[yubiox]

I made the mistake of connecting my bose noise cancelling earbuds to the phone app so I could disable autoplay. They updated without any warning and now they won't charge properly and the noise cancelling sucks. It used to be amazing. Never connect anything and never take updates unless you need a specific fix.

[hbn]

I swear AirPods in general are just less reliable than they used to be too. I feel like I need to be doing incantations for them to work sometimes, whereas I recall them feeling like magic compared to BT headphones I've used in the past, the way they would seamlessly pair, start/stop music when you pull one out, etc.

It reminds me of some discussion I was seeing the other day about how the dynamic island on the newer iPhones is way buggier than it was at launch. Someone suggested that this happens because the S-tier engineers are tasked with building these things to blow everyone out of the water at launch, and then B-tier developers are tasked with maintaining them for the following years, at which point stuff starts regressing.

[doublerabbit]

Build quality too.

My iPhone XR that I am deliberately keeping on lower iOS for jail breaking reasons that when comparing the thunderbolt port to the iPhone 13.

The quality lacks so much that I am unable to listen to music with a wired headphone adapter.

Any slight jiggle of the adapter will cause it to disconnect. I don't want to use BT headphones.

[kiririn]

Lightning ports very rarely fail or get loose - it’s more robust than usb-c in that regard, which is already a high bar - it’s probably dust in the port

[doublerabbit]

Not at all. I've cleaned, air-dusted it. The phone is six months old. I've taken it to the Apple store and they won't do anything.

And now that they've disconnected the thunder-bolt adapter too.

I know the quality is less than my XR. I own both and I have a box of three thunder bolt to audio cables, all have the same issues.

[Lammy]

FYI: The Bose app also phones home with your media metadata by default. There's an option to disable it tucked away on the same screen as the Privacy Policy.

[mihaaly]

"never take updates unless you need a specific fix"

Weirdly, serious groups, among them Signal seem to be clueless about this rule. In Signal, in their security concious context, this is a bit of puzzle to me why. They have updates every few days sometime, but no more than 2 weeks pass by without their update banner appears in the most prominent spot in their desktop app: above all of your recent chats, with background higlight to pop out even more, if someone would miss in important messaging. Like if this was the most important thing for everyone around - so much that it is made not possible to turn off -, to keep their software very very fresh, the freshest possible! It is generously allowed not to download updates immediatly, but that's it. The alert is always there.

But there are so little changes between updates. Once I checked the history, dominantly marginal things. Yet, the prime spot in their UI is occupied with these marginal things too, all the time (it must not be critical update in every few days because that frequency of security risks would be too worrysome for an app like Signal!).

And this is just one of the examples out there, there are too many similar ones (serious or marginal use apps alike).

Looks like software engineers lost sense throughout time, thinking the central spot of the user's mind is occupied like their own with the maintenance and state of their precious product. Not the task at hand where some whatever tool should help, without grabbing the attention away from the task all the time (also with all those frequent 'helpful' pop-up tips many software employ - I am looking at you Teams as prime perpetrator - for self advertisement, that is an other senseless narcissistic attitude).