Lol glad to hear it!

Are you alive today lol

Stop making sense!!!

I do totally get paying to support something you use a ton.

But I don’t get comments like this calling blocking ads a cat and mouse game. It’s always been incredibly easy to block ads on the devices I own and I rarely ever have to mess with anything after installing a single browser extension or a single app.

On my desktop/laptop–ublock origin. I would install this regardless of whether or not I care about YouTube ads because ads on websites in general can be pretty cancerous. So I would already have it on my device to begin with. Install one extension and forget about it. Very occasionally ads start coming through, but then the extension auto updates itself and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s effortless and I absolutely never need to mess with the settings.

On my phone–YouTube ReVanced. Just basically download I think two APK files and you’re set. I’ve had to reinstall this a single time over the maybe decade(?) I’ve been using it as YouTube had some sort of breaking update or something. But having to install it again once every many years is hardly an inconvenience. Oh I guess I have had to install it again when I’ve gotten a new phone, but that’s really not that odd or inconvenient to me either…and generally I don’t get a new phone that often.

On my android TV device–SmartTube Next. It’s a single APK file. Set it and forget it. I’ve never had to reinstall the app.

One caveat with this is that it seems harder to watch YouTube ad free (without paying for premium) on Apple devices. So if you use a lot of Apple products it also makes sense.

How do you pronounce Wafrn?

Also in terms of games…I know Steam compatibility is supposed to be great, but if you use other platforms, you might run into some issues. Most of my library is in the Epic Games store (I know, terrible to admit this online…but they give you a lot of free shit), and I just could not get it to work at all the last time I tried Linux (maybe 6ish months ago).

Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.

As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.

First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.

Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.

I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.

This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you’re talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).

I bought one off the shelf at like Target or something before I got my first pair of Bluetooth headphones. The adapter is trash. Static noise like you said and when slightly kinked it just stops working. It’s not like I used it forever just fine before it started doing all this…it was trash to begin with. Apparently a lot of these adapters are just known to suck.

Yeah I’m a bit salty that it’s gone, but I’ve actually found using Bluetooth earbuds to be a way better experience. I’m no longer snagging a cable on everything and ripping them out of my ears. Maybe I’m just a clumsy idiot, but I did this all the time with wired headphones.

One thing that Bluetooth headphones still suck for is gaming. The lag is too obnoxious. So I have a pair of headphones that can convert to wired for that purpose. I don’t game on my phone so that part is a non-issue for me.

You can also get a decent pair at a relatively inexpensive price nowadays. It used to be crazy expensive to jump in, but there are a lot of cheaper ones out there nowadays that still offer great sound.

Edit: I saw a commenter complain about the lag when watching videos. This doesn’t happen for me. I’m not sure if the tech is in my phone itself or in my headphones (I have two different pairs from different companies), but there is some sort of processing that goes on that makes it so the audio and video are synced, no matter if I’m watching a local video on my phone or a YouTube video. I can even manually adjust it with a “Bluetooth metronome” setting/app, but I’ve never needed to manually adjust it. For me, lag only happens when playing video games.

For people explicitly following Sony, sure it makes sense. For the average consumer that doesn’t know anything about that stuff, no it doesn’t.

For the average consumer and the average company, the bigger the number means the newer the device (ex: iPhone 12 vs iPhone 11 S23 vs S22, etc.). And then it’s pretty easy to tell that words like “pro,” “max,” or “ultra” denote a more high end experience than those without in the title (ex: S23 vs S23 ultra). Obviously there are nuances and variations, but it’s easy enough for the average consumer to quickly skim before inquiring with a salesperson.

Your average consumer doesn’t delve deep into hardcore researching everything and won’t be sitting there following the specific naming scheme of every single product line of every company. They just want to quickly be able to tell what the latest and greatest models are.

The rest of the world isn’t techie like Lemmy/Reddit. So no, the naming schemes don’t make any sense.

Sony really has no idea how to name some of their product lines lmao

Dogs are wholesome but this is why I don’t think I could own one myself

I actually hate haptics on phones unless it’s for a notification or phone call. It’s always the first thing I turn off when I get a new phone. Vibrating on button presses is obnoxious to me.

Well not really. I wanted it specifically for listening to offline Spotify music while working out. On my phone, I’m using a couch to 5K app which tells me when to walk vs run. And my phone has a pedometer that counts my steps. Can’t really do that with a basic mp3 player. And I wanted to use a watch instead of my phone so I don’t have to deal with holding my phone or anything while running. Plus I specifically wanted Spotify offline play, which not every basic device can do.

I ended up just buying a belt to hold my phone and keys while running.

Yeah from my research it looks like the largest size you can find on a watch is 32GB. I noted that Apple was one of the brands with 32GB and it did surprise me as well.

But my current Spotify downloads total 20GB and I only wanted to wear it while trying to work out so I decided against it anyway. I wouldn’t want to wear it to work because I work in a gross environment. And so I don’t really have a need for it.

I was briefly interested in getting a smartwatch for one specific purpose…listening to music offline without having to have my phone on me while working out. I found out how low the storage is on many of the devices and decided it wasn’t for me anyway.

Having my fingerprint sensor located on the power button of my phone has been an absolute life changer. I have zero clue why companies keep insisting on putting the fingerprint sensor in some nebulous place under the screen or on the back. It’s beyond me.

My anecdote…I used my last phone until it died. It was around 4 years old and the eMMC storage failed from age, making the device a suddenly totally unusable brick. Before then, it had gotten very slow and laggy over time and the battery life degraded to be pretty sucky…barely surviving the workday on standby in my pocket.

From my experience, I don’t know that I would necessarily advise using a device for that long. The battery just gets too shitty and its sudden death made it a bit of a scramble to buy a new phone. Granted, my previous phone was fairly low end, but even with a high end device, batteries degrade to almost unusable levels after a few years. I know it sucks for the environment, but it seems like less of a headache to keep a phone for only like 2-3ish years and then upgrade it while it’s still working as opposed to waiting for it to irreparably bork itself.

Edit: If you’re able to do a battery replacement, I will say that it does change the conversation somewhat. But long gone are the days of easily user serviceable battery replacements for most phones. Yes, there are obscure phones out there that make it easier to swap out the battery, but these phones aren’t exactly prominent.

This reads like an Onion title

What? These things have been around long before zoomers.