Yeah that’s basically the same conclusion I reached: it’s perfectly cromulent until you run into something you need that it won’t do, and then there’s absolutely no way to make it work, period.
A lot of the final decision was based primarily around the fact that I just was not invovled in what friends and family members were doing, because I had become a pain in the ass to contact and so people just… didn’t.
Mostly becasuse, well, I don’t like Android.
I’ve tried it repeatedly over quite a number of years, starting with the G1, and every time I’ve used it, my general opinion was ‘this is fine I guess, but I’d rather have an iOS device instead’. Excepting the two OnePlus devices: those were utter shit. One I was pretty sure was going to catch fire, and one that actually did catch fire. No more crap from them, seriously.
Will say the Nexus 9 tablet rates in the S-tier of all the tablets I’ve ever owned, though.
And I’m deep in the Apple ecosystem otherwise: Mac, iPad, Watch, AirPods and so on.
And, of course, I don’t think there’s a wearable smartwatch for android that integrates cellular stuff quite like the iPhone/Watch does in that it’ll share calls and messages on a single number. I know there’s a lot of stand-alone stuff, and a lot of non-cellular stuff, but the last time I looked there wasn’t really a seamless and cheap solution for leaving the phone at home and not losing any of the primary communication aspects of the phone.
Well knowing Elon, he’s probably paying minimum wage and also forcing the guy to clean his toilets and bring him tendies.
And complaining the entire time about how the tendies doesn’t have enough honey mustard.
I’m using their T-Mobile rebrand, and it’s just as good as T-Mobile ever was, excepting you don’t get any 5G access.
Though, tbh, I don’t care, since I’m paying $5 a month for 500 minutes, 500 texts, and 500mb of data. 5G would be a total waste since, I mean, even the 4G stuff can eat all my data allocation in like 30 seconds anyways.
It’s just endless little things:
Edit: Also:
And on and on and on. None of those are dealbreakers on their own, but it’s always something that either you can’t do, or can’t quite do right, or is actively a problem for everyone else you’re interacting with and you just… end up with so many little annoyances you’re not sure doing this makes any sense.
Hah was coming here to say basically this: if you’re always tired after sleeping, go get a sleep study. If you do have sleep apnea, absolutely nothing short of medical intervention will make a meaningful difference, and it’s an easy place to start.
Same.
There’s almost never only a single option to offer me what I’m after, so I’ll just go back to my search results or whatever and pick the next link and move on.
There’s no way in hell I’m giving some jackasses my phone number, though. I don’t even like giving people who really actually need to be able to call me my number, so why would I give some sketchy-ass website it?
I’d argue the problem is that Hollywood has lost the ability to make cheap movies, and thus if it doesn’t gross a billion dollars, it’s a flop.
A stupid example, I’ll admit, but I think most people will agree was good: The Breakfast Club. It had a $1 million budget, which isn’t shit even adjusted for inflation (about $3 million).
Maybe they should find people who can make a movie for less than a hundred million and see if they come up with any winners?
Stuff your mouth full of cotton, and find someone to kick you in the head a few times. That’s pretty close.
Listen, I can’t deal with my sore back, bum knee, AND a hangover all at once.
How did any, and I mean any TV executive think that was a good deal?
I doubt they thought about it and/or care. It’s probably a case where they don’t have the rights to offer the missing seasons, and threw what they had up anyways because fuck it, someone will watch it.
Or with Netflix, you’re exactly right.
I don’t honestly expect Netflix to survive long-term, since there’s absolutely no reason to subscribe to them anymore.
They don’t have any shows that I could name that I’d be interested in, and it’s damn internet meme that they’re going to kill everything after a season or two.
It’s utter incompetence by the c-levels, and has pretty much put them on a trajectory to eventually just glide into irrelevance.
I’ve started spending 100% less on streaming services this year.
When all the content I could possibly want was on Netflix, I happily and without reservation paid for it. I would have even paid more, (and did, when 4k streaming became a thing) and was generally happy with what they offered.
But of course, we all know that their content licenses were not renewed, and then they engaged in a non-stop campaign of cancelling any show I found remotely interesting, and that was basically the end of a 15-year subscription history with them.
And it’s not like any of the replacement services were better: they all had little bits and pieces of shit I might want, but they had multiple tiers, mostly with ads, and I just couldn’t be fucked to figure out which service had what content - and, worse, sometimes they had the content but not EVERYTHING: who the hell wants to watch a show on a service that has season 2,4,5 and 6, but not 1,3 or 7?
You would have to subscribe to several services to get everything, and suddenly they were looking worse than the cable subscription they were supposedly replacing, but being better than,
Basically, they made a product worse than me doing it myself, and so, after a very long stretch of paying for shit, I went back to uh, not paying for it.
Spotify is in that list too: I realized I was a grumpy old man and that for my purposes I could just buy and rip second-hand CDs and build a library that didn’t cost me money every month, and well, if I bought a couple of CDs a year, it was STILL in my favor by a huge margin. (And, as a bonus, I wasn’t contributing to certain poor choices of podcast funding they had made.)
…so it’s true, but her parents just decided it’s not worth chasing any further.
Cool, cool.
What, you mean you don’t play games and go “Well that looked great! Well worth my time!” like an awful lot of the AAA game industry appears to think gamers do?
Huh.
Seriously though, I’m curious how we ended up in the make-shit-prettier race and not a make-the-writing-good, or make-the-game-actually-fun, or even things like make-more-than-two-dungeons (looking at you, Starfield) race.
Especially given the cost to me, personally, to keep upgrading my GPU has reached an untenable level: I’m sure as crap not paying $2000 for a new GPU just so we get a few extra frames of hair jiggle or slightly better lighting or whatever.
I got a CA-53 recently myself, for much the same reason.
Nobody ever said anything about my Apple Watch, but holy crap does everyone love a calculator watch.
(Which is hilarious because as a kid, I was teased as a nerd for having such a thing.)
Time to rename the blue shell to The Shell of Equity, I guess?
Might have been unclear; I listen basically exclusively to spoken word stuff. Podcasts, audobooks, “raido” plays, etc.
The Airpods actually sound remarkably good and clear (and ANC helps a lot with ensuring clarity anywhere even slightly noisy) with voices, so for my uses, they sound perfectly fine.
I have a pile of Chi-Fi earbuds that absolutely destroy them in sound quality for music, but it’s very much a 99.9% of the time it’s not music situation.
They really do.
The sound great, and the ANC is great, but the “official” battery life for a brand new one (which these are not) is “up to 4.5 hours” with ANC on, and 5 without it.
It ends up being 2-3 charge cycles basically every day, plus a full recharge of the charging case.
They do, however, work amazingly well if you’re in the Apple ecosystem; for example they’ll swap between my iPad and Mac Mini if audio starts on one or the other.
But for actually sitting down with something and listening to a thing, I’d rather just plug in some headphones (via the lovely USB-C dongle) and not have to think about if the stupid things are going to die before I’m ready to stop listening.
(Disclaimer: I’m also a weirdo who doesn’t carry a smartphone, and still uses an iPod for listening to stuff outside of the house, so feel free to roll your eyes and disregard my obviously bad opinions :P )
My complaint has always been that the stupid things need to endlessly be recharged.
I’ve got some AirPod Pros and they’re great… for about 4 hours.
Then you’re stopping what you’re doing, recharging for half an hour, and then you’re good for uh, another 3 hours because that wasn’t a full charge.
And after the 2nd or 3rd time you’ve done that, your case is dead and you get to throw everything on a charger for a couple of hours.
Ooooooooor I can put in my wired headphones, and not give a shit about any of that, because that’s not how those work at all.
I suppose most people don’t spend most of their day listening to podcasts and audiobooks and thus 4 hours is fine, but good lord is it annoying as crap.
Can you imagine if the first movie released in it’s first iteration?
Stopping to remake that shit has probably been the best decision that anyone working on these movies has ever made in their life.