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Smart speakers with personal assistants like Amazon Echo etc. Not remotely useful enough to be worth 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.
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 persisted with my wired earbuds until only very recently picked up some wireless ones and can say theyβre 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 youβre 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.
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 youβre 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.
So much this
No smart speakers
It's a mic sitting there waiting for your commands and everything it does I can do myself easier
Everything that need a pay subscription to work.
For me it's anything I have to download an app to operate.
Virtual assistants, e.g. Alexa, Cortana, Siri
I don't want to interact with the companies they represent basically at all, let alone give them nearly unfettered access to my electronics and their data.
I don't use the apps on my smart TV because I have a separate streaming device and I don't trust that the smart TV apps will be updated properly.
Apple anything
Patiently waiting on Asahi Linux to get more and more features done β the stuff theyβve achieved to reverse-engineer so far already is frankly incredible.
The hardware is quite nice, after allβ¦
Smart watches.
Couple of reasons:
I like my mechanical watches. They aren't the expensive flashy ones, but I like the way they look and especially like the mechanical engineering. It's one of the (maybe only?) Item I can think of that I use daily and 'does something' without electricity. Smart watches are nothing like that.
When I want to be offline I can just ignore my phone or flip it upside down. Having notifications on my wrist all day long wouldn't be good for my mental health. It annoys me so much when I see people looking at and using their smartwatch mid conversation because they are so addicted to it. And I know I would be the same once I start using it.
It's expensive and e-waste after a few years.
Any smart home stuff. The story with Amazon shutting down someoneβs account and all their devices is terrifying. Frankly I should probably unplug my smart speakers.
The Apple Watch is neat for health stuff but I donβt see a need for another device to charge.
OLED and Mini/MicroLED screens for PWM sensitivity. Even LED lights are starting to hurt my head.
VR/AR is just Ready Player One stuff.
If you are willing to put in a fair amount of effort, you can have a smart home without accounts anywhere.
Most of the account based stuff is based upon open specs.
But you have to be somewhat technical and patient.
To expand a bit, search "home assistant" or "hubitat."
Both are great, but home assistant is open source, and has the bigger community who support more devices. It is a bit more DIY than hubitat, but they have released their own hardware to go with the software, so its getting easier all the time. You can also run it on your own hardware if youre handy.
Hubitats advantages are an all in one hardware/software package and a philosophy that aims to emulate the cloudless Smartthings of yore (the old lead player in stand alone home automation until they lost their damn minds). It is still a ways DIY, but is not FOSS. Still, active community and tons of supported devices.
Smart watches.
I do not need an additional notification screen. I see 0 benefits
As somebody with adhd those shit is helpful as fuck...
Smartphone rings
i Check it
After checkin (and not replying) i doomscroll...
Smartwatch gooes on
checkin the notification
decides that its (mostly) not important and keep Doing whatever i am doing right now
Any of the camera doorbells or security systems that ship all the footage to their own cloud. Itβs unsettling to have devices with cameras semi controlled by a third party like that.
Most social media.
I used to use reddit, I have moved all my presence over here. That's about it.
I have a FB Messenger account because that is how a lot of my family keeps in touch with me, and I have this. I had a proper FB account back when I was in uni and Facebook was still only for uni students, but I think I dropped it shortly after that.
It's not some grand principled stance, I just don't get most of them because I am apparently an old man. Like Instagram, why do I want to share pictures with just random people? How am I networking with anybody by doing so? I honestly don't get why it is so popular.
Does Facebook count because I was once in trouble with the police here for something completely unrelated to the Internet and they asked me several times for my Facebook account which didn't exist anyway
Made me think they were fishing for anything and anything they read on there would have likely ended up twisted against me.
So yeah I refuse to use it.
As far as possible I try to avoid:
All things from big tech because privacy, see Schrems II and their terms on use of personal information for own purposes
Non Open Source tech because privacy or other malicious functions
Tech that are prone to planned obsolescence because of special batteries etc. and can't be fixed with for example a custom ROM on Android
I go out of my way to avoid cloud-based products. Which- is funny, because I do a LOT of home automation, and many of the cheap products, are cloud-interconnected shit, which will go obsolete in a few years.
Need... a list of reasons? I got you covered. https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2022/reasons-to-avoid-cloud-based-automation-products/
Facebook, Twitter and now Threads. Have no interest and zero use for that stuff.
Self driving cars or honestly the majority of car tech introduced in the last 5 years or so, such a lane keeping assist or other drivers "aids" which ultimately seem to distract drivers more than ever help them.
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.
Anything "smart" exepct smartphone.
I dont want more stuff collect my data, and I am lazy to selfhost it.
@mayflower
Anything that has something to do with Meta.
I trying to ditch all non open source software, it's hard but I'm hopeful.
Apple Ecosystem. Since I learned that iTunes changes mp3 files when "sync" to iTunes I stopped using apple products. That was back when iPhone 5 was released.
Smart Watches.
I don't want to take care of charging for yet another device. Plus, analog watches are beautiful!
Already trying to limit my screen time, no reason to check notifications the instant they pop.
Don't want to be conscious of my heart rate and sleep schedule all the time. Also have some privacy concerns about real time data associated with me making its way into big tech's servers.
expired
Tablets, I don't see the appeal of a big phone device that can't fit your pocket and can't make calls
Tiktok because Twitter already made me spend all my time raging out at random annoying assholes until I finally quit it and apparently tiktok is just that but with a more effective algorithm.
Also "ragebait but video" is like the last thing I need.
Smart watches, as I'm a big fan of mechanical watches. I don't need my wrist to be a place for constant notifications and distractions.
Anything with a camera or mic in my house.Mit's plenty bad my phone doesn't have hardware switches, who tf wants to pay to wiretap their own house?
Voice commands. I get the utility if you're disabled or elderly, but it seems like a hassle to anyone else.
Any smart home tech that isn't fully self-hosted. I'm far from a privacy hardliner, but that's one line I won't let the corpos cross.
"The cloud".
In the end "the cloud" is just someone else's hard drive. Call me old fashioned, but I'll keep my data on my own hard drives.
A helicopter. RIP Kobe π
Almost all smart things, except a smartphone, which sadly I can't avoid. Maybe I just don't want to be connected 24/7.
Home smart devices in general. I'm avoiding Alexa, Siri or any other thing like that. Besides the obvious privacy issues I see about them, I can only imagine being alone at home, Alexa thinking something talked to her and responding in a distorted voice. No, thanks.
I'm considering a home assistant at some point, by setting up a proper network for the smart devices alone, but that's as far as I'll go.