As an experiment, I logged every bug I encountered for a few days. I averaged 5 bugs a day, not counting dark patterns or bad design.
Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1]
Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages, even though it works just fine. Most online stock brokers have issues at the worst possible times. My bookkeeping app is frequently wrong, per my tax advisor. Since everything is broken, the best I can do is to mentally assign all those apps a trustworthiness score, and avoid betting too much on them.
The worst part is that support for all that software has been largely automated. If you have a problem that can't be fixed by a chatbot or a crowdsourced support community, you are largely helpless. Google can wipe everything you love, and there's no one to punch in the face (to borrow from Grapes of Wrath).
So far, my only solution to this is to be a late adopter, and to favour simplicity over sophistication. I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store. The Surface Go wanted me to go through a setup wizard (after dismissing a few notifications). Two of the 4 iPads had working pencils. The ReMarkable reviews mention a host of issues. I never encountered any bugs with my Moleskine. It pairs flawlessly with any pencil I want, including older models.
Thank you for mentioning AirPods! I was so excited to buy them after a ton of reviews saying they just worked. They said the days of fighting with Bluetooth audio were gone. I believed them, then reality showed up.
My Mac sometimes unpairs them and worst it doesn’t find them. Some times while my baby is sleeping I put my AirPods and play a loud video just to realize they were not connected. My wife’s right side AirPod just stopped working after one year of use...
If apple is considered top tier in reliability, then technology in general really just sucks!
To provide an anecdotal counter-example, AirPods have worked seamlessly for me so far. Much quicker to connect and more reliable than Bluetooth. So their marketing isn't completely off-base :)
My manager had to buy new headphones as when she is WFH she used airpods and iphone to connect to calls and the irpods constantly cycled leaving garbage audio whenever she tried to speak.
I'm using a BT Jabra headset, with noise cancelling I got for about the same cost, 16+ hours of battery, easy pairing and super useful phone app, great ANC, and solid audio quality, at least to a non-audiophile. My biggest complaint is the closed back design leaves my ears a bit irritated after 4+ hours of use. Not an airpods competitor but for the cost I am way happier.
I use my AirPods with multiple devices, and that process is also fraught with problems. Switching to another device takes an absurdly long time. About once per month, switching will make bluetoothaudiod peg a core and ultimately hard crash the entire computer. Yes, the kernel panics if it doesn't hear from this userspace process frequently enough.
Surprisingly, iCloud syncing works fine. If I pair my AirPods with one device, it always pairs with all of them.
They work well enough, but they don't work magically well.
The main issue is with the right pod not always turning on when I take it out of the case. The solution is to put it back in the case for 5 seconds and to try again.
The second most important issue is the airpods falling out of sync with each other. It seems like the signal from my Samsung S9 in my pocket is choppy. Looking left or right for too long will make the signal drop. Putting my hands in my pockets also will. If I put the phone in my backpack, it's okay.
This is still more pleasant than wired headphones, but it's far from a magical experience.
Personally, I hate ear buds and, as such, never bought ear buds. Rather, I spent ~$20 on SoundBot bluetooth headphones starting some five years ago (long before air pods, methinks) and haven't had problems with them at all.
I also have a seven year-old phone (HTC OneMax) running custom (unofficial/ported by a random hacker) Android[0], and it pretty much works.
Sure the battery life has degraded since 2014, but that's to be expected, no? I wish I could replace the battery (as I did with my 15+ year-old Panasonic cordless phones), but there really aren't too many mainstream mobile devices that allow that any more.
As for poor quality software/hardware, if you don't like it, vote with your feet and/or wallet.
If stuff doesn't work, why use it? Even more, if stuff doesn't work and you can't/won't fix it yourself, then don't use it.
Software devs and hardware manufacturers don't care about whiny blog posts or complaints on HN, they care about the bottom line. Impact the bottom line and you may have a chance at improvement.
Stuff that actually addresses the issue is useful. A great example is the lack of Android support after 4.4/KitKat on the HTC OneMax mentioned above and the abandonment of it on Cyanogenmod/LineageOS in 2017, where those (myself included although I'd never hacked on Android ever -- and failed miserably -- thankfully someone else did not) impacted by this took action to provide the latest Android on an old, unsupported, discontinued device.
If you're not taking positive action toward making things better (whether that's fixing the problems or voting with your feet/wallet), then you're not going to have any impact.
While whinging about it on your blog may be a way to relieve the stress you feel about whatever issue(s) you may have, it's not constructive or useful.
That is unless your goal is to get lots of comments on HN where the Apple Fanbois sagely agree, and lament there's nothing to be done about it because Apple is the pinnacle of tech and since no one could possibly do anything better than Apple (or the apps that run on their gear) therefore all technology sucks.
And that's objectively false. There's lots of tech out there that's quite good. I suggest using that and shunning rather than using, then whinging about the stuff that sucks.
> I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store.
Good, you dodged a bullet there.
I mean, I love my 2-in-1 Dell (a slightly cheaper but still high-end Surface-like device). The pen, as much as it's useful (I'm not even considering buying a touchscreen-enabled device without solid support of a pen anymore; it's so much better UX than fingers), still has lots of subtle and annoying bugs. Maybe in 20 years people will work out the kinks. More likely, the concept will be abandoned in favor of some new modality that will also never be perfected.
Most software is still net positive in productivity. We tend to place more emphasis on failures as users.
Remember you're running millions of lines of code that talks to other computers running millions of lines of code that communicates over a network running millions of lines of code to deliver some information on the order of seconds to minutes -- and then something responds to that information and everything happens all over again.
All day, every day, trillions of packets of information get delivered just fine. Try doing that as a human, delivering letters. You probably won't even approach a million packets delivered in your life time. And people have the audacity to say, "oh my, some things didn't work, this is completely broken"
In only a single generation, we went from voice communicators to super computers in our pockets. The utility vastly, vastly, vastly overshadows the glitches that come with frenetic advancement. How long did it take humans to invent basic numbers?
I rsearched the ReMarkable 1 and 2. I ended up just getting a Rocketbook. It's very simple concept. "Paper" in the form of hard plastic. The pen it uses is the Pilot Frixion, which is an erasable pen. Hence you have a notebook to record notes for a while. If there's anything important I'll manually transfer it to my OneNote (I don't use Rocketbook's picture taking app).
Most notes I take only need to exist for a few weeks and then I erase...so transferring it to "long term storage" is rare.
I do have an iPad and note taking apps like Notability if I know something will need to go to "long term storage" but I find I use the Rocketbook more.
I was looking to replace the A6 sketchbook I carry everywhere, and the A5 notebook that always sits in front of my keyboard.
I thought it would be nice to access my notes when I don't have my notebook on me, and to have layers, zooming, undos etc. However, the more I look into it, the more absurd it seems.
I'm replacing a 15€ notebook and a 2€ mechanical pencil by a 400€ gadget that doesn't quite work. Why? So that I can spend my time organising notes in a digital space. Why? I don't really know.
It would be cool to have layers, zooming and an undo button. It would also be cool to have access to my notes even when I don't have my notebook. However, it would just be cool. It doesn't actually solve a serious problem.
The big draw for me for a Remarkable is being able to hand-sign and annotate PDFs without printing them out or using Adobe Reader's atrocious support for annotations. I'd love to be able to say that e-signing is the future but nobody really accepts it without question.
I'd also be replacing the piles and piles of legal pads I go through every year. Most of the time the notes are ephemeral except when I'm working across from someone in which case I really need them to exist digitally so I don't lose them.
I just wish I didn't have to wait 6 months for the second version.
> So far, my only solution to this is to be a late adopter, and to favour simplicity over sophistication. I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store. The Surface Go wanted me to go through a setup wizard (after dismissing a few notifications). Two of the 4 iPads had working pencils. The ReMarkable reviews mention a host of issues. I never encountered any bugs with my Moleskine. It pairs flawlessly with any pencil I want, including older models.
All of those were on my list of cons, particularly the lack of distractions. I avoided the Surface completely because Windows is anything but quiet and maintenance-free.
The iPad seemed pretty solid, but I'd have to turn it on and unlock it to see my notes, unlike a notebook.
The Remarkable seemed nice, bht there are lots of complaints that paper doesn't have.
The Supernote A6X was the most promising, but it was hard do get in Germany.
Everything is broken, and nobody is upset. [1]
Some of the software I use is so unreliable that I expect it to fail. I expect the Vodafone login page not to work properly. I expect one of my airpods not to connect on the first try. I expect my banking app to show random error messages, even though it works just fine. Most online stock brokers have issues at the worst possible times. My bookkeeping app is frequently wrong, per my tax advisor. Since everything is broken, the best I can do is to mentally assign all those apps a trustworthiness score, and avoid betting too much on them.
The worst part is that support for all that software has been largely automated. If you have a problem that can't be fixed by a chatbot or a crowdsourced support community, you are largely helpless. Google can wipe everything you love, and there's no one to punch in the face (to borrow from Grapes of Wrath).
So far, my only solution to this is to be a late adopter, and to favour simplicity over sophistication. I was recently considering going from paper notebooks to a tablet. That initiative stopped at the electronics store. The Surface Go wanted me to go through a setup wizard (after dismissing a few notifications). Two of the 4 iPads had working pencils. The ReMarkable reviews mention a host of issues. I never encountered any bugs with my Moleskine. It pairs flawlessly with any pencil I want, including older models.
[1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUp...