expired
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.
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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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.
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.
Voice commands on anything. It just feels silly.
@mayflower
Anything that has something to do with Meta.
I trying to ditch all non open source software, it’s hard but I’m hopeful.If you’re using Linux, there’s a bunch of open-source code from Meta running on your PC. Same with some small parts of Windows. :)
Yeah, but with Meta’s open source contributions we know what they are and what they do.
Apple anything
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.
“The cloud”.
In the end “the cloud” is just someone else’s hard drive. Call me old fashioned, but I’ll keep my data on my own hard drives.
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.
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.
Tablets, I don’t see the appeal of a big phone device that can’t fit your pocket and can’t make calls
