I think it depends on what you want - I have some pricier headphones myself & I used to own monitor speakers too, but I never think to use any of it with a phone. I use a phone to be on the go, and having big headphones don't go with that well unless I'm sitting for a long time like an airplane.
So far I've been dealing with being on the go with the PowerBeats Pro - it's good enough for my purposes (light, good battery life, sound is good enough, somewhat compact), although I have it mainly because the AirPod Pros were not out then.
There are different ways of making teams more productive than doing just technical work.
For my own anecdote, I often can fix a lot of bugs/feature requests that come by in < 10 minutes, and often will. As soon as it is revealed that another dev will start contributing who has no prior experience, I stop most of that work and let that person take on some of those tasks & do the leftover ones. Mentorship/growing developer capabilities expands capabilities long term, even if the dev ends up moving to another project.
I also spend the most time in meetings of any IC on my team - reducing how many ICs are in meetings frees up their time to learn and grow.
I often float ideas to people for approaches to problems and designing apps/systems/features - I’ll also let others do the same. However, I also often take a light touch and leave ultimate decision making to others so they can gain that experience even if I disagree. Letting others take ownership improves the team’s capabilities.
There are many ways to expand productivity of those around you that even those who aren’t as technically gifted can do. Leadership is a very underrated part of being an engineer IMO. I do all these things as a mid-level engineer in title, but gained massive respect from management & senior ICs where they come to me for advice/ideas. I don’t fall into the trap of jealousy that others are getting credit/hampering my ability to get promoted because my work speaks for itself & I celebrate when others do well - I have no reason to feel insecure, and so help unlock my team’s productivity by removing that ego in my actions.
Slacking in Apple? From what I've seen, Apple engineers probably amongst the hardest of the FAANG - probably less so than Amazon if I had to guess, but I know my Google, FB, and Netflix friends do not work nearly as hard.
There's a huge difference between Apple's built in apps and the third party apps doing who knows what background processing/data mining on phone usage. The effects on performance such as battery life is very noticeable.
While I like using FB, this is type of behavior by Android OEMs that largely drove me to the iPhone. The main reason I rooted my phone prior was to get rid of crappy apps I don't use from being on my screen.
Around 4-5 years ago, Android phone manufacturers started locking down their phones more while not letting them be rooted. They didn't solve the problem of having undeleteable apps waste my time & space with clear advertising plays.
After my experience with the Galaxy S5, I quickly jumped to the iPhone 6 when it came out, and haven't looked back. I've used Android for a period of time in parallel with a second phone, but it only confirmed my reasoning for bailing for the iPhone - the Android experience is just way behind.
Seems Siri is much better than Alexa as well - I often hear my roommate struggling with getting Alexa to do what she wants, and various other friends struggling with Alexa as well, usually because of accents.
Smart assistants in general have a ways to go still, but perhaps in the next 5-10 years they will be very good.
I recommend a different approach - if one feels bound to go on social media often, take a couple of month hiatus from it. The main important thing is to be able to break the power of addiction, since it is what causes the distractions in the first place. It is not really a problem unique to social media.
I have had performance issues using Ionic myself, and I have been intensely dissatisfied with Cordova & its ecosystem. In addition, I have had some pain with Ionic when trying to implement special behavior, mainly due to how the internals work.
React Native is much more a step in the right direction IMO, although the Ionic team's work on Ionic 2 with Angular 2 could provide an interesting paradigm to compete on that front.
I remember that some of the talk at UIUC being that the school missed an opportunity there.
As for theft, I think a just as big example is Zuckerberg AND Facebook. In that case, he actively sabotaged the code for the people he was supposed to work for.
You can do every one of these things without trolling. If trolling is used for such a purpose, it often has the effect of fostering groupthink - you often see it in places like 4chan.
Trolling when used for these purposes is often used as a substitute for well-reasoned/articulate point, and has the irresponsible effect of causing grief when it could be pre-empted by simple actions. To not take those actions is often an indication of callousness.
Note: I claim no knowledge on Xah's case, and am not commenting on it.
I've seen plenty of downvotes around from people who didn't understand what was being said/wanting to exert opinions. To be honest, that partly gets me to just not want to contribute thoughts since they may be unpopular/do not jive with a hive mentality, and has gotten me to visit the site less for the comments, especially with the recent tweaks.
It'd be nice if something could be figured out to discourage this behavior through reduction of the value of the downvotes of such, especially if a comment has not had a response to explain the downvote.
So far I've been dealing with being on the go with the PowerBeats Pro - it's good enough for my purposes (light, good battery life, sound is good enough, somewhat compact), although I have it mainly because the AirPod Pros were not out then.