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Hisham

@sinvega @sn0n @fraggle the whole "technical ignorance of people in remote towns" also struck me as very off-base.

What ignorance? Those users know the cheap earphones need bluetooth. They also know that the real Apple earphones costs 10x more.

9 comments
Gabriel N

@hisham_hm @sinvega @sn0n @fraggle I’m a Venezuelan in this edge-of-the-world country :pika:

The people here is tech savvy in a very different way that this engineer is: they mostly don’t care about what the underlying technology should do, they just care about solving a problem.

In UX we call that “Jobs to be done”. You are in the wrong here, my guy.

Alexander The 1st

@wtrmt @hisham_hm @sinvega @sn0n @fraggle I was going to say - the accordance of the headphones is that they only worked with Bluetooth.

As someone who did manual and automated QA, the guy arguing the cable doesn't need to use Bluetooth sounds like a guy insisting everything works because the Unit Tests validated all the internal contracts, so it should work that way.

I have broken a *lot* of software tools in staging/QA environments by simply not limiting what I input to sensible inputs.

Alexander The 1st

@wtrmt @hisham_hm @sinvega @sn0n @fraggle "Your Unit Tests work, right? Great, watch me toss this into your posting input on a browser loaded to your website: "';SELECT *;" That shouldn't break when I hit post, but here's the error, because *somewhere* in your Unit Tests' contract validated code, you're not sanitizing an input."

Alexander The 1st

@wtrmt @hisham_hm @sinvega @sn0n @fraggle (I'm not that aggressive about it; I just write up a bug report with the resulting console log information, or the API response code, or in worst cases, the stack trace, for them to use to fix it. And I do keep those tests safe enough to avoid taking down the environment, since as a QA Tester, it's my job to prove the core of what can be done, not the scale.

But while that's an obvious example of a situation like that, there are many more.)

Nick Krichevsky

@wtrmt @hisham_hm @sinvega @sn0n @fraggle Maybe I'm just grouchy (probably) but while it is true that this solves a problem, the alternate, "simple" solution (i.e. a copper cable) solves the problem more reliably. That said, I know my headphone preferences are less popular among the masses :)

Gabriel N

You are right: I would like to use the copper wire instead.

This is just a workaround for a licensing limitation: Apple is just milking money where it shouldn’t.

I like the fact that this Chinese workaround:

a) Makes clear by its design how the product works.
b) Is cheaper for the user.
c) It hides the complexity of what is doing

Lately, the chances of that occurring are few and far between.

@ollien @hisham_hm @sinvega @sn0n @fraggle

You are right: I would like to use the copper wire instead.

This is just a workaround for a licensing limitation: Apple is just milking money where it shouldn’t.

I like the fact that this Chinese workaround:

a) Makes clear by its design how the product works.
b) Is cheaper for the user.
c) It hides the complexity of what is doing

RouseWorld

@wtrmt

I do find the quoted post kind of classist and gross. I talked to a local (ruralish southeast US) about this issue and he said those headphones have been around for a while and thought everyone understood them. I think some people (I include myself!) get into these tech bubbles where anything that falls outside of that bubbles seems backwards or wrong.

Gabriel N

@rouseworld in the end, this whole product category of cheap wired headphones is disposable.

These products are so flimsy that no one bats and eye about those issues, because the perceived value is so low.

I used to have great sounding, durable, small and cheap headphones by Panasonic. Apple killed them when it eliminated the headphone jack.

Matt Campbell

@hisham_hm @sinvega @sn0n @fraggle Ignorance as in this part, I think:

> Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.

So the unscrupulous manufacturers have left these people with a sort of superstition, not real understanding. Note: I blame the manufacturers, not the people affected.

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