About the expensive part. In the grand scheme of things the iPhone is 1000+ EUR, with an extra 200 for AppleCare, a watch would be around 500 on top of that.
Adding 550 for something that will sit on one's head for hours and hours isn't outlandish in comparison.
I'm in the Pixel 4 / cheapish Sony headphones camp, but for people riding the high tide it doesn't look out of place pricing wise.
To echo izacus's comment, they are very sensible and there's dozens of variations of the keywords that they accept.
We have a Nest Hub, and saying Google twenty times a day was a deal breaker so we all use some other variation that works 99% of the time, and looking at history it accidentally triggers itself a few dozen more times during the day.
It has a real value for us for now, but privacy issues are real in my opinion.
Now, Sony has banking, internet provider, insurance, camera sensor, NFC payment companies as well.
Would we also boycott all of these, as well as smartphones that feature a Sony sensor for instance, if the goal is to be consistent ?
I’d totally boycott Sony BMG for life, but I feel it would be the wrong signal to boycott other independent activities, in particular as the headphone devision is one of the last bastion of trying to provide the clearest sound at a fair price, in a world where Beats and Bose are runaway hits.
> So, after boycotting a certain manufacturer for more than a decade on account of their root kit debacle
TBF It’s not even the same company. Part of the same group, but the entertainment companies are separated from music hardware, have their own heads, their own deals etc.
It’s like boycotting Vox media because of Comcast. It follows a logic, but it feels peculiar.
On your general point, totally agree. There was a company touting to “design” everyday noise by sticking a small module we’d keep in our ear canal, the company seems to have disappeared but I was so sold on the idea. Almost permanent noise reduction, or filtering for nearby voices only would be the dream setup.
The physical size of the 8 and this new SE is pretty much the same as the X/11 Pro (it's only smaller 5~6mm in height, 4mm in width, 0.4~8 mm in depth). If you were holding up on your 8 because of that, I'd say you can fork the 1000+ bucks for the X or 11 Pro, it will be an upgrade in every dimension except Touch ID disappearing.
I know very few people irl that are positive about the impact, and the polls where mostly negative as well (except those done by the IOC itself, who got up to 70% support at some point, go figure)
At the risk of sounding grounchy, the Olympics is one of the show a lot of people actually want to get cancelled. Population was mostly against it.
And a part of it would have been about “volunteers” (like school/university kids/sponsor company employees requested by their board to participate due to lack of actual volunteers) working in the heat of the summer for a for profit organisation getting super preferential tax and financing treatment.
We have global events every year centered about the athletes, I wont be crying any tears for the IOC and officials not getting their payback.
I think we are going in the expected direction, but we’re not at the end yet.
About brands, we’ve seen the rise of comparison sites and review videos that allows unknown products to raise to the top. I’d say that’s pretty in line with your expectations towards user reviews. We just have more experienced, less influencable/buyable reviewers (in general). For instance the top vacuum cleaner on wirecutter doesn’t need to be a Dyson to get recognized.
The main issue here is really Amazon messing with the supply chain and injecting fakes where they could be guaranteeing genuine products instead. In a sense, looking at a wirecutter like site and buying directly from the maker is the best of both worlds.
Apple was an oasis of reliable design because short of Lenovo and Dell other brands were horrible in critical ways(e.g. no decent *nix support, or lack of decent international keyboard), and Thinkpads have a very opinionated design to put it mildly, leaving only Dell for a lot of us.
I kinda hate the current crop of MacBooks, but I am not sure I want a Dell either. For people listening to ATP, I see it as the same issue as John Siracusa and his Oxo cheese grater, there's just no obvious good replacement.
I see the role of a manager to guide and help people, someone with just good technical skills should be an architect , an expert or technical lead. I know a lot or organizations don’t make that distinction, but I also made a conscious choices to avoid these companies.
Then anyone managing a team with objectives should understand pretty fast that to reach them and get credits among their peers each person on the team needs to know the metrics, how they work, and what they should do to make them happen.
That’s great if like you each member puts itself in the manager’s shoes, but I personally think anyone who doesn’t understand they should be transparent with their team on their needs shouldn’t be manager in the first place.
How would you account for people self-persuading themselves when they take the job, and know to keep that belief alive for self-preservation ?
We have inate abilities to model reality in a way that helps us, not just in a cognitive dissonance way, but in strategic ways as well.
It's the classic "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.". It's wildly viewed as a skill, and in a lot of cultures marked as a sign of adulthood to be able to deceive yourself to overcome your primary reaction.
Any control interface is by definition acting on something dynamic, so even pushing a physical button, we expect the some status to reflect the result instantly.
I think touchscreen could be best used as a step above joysticks, when an action cannot just be summed by a on/off (or +/-) state, or a vector in one direction.
Imagine in a military setting if you need to open a communication channel with 4 teams moving close to each other to warn them of a nearby enemy. Would you prefer to switch the “open communication” lever, check the team numbers, push the buttons 1, 5, 6, 12 and the “open channel” button. Or circle them directly on the map and click “open communication” on the right side panel?
I also think that a lot of touchscreen interface are immature and ill thought, but it would be the same issue with stupid buttons like we can find in so many cars for instance (why would the parking brake switch be next to the A/C on/off ?)
At this point is “manual” even accurate, as these controls are gradually not linked to anything ? (thus allowing to move control around, or input adjustement for instance)
Adding 550 for something that will sit on one's head for hours and hours isn't outlandish in comparison.
I'm in the Pixel 4 / cheapish Sony headphones camp, but for people riding the high tide it doesn't look out of place pricing wise.