metheus

Shall we extend the same curtesy to those who oppose other forms of universal suffrage?

> I'm sure he's heard all the traditional arguments like we have, which means he has additional information that I don't.

It means nothing of the kind. Occam's razor suggests, rather, that he reasons differently than you (or at least me).

> Don't you think it's more intellectually honest to question and hear what others have to say

In theory, if we had infinite "compute time" in our lives to hear and evaluate all the arguments of those advocating regressive politics, then yes, sure. But we don't. Instead, we rely on a cluster of markers to heuristically determine if it is likely that someone has anything to say that doesn't just reduce trivially to the same BS you've already heard.

In this case, we have an arrogant economic royalist lamenting the consequences of women having a political voice. It is quite obvious that he has a ton of raw intellectual horsepower in that brain, but equally clear that he has no novel, reasonable justification for disenfranchising women.

I see, I made an unwarranted assumption about your prior post. And possibly over-explained bluetooth details. I apologize if that was patronizing.

I hope you'll agree that there is some number of devices beyond which we don't really need to worry about now many of them headphones can attach to. For me, for now, 2 or 3 would definitely be a problem, while 8 is more than sufficient.

My intention in this conversation is not to make a claim that there are no tradeoffs to be made, but to take issue with the poorly thought out nature of the article.

In fact, I think you make a better point than any of Ms. Goode's. And I'm willing to mention a couple of others.

1) It's not a super common case, but I have been in a situation where I was listening to music on my headphones, and wanted to hear what someone else was listening to on their player. With regular headphones, all you have to do is unplug and plug them into the other player, while bluetooth headphones would require the pairing complication (and un-pairing manually, lest you over time eject your own devices).

2) Wireless interference can be an issue in some circumstances. At one office desk where I sat, the Elite 800X cans had an issue with their connection to my Macbook, which I attributed to the in-office cell phone signal booster that was perched up on the wall above me. The audio stream would cut in and out rapidly. That was annoying.

There is no limit to the number of devices that can be paired to each other in the BT standard, any more than there is a limit to the number of remote host keys you can keep track of in the SSH standard.

In practice, the number of devices headphones can be paired to varies by model. The limit is simply the amount of storage the device allocates to keeping device hardware addresses and link keys.

What I can tell you is that both my headphones -- Jaybird BlueBud X and Turtle Beach Elite 800X -- are paired with two MacBooks, my iMac, my iPhone, and two iPads. They do not require any re-pairing.

The Turtle Beach cans even support connecting to two devices simultaneously (see section 3.2.6 "Point-to-multipoint configuration" of the latest Bluetooth spec). Whichever one starts emitting audio first claims the channel and keeps it until it's done.

Absolutely, granted. It's not a tradeoff that everyone wants to make.

(I make the tradeoff and am never going back. I've worn nothing but BT headphones of multiple types for the past year and I've never had an "oops, no charge" issue. The Turtle Beach cans have a magnetic dock I just drop them on, and it's easy for me to plug my BlueBuds into the cable on my desk when I get home from a run.)

I'm not railing against her claim that there are downsides. But... well, consider an analogy. When the iPhone and subsequent smartphones came out, they offered drastically lower battery life than their predecessors. They needed charging every day. People rightly pointed out the inconvenience that represented when compared to the minimal logistical demands a feature phone placed on people. But I would have the same criticisms to level at someone who wrote an article about how "smartphones are annoying."

Taken together with the logical bankruptcy of her other claims (e.g. an in-line 3-button controller isn't as good as using the phone itself is somehow a bluetooth-specific issue??), I'm including this particular point about charging bluetooth headphones as just another poor argument. It's the only one on her list that holds any water whatsoever, but I still disagree with her characterization.

Agree to your points, but and if the article was "Removing the 3.5mm jack is stupid", I wouldn't take issue with that. But that's not her claim, and my issue is with her absurd non-points in support of her claim that bluetooth headphones are annoying. Here's one more:

> A plastic three-button remote is a poor substitute for an entire phone interface when it comes to controlling music, answering phone calls, or using Siri.

In what way is that different than wired headphones??!!

I'm surprised by your need to select your headset each time you use it, though. If that was her issue, if it was widespread, I'd absolutely concede the point. That's not been my experience at all, though. I've used 4 different headsets (all Jabra, though), a half dozen portable speakers, and am currently using two different headphone/mic models -- JayBird BlueBuds and Turtle Beach Elite 800X. Not a single one of them requires that behavior. I power them on, they connect.

What is more, if I'm getting a phone call, and my headset isn't already on, when I do power it on, it connects and immediately answers the call.

The only time I need to use the device selection preferences is when I switch which device I'm using the headphones with. And that works flawlessly for me. When I leave the house, I turn on my headphones and they attach to my iPhone. When I get to work, I use the bluetooth menu mar item to select the headphones and they switch over to the MacBook. When I leave I select them again on my iPhone and they switch back. If I pull out my iPad to watch a video, I switch over to them.

Hell, not only does that work well, but iOS even tries to guess what app I want to switch to when it detects a bluetooth connection.

Obviously this is a case of YMMV. I don't doubt that your headset doesn't work as smoothly with the iPhone. And if Lauren Goode's article had even a shred of that nuance, I wouldn't call her a hack. But both times I've noticed her work lately I've found it riddled with non-evidence in support of her claims (see her article about why WatchOS 3 is "an admission that Apple had it all wrong when it came to interactions on the first-generation Apple Watch": http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/14/11926314/apple-watch-os3-n...).

Lauren Goode is either a hack or just incompetent at using things.

> Late for a conference call you need to dial into? Hold on — you need to jam your Bluetooth buds in your ears and pair them to your phone if you're not already paired.

Is she serious? In what universe do you have a pair of BT headphones that aren't paired to your device? You do that when you get them.

> Got a sudden burst of motivation to work out? Sorry, no music — headphones are dead.

Right... things with batteries need charging.

The rest of the article is just as poorly thought out.

I agree that there are issues with Bluetooth headphones, but I find the benefits so great that I've stopped using my RHA T10i in-ear phones almost entirely.

We have to get the maintainer to run a "guess the game" on each of those tweets. You reply to a tweet with your guess, then 24 hours later you get the answer.

I'm perplexed by all the suggestions that 3D touch is a misstep. Arguments center around it being useless, hard to discover, or a source of platform fragmentation and therefore confusion.

1) "3D touch is useless."

3D touch adds a new affordance to interacting with screen elements. Perhaps you do not use 3D touch, perhaps applications have not yet incorporated the feature in a compelling way, but 3D touch is no more useless than analog pressure sensitivity in game controller buttons. I would be shocked if driving games available for iOS didn't adopt pressure sensitive accelerator features this year. Ditto drawing apps; Pixelmator has already added support.

Additionally, 3D touch means that interactions that previously had to depend on introducing latency (long-press) can now happen more quickly. 3D touch also promises a high degree of real-time feedback to a user, for example in the case of peek and pop.

Application shortcuts are also very convenient and hold even more promise as apps become more powerful and complex, and if anything serve to highlight that Apple needs to improve the springboard environment.

2) "3D touch suffers from poor discoverability."

I agree somewhat, but it doesn't make the feature bad. There is room for improvement here, and hidden features can still be good features. The solution is to improve the extent to which the elements embody press-ability.

My guess is that future iOS versions will incorporate more visual cues for the interface elements that afford 3D interaction. Consider, for example, how the lock screen camera icon bounces when you tap on it -- suggesting that it should be swiped up (IIRC it used to launch the camera when you tapped on it). At the moment it's pure conjecture, but, just to toss out some ideas, elements could appear to depress slightly when touched normally, or be given a (very) minor 3D treatment... or down the line, haptic feedback could simulate texture (see http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...)

(Are any 'discoverability' critics emacs users?)

3. "3D Touch is confusing because some hardware supports it and some do not."

Other people have already argued very effectively against this point. Also...

Some mice have more mouse buttons than others. Some iPhones have processors that support power-free "Hey Siri". Some cars have built-in GPS. In general, people are not confused by higher cost/prestige features being absent from some models of a product.

How else would a voice activated personal assistant work?

> It makes a good propaganda bit for both sides, but doesn't actually impede function.

The 9/11 attacks impeded function. The functioning of airlines, for example, have been impeded. Efficiency of flight for every individual traveler is reduced by needing to arrive at an airport an extra hour early. If we agree that making things proceed through big bureaucratic processes is effective sabotage, then consider that the TSA is an entire bureaucracy that would not exist if not for high profile suicide terror.

The functioning of government has been impeded. Enormous amounts of political capital and willpower have been wasted dealing with the war on terror, allowing domestic priorities to languish. The USA, goaded into a decade of counter-productive flailing, is now highly challenged to enact foreign policy strategies.

Those are two things, I think there are many, many others.

> ...a good thing that prospective jihadis aren't motivated by charts showing decreased output.

Why should we assume this? We might just not be looking for it.