Košs KPH30i headphones. Those fuckers are an actual health hazard. They will make your ears suffer for the crime of putting them on.
Really sad cause Porta Pros are incredible. And I usually see people suggest getting the KPH30i instead. Don’t do that.
Anything KOSS or PYLE is straight dog shit. Been that way for at least 25 years. I bought many of their products as a broke teenager.
Anything with fucking Bluetooth. Even in 2024 getting it to connect consistently requires some kind of arcane magic
It’s fine as long as you never connect different controllers to the same device. Then it becomes a nightmare
All of my Bluetooth devices work flawlessly these days. What are you using?
“Sony MDRXB55AP Wired Extra Bass Earbud Headphones/Headset with Mic for Phone Call, Black”
Biggest pieces of shit I have ever disgraced my ears with. I’m not even an audiophile or a gear snob or anything. These were just so ridiculously bad that it was offensive. I’ve owned earbuds from the dollar store that sounded better than these.
Probably won’t help, but I find that headsets sound much worse when they’re connected as a headset. My (completely different headphones/headset) sounds a lot better in headphone mode.
Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.
Or worse: it’s in telephone mode now, so obviously you only want the sound from the “call” because there’s no other reasons the microphone could be on.
Good to know, thanks!
Thank you for explaining that far better than I could!
I might be exaggerating a but I’ve never been a real fan of Bluetooth headphones or earphones. Sound quality never matched cabled ones (I also have the popular Sony one) and battery life sucks for the time I want to use it
All true. All good points.
I’m running out of places to buy a phone that offers a jack, though.
But my home rig is a USB sound dongle to wired earbuds usually. Occasionally a set of ANC buds for the bad days.
I always wanted to be the cool hipster with cabled headphones and getting mad about phones without audio jack.
Truth is, my cables always got tangled up, especially at work. It was getting really annoying. I bought some open ear headphones from aftershokz because i often listen to music wherever and i don’t want to be isolated. These things absolutely fuck. Battery life is fantastic. Even if they are empty, i can throw them into the pocket charger for 15 minutes and they go for hours again. The sound is good. It’s not full blown headphone quality, obviously. But they are so comfortable and you don’t have to stick anything into your ears. I saw that bose has a similar product and i kinda wanna try them.
There’s a method to put headphones into your pocket without them tangling. Fold them in half always instead of coiling them up.
I learned ‘cable macrame’ from my networking mentor. I can wrap a cable so fast, and it’s not gonna tangle.
I always wanted to be the cool hipster with cabled headphones and getting mad about phones without audio jack.
I’m triggered for I think I’m in this comment. But I’m less ‘cool hipster’ and more ‘cantankerous nerd’. But allllll the rest is true.
I understand it’s a very subjective experience. And tbh, one thing that bothers me about cabled ones is the cable noise when moving. Or accidentally pulling off the headphones from my head, although that’s not a common issue,but for sitting experience they’re perfect. Aside from that, my music preference is very eclectic, so e.g. the level of bass really needs to adapt properly to the genre I’m listening to atm, so the boosted bass Bluetooth headphones just don’t work for me. I’ve never experienced a Bluetooth pair that doesn’t have too much bass.
Ya, bass is always the downside of these things, but i’m not super into that. Also i don’t really like to listen to music very loud. I really don’t like when i feel the cable brushing my arms or something. And i rip them out every time i stand up. It’s so bad. A huge plus for me is also that i can leave my phone somewhere and i can still listen to music.
Yeah the moving around thing is also a benefit to me too
My jabra 85 elite last me for a solid >12h of continuous play
I have $25 wired IEMS that sound better than my most expensive Bluetooth tws sets. I’ve taken to just listing to podcasts and YouTube videos with my Bluetooth sets at work.
HTC Droid Incredible.
It kept telling me its storage was full when it was nowhere close, and then because it only allowed over the air factory resets, it couldn’t even erase and reformat itself. It was the top rated Android phone at the time and it’s why I’ve never gone back.
The WD TV Media Player was pure garbage.
Also hated the Macbook Pro with the Butterfly Keyboard.
And probably a lot of smaller tech that I forgot about.
A CD-Rom with Windows ME. only took me 2 hours after buying to break it in pieces. It hung in the computer store for years as a trofee 😂
PackageKit
A Surface RT … Slow, barely any software support. Totally lost whatever trust I had for Microsoft.
I used mine for GBA emulation for a while, and it ran flash for some reason.
The wonderful result of Microsoft and Qualcomms exclusivity agreement.
That garbage tablet gave me lasting resentment for ARM processors.
Welcome to the Abandoned By Microsoft club. For me it was Windows Phone 7.
OUYA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya ?
Wow. Okay, I misread it before, but still tell me more. What’s your story ?
Not that guy. But: what people were promised was smartphone guts in a set-top box, for all the novel PSP-grade mobile titles that were limited by touchscreen controls and battery life. What was delivered was Not That. They turned the Kickstarter into a custom microconsole, which is a vulgar word in any context, because it means there’s no goddamn software. The central fucking point was to take advantage of everything on Google Play… or whatever the hell it was called that month. Instead you got a tiny selection of games which were forced to provide free demos. And you could play them with an abysmal controller, which was the one thing these geniuses were supposed to get right for free.
Pretty much the worse “console” ever made. Any video on it will tell you all you need to know. I wouldn’t buy it for a penny today if someone offered.
It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
Maytag dishwasher and gas dryer. Maytag had always purported themselves to be a top brand. However, both of these products would not last more than 4 years. I should have bought the Bosch dishwasher like consumer reports told me.
I have two Bosch dishwashers and have been very happy with them so far. Avoid Samsung appliances at all costs.
If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.
Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.
I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.
Gotta have one from 30 years ago. My dad’s secondhand Maytag dryer survived 4 moves, and 35 years. We had it serviced twice in that time. First time was at 30 years. It stopped running because it filled up with pocket change. Some of the coins were polished almost completely flat. Second time, the heat quit working. Bought a new dryer after that. It’s going strong, but it’s got a long way to go just to be half as good.
Yeah, it’s a common fallacy in appliance brand discussions: “my grandma has a <brand> and it still works! You should buy one, too!”. First of all it’s survivorship bias and almost always the quality has degraded a lot in the past decades (greed and consumers that don’t want to pay the price for reliable appliances).
It’s probably a bit of both here. We didn’t have the “disposable” lifestyle 50 years ago that we have now, and a stronger push for efficiency and features has had trade-offs in complexity and reliability.
Example: My current dryer (and my dad’s new dryer) both have a lot more plastic in them. The motors are smaller, and quieter, while making the same power (or more). They are loaded with temp, humidity, weight and wobble sensors, and my dryer has 4 dials, 5 different temperatures, and 2 different modes. The old one, had a dial to control the heat, and a timer.
As for disposable, I think older generations had an expectancy that you would buy an appliance once or twice in your life. I’ve got a 1000 dollar poket shit-posting device that I’m going to get rid of because it is pushing 4 years old. We just accept that these devices are uneconomical to repair, and we toss them out. I think the only things American’s bother to fix anymore are cars, and that’s going away because every year, they get harder and more expensive to repair.
Also, it’s not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It’s just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It’s enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
These things were trash and the concept was even worse.
Fun fact. The guy that made this was the “forensic expert” that claimed he could detect bamboo fibers in ballots in Georgia and Arizona. The GOP tried to put him in charge of their investigation.
Not sure if it is was the worst but I had a Ngage Q. You know the taco shaped gaming phone? Only that it was the less taco shaped version. And it was in 2009, several years after those things failed. It was a decent phone actually and it had tony hawk pro skater, very playable.
But yeah ugly as fuck and hard to hold as a phone plus lack of colours on the screen unless it was a game.
Nokia Lumia 620 (Windows Phone)
As someone who runs a Windows phone launcher to this day, I think you’re wrong 😂 had they actually pursued them, and supported them better. I think we’d still have Windows phones today, The app store was truly the killer.
I think the Thinkpad X130e with the AMD E-240 CPU. That processor, really, was the bad part. Every little single thing you wanted to do was absolutely CPU-bound, even when it was contemporary and new (c. 2011-2012). The amount of time I wasted waiting for the fully hammered CPU to do literally anything was too much.
I bought the laptop used because I figured a tiny Linux laptop would be great. And other aspects of it were fine, such as the display, keyboard, trackpad, build quality, etc. But that stupid CPU totally killed the device. Such a regret.
