers and Internet as a kid.)
It really depends on what you're doing. On a desktop/laptop/workstation 1 partition is fine. On servers, all the data is not necessarily on the same disk. It's common to have the OS itself running on local disks and have everything else mounted on some non-local storage like a Storage Area Network, Network Attached Storage, NFS shares, etc.
It is a lot easier to upgrade an OS on a Unix box with proper partitions separating things you want to persist across installs from the OS. Makes backups and backup restores easier as well. It’s also best to have swap space be a partition. Though these days probably doesn’t matter.
A modern Windows install has something like 4 partitions these days for the c drive. Ones labeled restore, c, and I have yet to care to figure out the other two. On boot though you see just c.
Sorry about the delayed response. I misunderstood what you were getting at. It's because it's running Solaris and Solaris had different partition scheme compared operating systems now. There's wasn't really a "desktop" version of Solaris so it would just slice up the disk the same way it would on a single disk server. It's a really old school OS.
I honestly can't say I understand the draw to drop significant money on a new set of headphones that need to be charged at least as often as a my phone, and can't be charged while being used.
I've had the same set of high quality in-ear wired headphones for the last 5 years or longer and have zero issues with them (I just replace the foam every so often for about $5). What is the improvement I am missing here?
I think what you are missing is that different people value things differently. These don't make sense for you? That's fine, don't buy them. They don't make sense for me either, so I don't buy them.
However, I can understand how it would make sense for someone else. Arguing the money aspect doesn't make sense because we never know a person's income, expenses and savings. $200 for one person is nothing, while it can be the difference between making rent for another.
Arguing sound quality doesn't make sense either, because despite all of the numbers that people throw around, people perceive and enjoy sound differently. It isn't objective, its subjective.
Same thing with the presence of wires. I would have liked these (or, more likely, a larger set of wireless cans) when I lived in Japan and commuted by train daily. Now that I commute by car, my headphone use is limited to netflix in bed and when I'm playing guitar. Wireless doesn't do anything for me in those situations.
Long story short, different strokes for different folks.
Like you, I haven't chosen to get them for myself, but I got them for my wife who loves them. Reasons: I have pockets big enough to always be holding my phone, and I can just run a wire up from my pocket under my shirt and into my ears. No snags. She doesn't have such pockets and wouldn't wire herself in any case. She cares about fashion. I'm a programmer. I care about more important stuff like compilers and her. We'll leave it at that.
I have a headphone jack in my phone. She doesn't, so wireless is mandatory for her. It's just a question of lower quality, big, and clunky, or these. Now that I got these for her, the lower-quality option is forever off the table.
She can cruise around the kitchen cooking while "watching" a video that's playing on a laptop on the counter. I did that using my MacBook Pro's built-in speakers, which eventually blew out both speakers. My phone-in-the-pocket, wired solution limits me to audio-only.
So, yes, there are reasons, and whether they matter depends on the person.
Basically every generation of phones' regressions are based on looking at what Apple manages to get away with, and copying it. Even if I would never buy their junk myself (or encourage anyone else to), it's basically impossible to get away from their aftershocks.
Unremovable batteries? Apple got away with it from the start. Hell, they even managed to get people to pay ridiculous markups to replace them after it was discovered that they tampered with device performance.
Unremovable storage? Just look at what Apple manages to charge for storage upgrades!
Dropping the headphone jack? iPhone 7 got away with it, and drove the sale of plenty of adapters.
USB-C? Well, if Apple could get people to buy new Lightning devices and chargers...
These are standard "features" now. Every phone has this now. There are no other options for me to "vote for" with my wallet anymore, even though I always did when the I had the option to. There is no way for me, as a single consumer, to get away from this bullshit.
Fashion doesn't spring up from thin air. It's crafted by people. With agendas. And accessories to sell.
Hell, nobody seemed happy about any of these changes when they were introduced. But the manufacturers had the pockets to outlast the outrage. And eventually, fashion changed.
And, just maybe, ask why on earth a whole industry exists around fake pockets, and what accessories they exist to sell.
I feel what you're saying. I myself am very disappointed (not to say displeased) with late Apple products and I'm currently in the process of moving away from macOS and iOS. But I'll stick to my AirPods.
They are _the_only_ wireless earbuds on the market that you don't push inside your ear canals, and I absolutely abhor the in-canal ones. They also look nice, work great, I wear them for hours almost every day. Even put them on for quick calls. Probably one of the best technology products I've ever owned.
Dunno if you've used them but you might find this insight helpful if you're ever keen on them in the future,
I find the sound quality argument hillarious. They barely block any outoutside noise, which is great for the commuter use case. You want to hear traffic and train/bus stop announcements.
They're perfect for that use case.
They're not meant for sound quality but they aren't nearly as bad as people would think by how much this is brought up.
If you want quality / noise cancelling on your commute go for Sony mx3's.
How about arguing for the environmental cost of our throwaway culture?
Airpods have a MUCH higher environmental impact than ordinary earphones. A lot of tech is crammed into these things, all of which uses energy, resources, distilled water and so on to produce.
I have a pair of Shure earphones that have "just worked" for going onto three years now. I had to change NOTHING on them, and they've never complained. I've worn them for 2+ hours Every. Single. Day. during that time period.
People are reporting rubbish battery lives on the Apple subreddit already, with several of them desperately hoping for new ones so they can mindlessly continue upgrading without stopping to consider where that tech ends up.
> I have a pair of Shure earphones that have "just worked" for going onto three years now. I had to change NOTHING on them, and they've never complained. I've worn them for 2+ hours Every. Single. Day. during that time period.
And I have a pair of Airpods that have "just worked" for I guess about two and a half years now. I've had to change NOTHING on them, and they've never complained. I've worn them for 2+ hours (almost) Every. Single. Day. during that time period.
> People are reporting rubbish battery lives on the Apple subreddit already
People are going to report a litany of problems with every new product. There is zero reason to believe that battery life on these new AirPods should be, outside of defective devices, any less than the previous model.
Let's come back to this thread in two more years and continue this chat. Are you in good faith arguing that airpods and quality earphones will last the same amount of time and have the same environmental impact? It's one thing to have wanton disregard for the environment and say "Fuck climate change, convenience rulez", but a whole another thing to try to convince yourself that there IS no difference between the two choices.
Also, to preempt any exhortations of slippery slope fallacies, I'd say every person deserves a good laptop that they take care of, and a smartphone that they try to get to last as long as possible. That's where we draw the line. Every gadget beyond that should cause a serious examination of how necessary it is in one's life, and whether it is a want or a need. Airpods would fail catastrophically for almost everyone in such a sytem.
How many monitors do people deserve? Is anyone allowed to have a car? What about food processors? Are wifi routers okay, I mean wired ethernet worked just fine for decades.
Seriously. At least be consistent. If you're living off your own land, growing your own tomatoes and dreadlocks, and own zero technology, I'd understand and probably agree with you as you rant about the selfish decadence of humanity over the fire pit.
But these comments here are basically the height of virtue signaling and weird oneupmanship. The fact that they are posting on HN about it on their high-tech device is hilarious.
For example, they brag about their save-the-world low-fi headphones without realizing the irony of also owning the high-tech landfilling gadget they plug them into.
Why does the conversation always devolve into "go live in a cave"? Surely you must agree that there is a spectrum of possibilities, and the further along it one can be the better? Eating mostly vegetarian food, driving as little as possible, owning as little tech as possible, having as few children as one can. These would have seemed to me to be relatively uncontroversial opinions.
The implications of all these comments seems to be that it's perfectly OK to buy Airpods every two to three years for decades to come, because there are other avenues in which we are also fucking the environment.
Two monitors, unless you're working at a NASA control center. No cars for journeys under five miles, unless you have disabilities. Food processors and wifi routers are OK, because they both are closer to BIFL compared to airpods. Wired ethernet IS better if you've got a desktop.
i would wager that your argument is a rounding error compared to laptops, phones, and tvs... are airpods less environmentally friendly than regular headphones? sure, but let’s tackle things that actually matter before nitpicking. my airpods are devices that i’ve had longer than many of my other electronics purchases, and they’re certainly a quality of life improvement
Fair enough, but I'm already trying to tackle the other things: travelling by train when possible, /r/nocar, biking everywhere, making my phones and laptops last as long as I can, no children, eating mostly vegetarian (not that difficult when you're Indian).
The environmental Argument is interesting as I am thinking about getting AirPods precisely because Im sick of throwing away my regular in Ears because the headphone jacks keep breaking when I carry them crumbled in my jeans. (I hate having them tangle around while not in use). As an earlier poster pointed out: It all depends on your use case and preferences.
Shure, and many other good companies, make earphones with removable cables. These MMCX cables can be bought relatively cheaply (decent ones on Amazon france seem to be about EUR 15 onwards). Even better, the ones that come with the earphones are burly as fuck, and as I said, mine have lasted three years with no damage or loose soldering to report.
I did a review of Shure in ear monitors. They sent me their entire product lineup, though I only reviewed two of their products. The highest priced monitor had a cable break 2 years later, with only minimal use in that period. They had/have outstanding customer support for this class of monitor, and replaced it for free. Cable broke 6 months later. They would have replaced that too, but I didn't pay for the monitors, and felt like it was right to push it. These are the type of in ear monitors musicians use on stage during performances, and easily run of $1k. They sounded fantastic, but they were as reliable as Apple's $30 corded airbuds.
Don't know what to tell you, except my experience didn't match yours. The only special thing I do to care for them is to fold them in figure-of-eights so that there isn't much stress on the cables when stowed. They've gotten caught in doorknobs etc. during my time of owning them, but still going strong.
Following the same line of argument, why are we even discussing this stuff on the internet, using devices that consume electricity, going through servers that likely consume tons of power... when we could all meet in a field and talk?
Honestly, this sort of attitude is why I just struggle to trust any “green” activism, despite fundamentally being a leftie. You are happy to live in a cave, fine, do that; but myself, I like my tech and I want to keep going forward.
What is your brilliant solution then? It's rather simple. There are billions of us on the planet. You cannot have them all live the standard American lifestyle full of chromecasts and Apple Homepods and use-and-dispose Airpods.
The best that I can think of is minimizing my impact. This heavily involves minimal tech.
We had the same arguments for decades, and we are still here. Whenever we hit a snag, like oil or food running out, we think of solutions, like changing energy sources to renewables or improving agricultural efficiency. Progress is made by unreasonable people.
As I said, you're free to do as you please, and I'm free to say that I'll do differently.
Good luck with the Shures continuing to last. I absolutely love my Shures, but I’ve gone through ~4 pairs in the last 12 years, and I don’t think I’m particularly hard on them. It’s a bit better now that they have replaceable cables, but even after that change, I’ve had at least one socket fail on them on the earbud side.
Being wireless is just that good. Especially when exercising or otherwise out-and-about.
The charging is not nearly that obnoxious, I've gone through a wide range of wireless sets and they've all had multi-day charges.
Personally I have a nice set of IEMs for longer, sitting use cases and otherwise use a cheap (~$20) wireless set; so that when it inevitably breaks/gets lost/battery wears down after a ~year, it's negligible to just replace it.
Also, nowadays, wireless headphones have surprisingly good audio; especially if you're just listening to podcasts.
How about getting a pair of BeatsX earbuds, cut those crappy units off and make what's left a Bluetooth adapter with MMCX connectors that are compatible with your IEMs. Seems to have the best of the both worlds.
I'll just address this point, because it is categorically incorrect and something many people misunderstood when they were first released.
There are two of them. You can use them independently from one another. When you hear the "low battery" tone, it's trivial to remove one and continue to use the other. By the time the tone plays again in the one you continued to use (signaling critically low battery), you just swap which earbud is in the case. The one that was in the case will be almost fully charged at this point.
The effect is that you can pretty much use them indefinitely without a full interruption. And using only one at a time is mostly unnoticeable.
I really wish I could put myself into the shoes of people who think that fifteen minutes of using only one earbud is a big deal, but I honestly just can't.
Your point that you can use one while charging the other was valid and helpful.
But saying "I'll just address this point, because it is categorically incorrect" was unnecessarily aggressive. With that opening, I think people expected a solution with no caveats.
From that opening I just expected that the idea that you had to use two would be a frustratingly widespread misconception and completely wrong. Given that I had that misconception, that the UX implies that it’s the case (remove one and it stops playing music), and it is apparently completely wrong, I’d say the parent was pretty spot on.
To me, that blows big holes in the argument that Airpods are better than wired earphones. It's compromises up and down the chart with the sole benefit being wirelessness? Are people nowadays really that rich that they can dump 150 USD EVERY two to three years just to get rid of a wire?!
Also, I just can't fathom people's willingness to let so much tech into their lives. Laptops, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, airpods... all of which need to be constantly charged, and replaced once their batteries die, because they cannot be swapped out, meaning the rest of the apparatus lies impotent in a dumpster for a thousand years or more, never to biodegrade... it's depressing and wearisome to picture.
They're literally always on my person. At all times. Without even having to think about it, because they just come along with my phone and keys whenever they change pockets.
I can wear them all day and basically forget they're there, even when pausing audio to have conversations with people physically in front of me.
For phone calls, they're measurably more convenient since I can just leave my phone on my desk and continue whatever it was I was previously doing.
The "compromises" I have to make, on the other hand are completely insignificant. Sometimes I have to take one earbud out. Sometimes the case is low on battery so I plug it in at the nearest cable on my desk or nightstand. The audio quality is perfectly fine, I have never noticed a difference unless I was explicitly trying to look for one.
> Are people nowadays really that rich that they can dump 150 USD EVERY two to three years just to get rid of a wire?!
Why do you seem to believe that these will only last two or three years? Mine are 2.5 years in and I can't say I've noticed any kind of battery degradation. Surely they won't continue to last indefinitely, but every other wired headphone I've used has had the wire fray sooner or later anyway.
> Also, I just can't fathom people's willingness to let so much tech into their lives.
I can't reply to the other comment you made, but I find it telling that you've decided that you get to be the gatekeeper for what is "too much tech" and what's not. From that comment, "Every person deserves... a laptop... and a smartphone". And headphones too, apparently. But wireless headphones are where we as a society should draw the line?
Somehow I don't think I'd be surprised to find you having this same conversation ten years ago deriding how rich people must be to afford a $1,000 cell phone every few years, when flip phones are just as good and aren't full of compromises like software keyboards.
My wired phones are also on my person. At all times. Without even having to think about it. I can also wear them all day and forget they're there. Actually even better because foam is softer than the hard plastic of the airpods.
The compromises are that you have to charge them all the time. You cannot wear them constantly on an 8 hour flight. One-size-fits-most. They come packaged with an expiry date. Yours are going fine, but on balance, I'd say a careful user could make wired, QUALITY, earphones last longer than Airpods. The audio quality, despite you confident proclamations, isn't even in the vicinity of wired stuff you can get for that price range.
Guilty as charged about being a self-annointed gatekeeper. I'm driven to a low-level despair at our relentless forward march towards a scorched planet. Nevertheless, to conclude the argument, yeah, wireless throwaway airpods and home theaters ARE perhaps where we should draw the line. Where would you draw the line? Or do you think it's all dandy even if we never draw the line?
As to your last point, you're probably right. I have in all seriousness considered moving back to a flip phone. Since I don't have any social media, all that smartphones give me is access to boarding passes for flights, and GPS. But meanwhile, I turn it off at night and make the battery last two to three days between charges.
People collect cars, watches, shoes, expensive clothing. On the extreme end there's figurines, paintings, antiques -- at least the former items have utility, the latter are mere articles for signalling to others.
Does it really blow your mind that the ability to move freely without being tethered to a phone is a selling point? I can give an example where it really helps for me: I'm a nudist.
But even when clothed I like walking around able to take a call or listen to music without snagging a cable on one of the many protrusions in this world like door handles, kitchen cupboard handles etc which can also lead to an expensive phone launching from my pocket onto the floor.
If you're worried about pollution, Airpods should be on the low end of the concerns list.
Off topic but any good resources you know of for those interested in nudism? You rarely come across someone who will talk or even admit to it so sorry if that is out of line asking.
Does Apple not recycle their devices anymore? You’re drawing the line in the wrong place. Phones and laptops really can’t get much better, so your other comment makes sense and we should hang onto those for as long as possible. But you know what? Headphones aren’t, and Bluetooth needed to be saved because pairing sucks.
Are you sure $150 every 2-3 years actually sounds like a lot of money to you? Especially on something as important as listening to audio? I don't even think you believe this. My headphones last longer than that, but that's irrelevant to my counterargument.
Show me your receipts and I'll find things I "can't fathom" and all sorts of environmentally questionable decisions. You clearly are willing enough to let technology into your life yet care so little about the environment to post here on your high tech device, to use your own argument. You would lose the game you started very quickly.
Perhaps I would. I have terrible gear acquisiton syndrome when it comes to music and also outdoors-gear. In my defense, though, both of those hobbies tend to have BIFL gear. Guitars and tents last a long time.
It helps in a pinch if you’re on a really long conference call and the batteries start to run low. I’ll pop one briefly back in the case to top it off and not have to miss anything said.
GP said they "can't be charged while being used". Which is categorically incorrect. They can, and on the scale of Things That Are a Big Deal, it's an 0.3 out of 10.
They can't both be used, and c'mon; is this really a debate? You cannot use _both_ of them and charge them at the same time. The best experience comes from using _both_ of them simultaneously. So, it's a workaround. It's fine, it's whatever, but it's also silly to get haughty about it as if there were no impact whatsoever.
Given zero interest rates, and the fact that AirPods used half as much will last twice as many days, the two-pair implementation is financially equivalent to the one-pair implementation.
I love my AirPods. I am in full panic mode when I realize that I forgot them at home (happens rarely). They are the best Apple products in years. Why? Because they simply work, seamlessly. Product development in perfection.
Can’t be charged while being used? Who cares? They last long enough. 1 out of 50 times I wear them they run out of battery. Charging them takes 5 minutes, so it’s not a big deal.
Also, the whole point is that they’re wireless. If you don’t care about this specific feature it’s no wonder you don’t see them as an improvement.
It would take a significant amount of charging inconvenience to get me to go back to wired earbuds instead of wireless. I can't speak for others, but for me wireless AirPods were a really dramatic improvement in the experience of listening to music outside of my home office. Almost revolutionary, if I can risk being a bit overzealous in my praise.
For me, switching to bluetooth earbuds (PowerBeats) was a game changer. Switching to AirPods was a level above that. I wear them for most of the day and don't really have an issue with having them be charged.
I pop them in their case when I take a break or go for lunch and then charge the case itself now and then and things work out just fine. The charging is very fast.
I think the confusion on charging comes in with the case - you "charge" the airpods by keeping them together in the case. You charge the case by plugging it in. The case has about 24 hours of battery, so I charge the case about once every two weeks with around 2 hours a day of conference calls/podcast listening. I generally hate having a wire attached from my laptop to my ears because it inevitably will get snagged at least once a week.
Also for my use case (calls) you can charge while listening by using only one bud at a time.
I have many pairs of headphones, wired and wireless, but I just ordered a new set of AirPods because they are simply the most convenient headphone I've ever used (Presuming you use primarily Apple products.) Far from the best sounding - but I've found for a general use headphone they are more than adequate.
> I generally hate having a wire attached from my laptop to my ears because it inevitably will get snagged at least once a week.
I actually finally understand why some people may want wireless now, thank you. Personally somehow I never get my earbud cable snagged, even when snowboarding or climbing. However that tangled mess of wires when i take it out of my pocket...
What about having to have your phone in your pocket and a wire coming out of it into your ears? I've always found that annoying and usually wind up running the wire up inside my shirt so that it's not moving around or getting caught on things. I've never liked having phone holder armbands.
I absolutely loathe working out with wired headphones. Even with them inside my shirt occasionally I'd wind up with enough slack to get them caught on something. Usually when I'm bench pressing or working with free weights.
On the flip side, before BT5 and my S10 I had nothing but problems with all of my wireless headphones constantly skipping. I've actually posted here before that my $200 Jabra 65ts on my S8 would skip just walking to work to the point I'd run wired on my "commute." My S10 solved that, thankfully.
With that said I still refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack (I'm on an S10 now). I have 2 sets of great (Jabra 65t Elites and Galaxy s10 buds) wireless but if I'm just taking the dogs for a quick walk I throw in whatever wired buds are laying around nearby. Or I'm at someones house/pool and just want a quick way to plug into their speakers.
It really is genius that you charge the holder which charges the buds, though, as opposed to charging the headphones. I can run them (not airpods) down and toss them in the charger for 20 minutes and get a few more hours of listening. Helps battery anxiety quite a bit.
> What about having to have your phone in your pocket and a wire coming out of it into your ears? I've always found that annoying and usually wind up running the wire up inside my shirt so that it's not moving around or getting caught on things
Again it's never been a problem for me however upon further thought I usually put my phone in my bra when doing something physical so it's not a surprise there not an issue.
Now don't get me started on no headphone jack... i have an iphone and I irks me to now end that they removed it for honestly no good reason imho. I only put up with it because it's only occasionally a problem for me as i can charge up the phone pretty quick with my ankor and I prefer iphones for other reasons but man, i would buy the new iphone tomorrow if it had the jack.
I will never go back to wired headphones, especially on the go.
After experiencing AirPods, I will pay any amount of $ to replace them if they ever get lost. They really are that good and they’re probably the best purchase I’ve made in years.
If you go to the gym at all, they’ll be a game changer.
Let me put it this way - sometimes I completely forget they’re even in my ear.
These get charged way less than your phone. The case has about 24-hours worth of charge in it. I’m much more likely to have my phone low on charge than my AirPods. Wireless case charging will make it so that my case is almost always well charged.
Plus (and this isn't unique to AirPods) the lower charge the AirPods are the faster they recharge. As long as you keep the case charged you can drop the pods in for a couple-few minutes while you give your ears a break and you'll get a decent playback duration when you come back.
This, for sure, but also the AirPod case can be charged whenever, whereas you usually want to charge your phone at night.
I’m struggling to find words to explain what I mean ... there’s rarely a time when I realise I need to charge my AirPods and it’s an inconvenience, whereas the phone always seems to run low at just the wrong time. I dunno.
Plus, you can have the AirPods in your ears, listening to a thing, while the case charges. This takes nothing away from your experience. You can use your iPhone while it charges, but that’s a PITA because now you’re tethered to a wall.
TL;DR: charging them isn’t an issue that should prevent you from buying them. They’re amazing.
Not needing to have your phone on your body constantly.
Source: Wife owns AirPods and I use them from time to time. For me these two points are HUGE plus points.
But I won’t buy them as i find them too expensive and don’t listen to audio often enough (wired or wireless) on my phone anyway.
> I honestly can't say I understand the draw to drop significant money on a new set of headphones that need to be charged at least as often as a my phone, and can't be charged while being used.
Maybe if you are using them 24/7. The battery in the case can charge the airpods batteries several times.
Not even if you are using them 24/7, since that would drain your phone battery. That is one downside, though — that your phone battery drains more quickly with wireless headphones. I've noticed this on my 7 Plus for sure.
Being able to connect to multiple devices at once, not having a chord get in the way or getting tangled while in pocket (happened to me a lot while exercising), not being tethered to a device (not a big deal with a phone, but it can be annoying when you are using a laptop or desktop), some headphones overlay external noises over your music (anti-noise canceling?) so you can be more aware of your surroundings/people talking to you.
These are just a few I thought of off the top of my head, but they may not be worth the price tag for everyone.
Literally the only significant attraction is not having the wire. Ever since wireless headphones started to actually work reliably, I've used them exclusively (big over-the-ear ones for music, airpods for things like calls or online meetings).
For me it was all about the fucking tangle. I don't care much about having the cable on while I am using them. But having to do that stupid devil-horns-figure-eight winding technique to avoid the cable getting tangled into a knot, every single time I want to put the headphones into my pocket, which I do several times a day... ugh.
For me, going back to wired headphones would be like going back to getting on the train by going up to a vending machine, putting coins into it, pushing buttons, waiting for it to emit a paper ticket, and then getting on the train.
It's only a difference of a few seconds, usually, but it something I do over and over and over and over, so that's why it's worth it to me.
(I dropped significant money on a new iphone as soon as it finally got train-pass functionality here in Japan, too.)
Having to occasionally charge a pair of headphones, and not being able to charge while in use, is easily worth the trade off of being wireless. I would never go back to wired headphones, regardless of quality/price/features
I can carry AirPods always in pocket and easily pop them to ear before answering call. I did not like wired ones, because wire would get tangled with keys etc. Is this worth the price? For me yes, but certainly not for everybody.
Why is charging while using a feature even worth mentioning? AirPods gain 3 hours of battery life (listening time) with 15 minutes of charging in the case, vs. 5 hours of total battery life between charges. That's very little difference, and if you're doing something important where interruptions are unacceptable (like a phone/video call), you can always charge one AirPod at a time in the case (they both have microphones). In practice I just don't find it hard to believe that very many people would ever need or even use the "charge while using" feature.
I’m with you but got AirPods as a gift and did not return them.
Pretty much all BT solutions are a pain pairing wise and sound lag wise.
Apple’s are very well designed, a luxury object. Almost no lag with sound. Very good phone call experience. Sound is mediocre but always available.
Still, they are disposable by design and I find it repulsive that we have normalized the pollution associated with buying this product. I won’t be buying another pair and will be pressing Apple to establish a recycling program.
My etimotic headphones sound great and have a long life.
I love the Apple wired earphones that come with the phone. However, if you travel a lot or move around, the wires tend to tangle and when you need the headset in the split of a second they don't work. It's not a critical use case but the more you travel, the more you move around, the tangled headphones start annoying you more and more. You'll reach a point at which $150 or $200 doesn't seem like a big deal to get rid of this annoyance.
If you fly a lot, then you'll really appreciate over the ear headphones, preferably the noise cancelling ones. That being said, these wireless over the ear phones are too bulky to use in day to day life such as commute etc. So now you end up owning one pair of wireless noise cancelling headphones for flying, air pods for your day-day commute. You see where I am going with this .. welcome to capltalism :)
True wireless headphones for me is a big improvement. It’s just so darn convenient. Also, during the year I’ve had mine I’ve never found myself in a situation where I’ve had to use them while charging. Having one more thing to keep charged is of course a downside, but when compared to the convenience they bring it’s a small one.
My first pair of Airpods, even after 2 years, still worked for hours on a charge. And of course “charging” just means putting them in your pocket. I just wish I had waited to run them through the laundry until today. I bought a new pair just recently.
How many meetings do you do on your phone? The people at my company that have them and love them have daily phone meetings. Keeping your hands free while talking and moving around is the critical feature that people seem to love.
>that need to be charged at least as often as a my phone
That's not true at all with AirPods. I use them nearly every day and I haven't had to charge them in almost 2 full weeks since charge while in the case and 5 minutes of charge lasts a few hours.
They're seriously awesome. I never would have purchased them myself or asked for them for the price they're asking but I got them as a gift and I think they're amazing.
I don't own any, but I do have a 3rd party wireless headset. For me, ditching the cable means avoiding the inexplicable and over-the-top rage I experience when wired earphones/headphones get suddenly yanked on the occasion they catch on something. Once in a while I'll meet somebody else that has this type of reaction. It's weird.
Freedom of movement more than anything. I bought a pair and they sounded about as mediocre as the wired apple earbuds. I loved the freedom it provided. I don't know how many times I flung my phone or macbook to the ground because I was wired.
I had to return them because one of my ears isn't a good fit. One earpod stuck out almost 45 degrees out of my ears and loosen over prolonged use.
You need to charge them roughly a magnitude less than your phone. That's once a week or more if you charge your phone everyday because your usage of your phone is supposed to directly correlate with your usage of the airpods.
So, unless you use your wired headphones on other devices, it's not a good comparison.
I charge my AirPods case probably less often than every month. With heavier usage that might be weekly. (The AirPods themselves are recharged by the case, which is where they go when they're not in my ears anyway.)
+1 and mini-jack headsets doesn't need an additional power plants. Think about it when in the next keynote they'll say how "green" and "clean" they are ...
It is a trade off and not for everybody. But for me I value my time and comfort of not having to untangle / untie the stupid pieces of Earpod wire every time I want to use it.
Software is versioned in numerical order which is pretty intuitive. At a glance it's clear which versions are minor updates, and which are major.
Cars are versioned by year/model, which again makes it pretty clear to understand minor/major updates. Sometimes significant updates are introduced in a model year, but generally the core features remain the same and it could still be considered an upgrade to that model.
Without a clear and intuitive versioning scheme it can be confusing and time consuming to make sense of a product line. And that gets frustrating if it keeps changing.
>Cars are versioned by year/model, which again makes it pretty clear to understand minor/major updates. Sometimes significant updates are introduced in a model year, but generally the core features remain the same and it could still be considered an upgrade to that model.
Tesla managed to break this trend massively, which proves a problem for things like insurance. The feature set on (say) the January 2014 Model S is very different from the December 2014 Model S, even though they technically share the same "year".
> Without a clear and intuitive versioning scheme it can be confusing and time consuming to make sense of a product line. And that gets frustrating if it keeps changing.
This is a case of Nvidia working with that sentiment rather than against it.
They were roasted by review sites previously for co-mingling architectures in the same numbering generation. So this time, they didn't.
TU106 was far too big of a chip to die-harvest low enough for a true volume x60 budget part.
Add in all the non-graphics acceleration hardware that needed to be cut to hit price and... Nvidia didn't feel this could be called an RTX 20xx part.
The 16xx is awkward, but it's the least bad choice.
BMW went that way very recently. It wasn't that long ago that their model numbers were very much explicit. A 328i was a 3-series chassis with a 2.8 liter. The i and d stood for fuel-injected and diesel respectively.
Well it still makes sense to some extent. i and d still mean petrol and diesel, with e for hybrid joining the ranks lately. But in general x1x(say 116d or 114i) are entry level engines, x2x(320d) are mid-tier and x3x(430d) x4x(240i) are higher end, more powerful engines.
That was fine back in the day when there was a correlation between engine size and performance.
Since they started strapping turbochargers to everything down to 1.0l, the engine size comparison has become less important. If anything my 3.0l car is seen as a negative because of the higher fuel consumption.
The manufacturers are just trying to walk a fine line.
I deleted my facebook account maybe a year ago. It was like ripping off a band-aid.
It felt bad for a short period of time due fear of missing out on family/friends and whatnot. But shortly after I realized that I'm feeling less distracted and not falling into the scroll-hole as often.
And as a small bonus, on my last birthday I received actual texts and calls from actual friends instead of "me too" comments on a fb post.
