I have three teenage kids and they’ve all switched to wired. Many of their friends have as well.
It has nothing to do with fashion or retro vibes, as far as I can tell.
They’ve all lost too many AirPods through the years. AirPods just too easy to lose, and at their school, too easy to be stolen by someone else. And they’re expensive. Yes you can buy cheaper Bluetooth headsets but those often don’t sound as good and get lost just as easily.
So you’re either on a subscription basis relationship wih Bluetooth headsets, or you use wired headphones, which are actually harder to lose and less desirable to steal.
Sound wise they are exactly the same. This is what bewildered me at the time with the airpods. Everyone is raving about the sound. Same chinsy crappy earppod sound they always had. Might as well use one of the five pairs of those you've accumulated.
And then also everyone I know who was heavy into airpods has also over time moved off them because, the battery. Everyone uses over ears from Sony now. Like look at what the walkers in your neighborhood are doing, everyone has overears now with actual battery life that isn't going to be ewaste in 18 months.
Heavy usage on these is just killing the battery. It is worst case for battery health: people just draining these down in one session constantly. In like 1 year maybe 2 your battery life has sunk like a stone and apple wants $50 out of you. 10 years half a grand spend on $5 sound quality.
It's a growing trend in the "alternative" health scene. I have a few friends who should absolutely know better do silly stuff like use wired headphones due to RF, and even as much as turning Wifi off at night for health reasons. Nevermind they just switch to 5G in bed on their phones.
Probably the usual "RF is bad for your head" quackery that has been floating around ever since the first mobile phones, and for athletes, wired devices aren't in danger of getting damaged when they fall out of your ear.
I think you’re missing the point and approaching this with a myopically binary perspective.
Just because you consider AI an interface in line with, perhaps, a paintbrush, typewriter, or spell checker, doesn’t mean it automatically is. It may even be true for you, and not for others. That’s the myopic part.
The binary part is that simply because you see it as an interface, it doesn’t have effects that are different than the interface of a brush. You wouldn’t get very far arguing with a judge that 80mph over the speed limit is exactly the same as 5mph over the speed limit.
Or, where would you draw the line. Is hiring someone to write your hacker news comments still your comment? Or what about spam bots? Are they not also an “interface?” Is banning spam bots outrightly also “ableist” by you?
But also, we have plenty of both media philosophical musing and evidence based data that shows that while mediums may not BE the message, they absolutely do affect the message.
In this case HN is simply saying that the process of humans generating words that we type onto a screen is the valuable part of communicating that we want to maintain. And that using AI is a bridge too far in losing the effort and output from that process.
I didn’t find the DLC quite as good as the OG however the storyline is excellent, and I actually liked most of the puzzles; I say actually because the puzzles are its most often critiqued part.
This is a case where it may be that people are outsourcing shitty user experiences to an AI.
I’m not a huge ebayer but I’m usually watching one or two auctions at a time. The problem is that you can’t disallow marketing notifications. So, if I want to be usefully alerted for a new item in a search, or that I’ve been outbid, or the imminent end of an auction, I’ll also be getting notifications and emails about all kinds of shit I don’t care about. $5 off coupons (that only apply to 8 items that I don’t want). “You might like this!” notifications (spoiler: I never do). Group buying times (who cares?).
So I either disable ALL notifications (and have an LLM write a script that crawls searches manually and much more appropriately notifies me on its own), or I enable notifications and get a bunch of trash spam.
As it relates to specifically to buying, we’ve known for a long time that we’re all up against some kind of bot that’s timed the exact last moment and amount to outbid us. It’s no fun.
I’ve been an eBay user since 1998 and it’s been on a very slow roll of enshittification since then.
Make your experience better for humans and maybe we’d be less inclined to outsource negative experiences to AI.
I think a better or at least adjacent question might be: do consumers want to pay full price for an object that isn’t subsidized by services? Do we actually want physical objects?
Even the things that aren’t technically subscription feel like they are. I have a Kenmore fridge I bought in 2020. The extended warranty just ran out and the thing died. I called a tech. $400 to replace a series of motors. I looked into doing it myself and it’s outside of my time or ability. I have a basement beer fridge that is admittedly less efficient but it’s still kicking and it’s from the mid 80s. I realized I’m effectively ON a subscription plan for a fridge. $900-$1,200 for five years.
How much is a smartphone that lasts (do they even) and is NOT subsidized by cloud services? I have a 128gb iPhone and though I barely use any apps I’m constantly maxing my space because I take a lot of photos.
I hate to sound like a graduate student writing a thesis on capitalism but like water flow, it just feels like companies will always default to maximum profits. Didn’t instant pot and tupper ware just go out of business because they made a product everyone needed but only once? There’s no long term profit growth in any model where we’re not sucking off the teet of some company.
It has nothing to do with fashion or retro vibes, as far as I can tell.
They’ve all lost too many AirPods through the years. AirPods just too easy to lose, and at their school, too easy to be stolen by someone else. And they’re expensive. Yes you can buy cheaper Bluetooth headsets but those often don’t sound as good and get lost just as easily.
So you’re either on a subscription basis relationship wih Bluetooth headsets, or you use wired headphones, which are actually harder to lose and less desirable to steal.
reply