I don’t really care about sound quality when using earphones at home because I only use them when there’s a lot of ambient noise so the sound will be bad either way. When doing vacuum cleaning, or the dishes, stuff like that. When I still had a smartphone I used a 1,5m extension cord so it wouldn’t pull on the jack each time I move, but since it died I’m using a much longer one plugged to my PC (not actually 10m, that was hyperbole, more like 5m). It’s not very convenient I’ll admit, but it does the job.

Well not actually lost… I just haven’t found under which furniture it rolled yet 😅

What statistics? People buying thin phones over thicker phones doesn’t mean much when that’s almost all that’s being sold nowadays and every phone is trying to be as thin as possible. It seemed to me that 90% of what we’re told people want is actually just what companies want to push on us because it’s cheaper and more profitable.

All the people I know who are average users couldn’t care less about how thin the phone is, two mm more or less doesn’t make any difference. They care about screen size and being able to use it without too much hassle. If they get a phone without an audio jack half of them will just assume that they can’t plug earphones at all. And they are not the ones who will complain. But then, Fairphone isn’t marketed towards average users, so maybe their users have different priorities? Idk

• They are expensive. You can get wired earphones for 2 euros that actually work and are reasonably durable. It’s not a great loss if they fall in a puddle or if I step on them.
• They are a lot more failure prone. Half of those I tried didn’t work or only half worked, and those that did work didn’t last very long.
• They have shitty range. I can use a 10 meters extension cord with wired earphones if I want to.
• They require charging. And it’s a law of physics that everything that requires charging always run out at the most inconvenient time.
• Also THEY ALWAYS GET LOST. Wireless earphones, mouse, controllers… it doesn’t matter, if it’s not attached with a cable they’ll just disappear.

Why does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) not have an audio jack?

After some of the criticism that we received about removing the headphone jack from Fairphone 4, we did consider bringing it back for The Fairphone (Gen. 6). However, we realized it would be at the expense of increasing the phone’s dimensions. We also looked into the consumer data and Fairphone 4’s weight and thickness were more of an issue than the lack of a minijack, so we decided to keep the same approach, although it was a difficult decision. We didn’t want to invest in OLED technology for the display and then not have improved the phone’s dimensions and weight. But just like with Fairphone 4 and Fairphone 5, we will still offer an adapter, which has had overall positive user reviews.

“We heard the criticism but decided that no, you would still need an adapter to use headphones, plus a USB-C hub to be able to charge the damn thing while listening to music or watching videos”

Funny how that’s the same excuses that we get for modern laptops terrible design. “We HAVE to make it thinner so there’s no space! You wouldn’t want a laptop that’s not complete shit if it meant it’d also be less thin and breakable, now would you?”

That’s a relief. I’ve been dreading the day when they introduce server-side adsm but it seems we’re not there yet 😅 I’m not sure what they think they’ll accomplish with this when it’s A LOT less painful than turning off your adblocker and dealing with the ads, though. Maybe they’re just trying random things to see what works.

If it takes too long to load I just use yt-dlp to download the video or whole playlist and watch it later. Do I care that it’s putting additional strain on YouTube’s servers? Indeed, I’m devastated and overtaken with guilt 😂 These are tears of regret, I swear 😂

I’m not saying that it’s not a lot worse now, I do agree that it is. But things were already headed this way long before ChatGPT. SEO had already gone a long way in killing the web, I think AI will just be the death blow.

“about to destroy the web” ???

Where have you been these last 10 years? It’s been getting worse for a long time, even before AI. It’s just getting worse quicker now.

Future uBlock/NewPipe users

Thanks for educating people about the usefulness of adblockers, YouTube ❤️

sorry I meant it in a joking way, I should have worded that better 😅

There no need to feel so special, people in Paris are rude to just about everyone. My condolences to anyone who has to work or live there 😬

VSCode because I’m too lazy to learn Vim and I’m not enough of a masochist to configure emacs.

I don’t even know what to say. How can you make jokes when reality already is making them for you? Have we finally entered The Onion Timeline?

I don’t think the idea itself is awful, but everyone is so fed up with AI bullshit that any attempt to integrate even an iota of it will be received very poorly, so I’m not sure it’s worth it.

Whaaaat? Are they using Windows smartphones with Copilot in Korea? 😮