mayflowerWhat is a technology/gadget you refuse to use and why?
Carlos SolísVoice inputs. I don't see the point of talking out loud when I can just type things. Plus the always-on microphones of most voice assistants are not something I trust.
banana_meccanicaEverything that need a subscription to work.
For me it’s anything I have to download an app to operate.
Except for public transport :-D
imaqtpieA helicopter. RIP Kobe 🙏
Remy RoseThe air fryer 💀
A housemate owns one and I hate it. It pulls such an irresponsible amount of juice you gotta turn a bunch of other stuff off or it trips the circuit breaker. And literally the ONLY thing it actually cooks very well is french fries.
Lazy machine for very lazy people, it cooks good freeze trash food. I know one guy that use it for heat McDonald food at home.
The thing I use mine for most is vegetables. Not sure how roasting Brussels sprouts or making kale chips makes me lazy.
tox_solidIt doesn’t, that guy is just a condescending prick.
Agreed. Enjoy your life and food. Don’t let others shame you for it.
Dumb take. It’s just a small oven which is great 99% of the time and is more efficient than a giant oven. It’s just a toaster oven with a fan inside.
That issue sounds to be with under gauge electrical wiring. We run an air fryer frequently in my home with no issue. It does pull a bit of electricity in the short time we use it, but it’s much better than using an electric oven to cook 20 chicken nuggies.
RickHonestly, this was one of the few kitchen gadgets that seemingly lived up to hype for me. We use ours all the time, even though our oven has convection mode which is essentially the same. The oven takes so long to warm up… where as the “air fryer” is up to temp super quickly. For a small family, the air fryer is used way more. In general I am opposed to kitchen gadgets that are supposedly saving you time or effort versus the “old” way of doing things.
I use mine instead of the oven for anything that fits and can withstand the “whirlwind” it produces. It’s faster, work at lower temperatures and requires no pre-heating.
The Philips i have now was quite expensive though. Before I had some other brand that didn’t work any better than a regular oven.
Sounds like janky electrical mixed with a junky air fryer. I love ours as it heats up quick and cooks almost right away. If you think that’s bad, imagine how much more juice your full-sized oven pulls.
I can believe it. My apartment is wired dumb as shit, basically the entire place except appliances and the bathrooms is one circuit. Found THAT out when I tried to plug in an iron when the AC was on.
It pulls less than your typical under counter oven (or an electric kettle). I think you need to check your circuits.
Unless your under counter oven is gas… like mine is.
Oh, nice! Do things taste different when using one of those compered to electric?
Not that I’ve noticed, but maybe the difference is subtle. I should try for a comparison someday! We’re not using gas for any particular reason though, it’s just what the apartment came with and we wouldn’t have the authority to change it anyway
Nah. Grew up with a gas oven, have only had electric since leaving my parents’ house, stuff tastes the same. TBH most people prefer electric ovens because they heat more evenly.
Yeah, but my cooker is on a separate 32A circuit of its own.
But that wiring sounds janky.
SentinianCheap air fryers suck but a good quality one is super versatile. Fries up chicken well and you can make so much other stuff. Just avoid the really cheap brands
That must be the problem I bet! I didn’t buy the thing though lol
All they are is a small countertop convection oven. They use less power to cook than a full size oven, you just don’t notice it because those are on their own higher powered circuit.
TakatakatakatakatakOh, you mean a small shitty oven that dries everything out and got really popular for some reason?
Smart speakers with personal assistants like Amazon Echo etc. Not remotely useful enough to be worth basically 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.
That’s true, smart speakers and wireless gadget are the waste of the century, things factories can’t even recicly and that fills the world of trash.
Yup. I begrudgingly began using wireless headphones beacuse I don’t want to have to carry around an adapter to use them once they killed 3.5mm on phones…
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.
I could see that, though personally, I just put the phone on loudspeaker in those situations. I mostly use headphones for music and general media consumption.
Putting your stuff over speaker has to bother everyone in the house right?
radixI find that for calling someone the mic quality is unusably poor on Bluetooth, especially when you’re washing dishes or doing something else with background noise. I use my wired earbuds connected to my phone in my back pocket so I can still walk around. The built-in mic in the earbuds that came with my phone a few years ago is pretty great.
The only time the wireless ones are more useful than wired is when you’re changing your shirt or flipping your head upside down to do your hair or something.
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.
Got myself a fiio (IIRC) BT DAC and can’t go back. Sound quality sure differs from a phone DAC.
Still got an ass-long cable though lol!
Until it can stream hi-res lossless without compression I’m sticking to wired. For a long time I’ve been eyeing the AirPods Pro and I finally tried them out at the Apple Store; they sound like trash. I don’t know how people put up with it.
I’ve got the Audio-Technica ATH-M50 (Bluetooth version, can’t think of the specific model number) and it’s just terrible unless I use the cord with a nice DAC.
Audio quality wasn’t even on my radar since I’m not an audiophile, but them being at parity doesn’t sway the argument one way or the other. Good technology typically outpaced the thing it replaces in all aspects. This is effectively neutral or worse in many cases which is why I don’t feel like it should replace the old method (headphone jack removal) but rather coexist alongside of it. I feel like we’re going backwards wheh dangles enter the picture. It gives me flashbacks to the very early days of mainstream cellphones/smartphones and all the proprietary connectors that came with it.
I love wireless headphones because I’m the specific flavor of clumsy that was catching my headphone cable on drawer pulls and doorknobs like 3x a week. I still have good wired headphones I use for serious music listening, but for most day to day stuff I went wireless and they honestly have lasted longer than a lot of my wired earbuds because I am such a shambling disaster.
I fucking oove my anc headphones!
I hate batteries though.
I persisted with my wired earbuds until only very recently picked up some wireless ones and can say they’re better in every way. Unless you only ever use them while sitting still. Exercising, gardening, mowing the lawn, working on the car or in the garage, anything where you’re moving about really. Not having the stupid wire getting caught on anything or accidentally pulling your phone out is a godsend.
Audio quality is fine for 99.9% of people. I think some people are stuck on views from 5 or 6 years ago. The tech has come a long way.
I find the audio quality to be pretty irrelevant when all I can hear is the bump bump bump of the wires bouncing against me with every step I take!
GormadtSo much this
No smart speakers
It’s a mic sitting there waiting for your commands and everything it does I can do myself easier
dannoffsI can’t stand the wireless earbuds that you charge in a case or whatever but you’ll have to pry my Sony WI-C400 neckband headphones from my cold dead hands.
WalopI have become so clumsy with the wires, it was less wasteful for me to buy wireless earbuds with wire only between them. The modern codecs are high quality and I only use them outside, so the nuance would be anyway lost.
Smart speakers I do not have. I feel weird talking to devices and I would have to do it in English because they support my native language poorly if at all. I’m not sure if they even are officially available here.
Everything unnecessarily connected to the Internet should have this on them, because they have very little security auditing and all support is dropped very early on the lifetime of the appliance. kissa.depili.fi/internet_asbestos_52x32_cmyk.pdf
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 tend to avoid any wireless peripherals, I still have a wired mouse because I don’t need to think about charging my mouse and whether it’s going to run out of charge.
Wireless mice are such a weird one to me. Like your mouse will never move more then a foot away from it’s normal spot so why do you need wireless?
Wires get in the way of the rest of the clutter on my desk.
I use wireless headphones just for watching TV, cable doesn’t work well for this use case.
I have good wired headphones (10 years old) and good earbuds (5 years old) and use both. There’s a place for each.
I have a really nice pair of wired Sonys (MDR-7506) that I modded with a 3.5mm jack, and bought a small BT receiver that’s strapped to the headband. So I now have the best of both worlds.
𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘You mean, you don’t want a 1984-esque always-on listening device in your home?
I agree with all of that. Also, wireless headphones discharge when not in use, there’s no way to turn them OFF, in standby they deplete the batteries in a few days. If not used very frequently, like every day, they are never ready to use, they must be charged. There’s nothing like good wired phones, in my case as I have an LG V20 which has a really good hi-fi dac that drives every wired headphones I plug in, going bluetooth is a huge downgrade in sound quality.
I love my Bose wireless headphones (quiet comfort 45). They sound really great, but I also paid $200 (on sale) for them and regret nothing.
The battery is user replaceable with some care.
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.
For sure not having a smartphone mean also living without the comfort and the easy access. Try to achieve something that seems impossible without tech I think is the mean of cure the lack of skills you mean before.
No I mean it’s actually not possible to do some of the stuff I needed for school. The only way to access financial aid is joining a queue from online. While at the the office. Nobody is in it to ask.
Similarly I couldn’t access my accounts on campus since I did not have the app that’s on my phone.
As an EV owner, I can’t charge at half the places near me without my phone.