On the other hand: I pay $10 a month for unlimited music, $8 for tons of movies and tv shows, I get most of the stuff I buy in the mail in two days, Google Maps can navigate me anywhere, and I do all of my trading instantly online with low fees.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1. You have sucky Internet. Bad Internet is going to cause numerous issues. From what I've heard it's hard to get a really good Internet connection in the US. But in many places in the world, great Internet connections are available at low cost.

Bad Internet means devices are going to have issues with firmware updates. Things will be more flaky in general, data will be lost part way through transfer and you'll hit issues with devices not robust to this more often.

2. There's no reason why your macbook should keep disconnecting from Wifi. Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise? Or you have a cheap/crappy router? Again, this is an issue which many people don't face. Mostly Wifi just works.

I've went through tons of routers, and on those routers all available firmwares (dd-wrt. open-wrt, tomato, etc).

I've been using an Asus RT-AC87U for the last couple of years now, on Merlins firmware (slightly altered stock). I want to say it's great, but really it's just the least sucky router [0] I've had.

Wifi has never mostly worked. At least I've never experienced it. With a wifi dongle on my desktop PC I could go for a few weeks without issue, but I often find at least one (random) phone to be disconnecting at times when I'm trying to access something locally on my network. I never have to reboot the router at least, but have to manually reconnect devices when issues occur, and of course it breaks any connections I had.

I installed a wired network in our house just this week, for the devices I care about the most.

I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. I imagine that any such suggestion is a statement of minimizing the time when it fails, which is great, but it has never been on par with wired in reliability. I would be very happy if it did, but I won't hold my breath.

[0] Nitpick: We're talking about the AP part of the router, the router part is quite stable and I've had no wired issues.

Years ago I had this problem and bought an Apple router. My wifi has always 'just worked' ever since. There was an entire thread of people on here on HN saying the same thing when Apple decided to stop making them. Wifi, like cell, is very anecdotal because of things out of your control.

It's a real shame they decided to discontinue them - they were absolutely the single consumer brand which didn't plain suck in my experience. Awful experience with Asus (overheating), Netgear (5 disconnects per hour), Cisco/Linksys (radio part died after a firmware upgrade, long fight to RMA a 3 days old unit), D-link (signal wouldn't cross a single wall), etc.

Fortunately I recently decided to look past the consumer products and discovered Ubiquiti. What a breath of fresh air. Amazing performance and range, all the stability of Apple without the Fisher-Price interface.

My setup at home is:

Motorola Surfboard SB6183

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X

Uniquiti Unifi AP

I set it up once and the only outages I've had were when my provider (Time Warner in NYC) had issues that made the Surfboard loose connectivity. Despite the fact that I'm in an incredibly noisy RF environment, I've never had trouble connecting to my AP.

If had spare time and money, this is a business I'd try:

- partner with Ubiquiti to white label their gear

- build an app to make the APs easy to setup

- work hard to become the Wirecutter's top pick

- sell them on Amazon

Are you saying you never have any wifi issues? Even every other month?

I think the OP question touched on problems existing, but small enough for many to "accept them" as status quo, and him/her questioning if he/she was the only one bothered by them. I am one of those people too. Thus my question of whether or not you actually have no problems, or simply "no problems requiring intervention, other than waiting/reconnecting".

Our internet has gone down (Uverse fiber), but that's outside of our home and there's little we can do about it.

My phone - a Nexus 5X - is probably the flakiest bit of tech that I have. I reboot it every 10 days or so. The next worst is the AT&T DVRs. They are terribly designed, painful to use, and have bugs.

Most of the tech in my house (Canon printer, QNAP raid box, Hikvision cameras, PS4, Roku, Wii-U, Onkyo receiver, Samsung and Toshiba televisions, iPads, iPhones, Samsung Tablet, Thinkpad, MacBook, gaming PC, Kindles, etc...) have basically no recurring problems. We've had brown outs where the power goes down but not off that made me have to go reboot everything, but other than that, no real problems. Our VitaMix blender does blow one breaker, but that's not really a tech issue.

Correct. It just works. The base station I have is also really old at this point. It is the larger flat one without simultaneous 5g bought ~2008. I bought it after I went through some of the other cheaper options that would cause my VPN to drop randomly throughout the day.

I want to upgrade to something with the newer standards and more speed, but I'm worried about going back to an unstable connection. I've been thinking about either the Netgear R6400 or the Google wifi 3 pack.

There was a cool blog recently on HN about switching to Ubiquiti HW: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...

The RT-AC68U or RT-AC88U are better choices (because they use Broadcom?). My RT-N66U has been a flawless AP for years.

Thank you for the tip!

Well, I work from home, and my wi-fi network (different routers across several homes, mostly Mac clients) has always worked.

The only thing that had issues was the DSL connection crapping out (usually once per 2 weeks or so) and having to restart the router to re-sync.

But no wi-fi issues, or machines disconnecting etc.

That said I always lived in single floor apartments (but with concrete walls). So I never had to try to e.g. bring wifi to the basement or so.

Do you live in an area with a lot of RF noise? or with a lot of other Wifi networks? I've stayed for a month in New York last year at a place with a lot of other wifi networks and my Macbooks became much more flaky when connecting to wifi.

Maybe you can try changing the wifi channel?

But I can say that having an internet connection that's not great definitely creates a lot of problem and additional frustration. I was way more frustrated when I stayed that month in New York (for some reason the internet connection had intermittent packet loss), I'm really quite surprised at how bad internet connections are in the US.

I've tried different channels, but is that suggestion in regards to the signal (which is not a problem for me) or for its effect on reliability of keeping the connection?

I'm in the San Francisco area so you'd think RF noise would be pretty heavily present here. Before this I had the TP-Link AC1200 and I had all the issues you mentioned with that.

a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points.

testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements.

Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful.

I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much.

0: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...

> Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses.

... I think fits with the question the OP asked, and my follow up to. Since it's not a binary, and people have different levels of acceptance, and different levels of work put in to getting that number closer to 1 than 0, that is my issue. A stable router and wired devices "just works" for at least the last couple of decades.

I can likely get a better WLAN than the one I have, but I have already put in more time than I'd like to. At this point if I can't throw money at it, I'll rather just throw money at installing cat6a, which I did for the stuff I cared about (desktop, htpc, server).

> I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time.

Contradicting as it is to your first statement, do you really mean this though? Or is it simply "works well enough, within reasonable efforts, means and expectations"?

I'm not shocked if somebody drops $3,000+ on a MBP, and can't reliably connect to an AP from the same vendor, let alone any other vendor.

For routers specifically, people are going to have a wide range of experiences depending on the brand (and sometimes model) they purchased. They all have their own quirks. D-Link tends to experience intermittent packet loss, Netgear has sudden intermittent loss of radio signal, ASUS routers just simply stop routing packets every few weeks or so. For off-the-shelf, we tend to see the fewest complaints from Linksys wireless devices, but their wired devices are pretty unreliable.

Engenius, which you'll see in a lot of commercial deployments, are over-priced and the radios in them just give up and go home after about a year or so.

This is one of my favorite soapboxes, so I gotta be careful not to get carried away, but I really sympathize with the GP upthread. Mail software, iOS, MacOS, Windows of course, networking, printers, phone systems, camera systems, databases, the whole kit & kaboodle is full of infuriating behavior and it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.

I'm currently in the process of selling my break-fix business, because it's an infinite suck-hole that's stupidly difficult to make money on, and moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.

I personally cannot believe how terrible consumer-grade WiFi has stayed. You'd think that some of these manufacturers would be upping their QC at some point: I've experienced all the random undiagnosable problems you've described where nothing short of rebooting the router fixes things, and only until things break again later. I currently own one of those fancy Netgear Nighthawk routers and after months of going through PCI-Express cards on my desktop machine where random packet loss made gaming impossible (but not on any other devices even in the same room), I finally gave up and bought a 100ft cable off of Monoprice and ran it over some doorframes with tape.

I see a lot of buzz around all this "pro-sumer" mesh network gear[1], but I haven't had the kind of sprawling living situation that justifies it yet. (Though I did just recommend that article to a coworker on a very large property, and he's hoping it fixes his many, many problems.)

> it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.

Hear hear. To OP's original point, I can't believe how much stuff simply doesn't work like it's supposed to. I always thought it was my high-tech demands for plugging together services/software that weren't necessarily built for each other (e.g. Google Music on a Roku, or Snapchat on an Android phone), but after going home last Thanksgiving, it's unbelievable to me how many mainline iOS scenarios are completely broken. Every conversation I had with relatives was "oh yeah, that's easy to fix...lemme see...wait, what?...that doesn't make any sense...google-fu...huh, I guess there's some random problems with this...let's try deleting/re-adding your account...okay, that didn't do anything...wtf..." Throw in some "you got your iCloud password wrong twice and now we're locked out, time to go through insane account recovery", and I was ready to move to the woods and give up technology forever.

> moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.

Hahaha, grass is greener, man. Be prepared to be not fixing A LOT more bugs. ;)

[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-mesh-networking-...

I personally think someone has put an apple-curse on him, he blames it on cheap batteries.

(Don't even ask about the quality of any of their "1.0" products - full of bugs every time, newest example is the touch bar.)

I hate solving problems like this at home. Part of the challenge is that I don't have the same resources, though.

> Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise?

I hate this X-factor of WiFi with a passion. It's something that legitimately can vary in the time domain, either periodic or aperiodic. I have no good way to rule it out.

I have started using home powerline adapters and found them to be effective and reliable high throughput, low-latency connections to the smart TV/set top devices in my home.

>2016 macbook that for some reason won't keep disconnecting from my WiFi router

I have had two different Macs that did this. I did a ton of research (those 5-10(!) year-old bookmarks in Pinboard are unsurprisingly dead) and found certain wifi chipsets had problems (which is why other people with the same model as you will say they've never had a problem). That said, when we moved into our new house a year ago I had to buy a new router and add an access point because of the step up in square footage and I haven't had a problem since.

Of course, that new router was one of the Netgear ones with the giant security hole that was revealed a couple of weeks ago . . .

There's a blog post that was on HN a few days back about it: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...

For example, three dual band triple chain 802.11n/ac APs (https://routerboard.com/RBwAPG-5HacT2HnD) and a router (https://routerboard.com/RB750Gr3) have an MRSP of $330, including POE for the APs.

Roaming is very tough to get right unfortunately. Only the client devices can make a decision to roam, so without ugly hacks such as using a single channel / MAC / SSID to create a giant interfering WLAN, your options are limited. What you can do with Mikrotik is set up access rules to kick a client off an AP if the signal strength falls below a threshold, but as this is not client-initiated, there is a longer re-association time which could interrupt VoIP etc.

There are options such as 3rd party roaming clients for (eg https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.heleron.wi... for Android) which I'd consider. For laptops, most drivers have a "roaming aggressiveness" setting which can be tweaked. In general almost all devices should handle transient connectivity glitches fairly well, so kicking low signal clients off an AP shouldn't interrupt too much.

1. Some people customize more, so their setup tends to operate in ways that weren't as heavily tested, or anticipated by the makers.

2. Some people are more technologically fluent, and instinctively avoid common failure modes, and/or tend to get everything humming along with minimal effort.

3. Some people push their tech harder, or more thoughtlessly, like people who open ninety browser tabs, or are oblivious to the fact that their laptop fan runs constantly.

4. Some people like to have the bleeding edge latest tech, which has had less time for the kinks to work out.

5. Some people are more bothered by little glitches.

This is me. I get irrationally furious when, oh, KDE decides one day to consume all available system memory and then hang and I have to ssh into my own laptop to reboot it. (It's an otherwise reliable, not heavily customized system, so not so much an example of #4.)

Meanwhile I see people walking around all the time with totally busted smartphone screens like it's no big deal. They just don't seem to mind very much if email stops working for a while or they have to reboot a computer or whatever.

As an analogy from another totally separate yet strangely parallel hobby, back when social networking meant ham radio morse code radios, I can personally assure you that every ham radio operator who can not solder a PL-259 RF connector, can not crimp an Anderson Powerpole DC connector, or can not solder surface mount components makes certain via social networking (over radios, back then) that everyone knows they can not, and that makes everyone think no one can perform those tasks because negative reports is all they hear endlessly repeated. However the reality is all those tasks are pretty easy and problems are rare and usually its possible to learn how to do it correctly with little time investment.

None the less, its a common "design pattern" of social media / networking that once the numerical problem count exceeds, say, the tribal count number around 100, the entire population no matter how many billions will all "know" that problem is universal for everyone, while perhaps they're the only person out of billions not experiencing the reported problem. Meanwhile the reality of the problem is there are (billions minus one hundred) experiencing total success.

I'm just saying its a social networking or social media problem, not a wifi problem.

I had a hunch that it must somehow be "me" and not my ISP, so I replace ALL of my network gear with Ubiquiti stuff. I got a UniFi USG (handles actual routing), UniFi Switch (US-8-150W), UniFi AP AC Pro (Wireless AP), CloudKey (runs the software that powers all this, but it's not strictly needed, you can run it on your PC/Mac as well just to setup things and it doesn't need to be running 100% of the time).

Since I've done this I've had ZERO disconnects. Not a single one. No WiFi problems either. I'm not sure if it would fix what you're experiencing, but I thought I'd share my experience.

I've been much happier with my home worker after I traded in my all in one AP + Router/Firewall with a discrete firewall (pfSense) and Ubiquiti AP that's only an AP, nothing else.

Seems to be a question of disposition, in my circles at least. There was a bonus anecdote about how Alexa has ignored his girlfriend for a year though.

Man, my life is good. The secret? Get good Internet. Wire what you can. Get a damned good wifi router for the rest. Know your tools.

I buy paper books because they're much cheaper but take my Kindle when traveling.

The reason why many people love it (me and my family included) is that they don't think of it as technology but as a product.

In my family we are two grown ups, a 7 year old and a 3 year old. Google Home understand us all first time in most cases. The ones where it doesn't are so rare it's note even 5% of the time.

I look for technology which:

1) removes the layers of abstraction when it comes to interacting with it.

2) Helps with banale tasks such as weather (can't be underestimated, when you have kids), starting some random music (Play smooth jazz, play Pat Metheny, Play dance music), play latest episode of "Startups for the rest of us", play the news, timer when you cook, add things we need to buy, ask something we are unsure about.

3) Gives us back some of the tangibility of the physical products.

All these things can be done via your phone, but once you have a voice interface you realize how much faster and less intrusive it is.

These voice interfaces are not yet good enough for really detailed needs but for our mostly simple needs.

This discussion also reminds me of this thread, see also my list of links there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333471

It's not just about markets being small. Many times it's about designers pushing form over function, and people not realising what they're losing.

Take induction hobs, for instance. I had to go out of my way to get one with mechanical knobs, as opposed to touch controls, and it's such a huge UX improvement that I now feel handicapped in other people's kitchens. Yet I've had several friends and colleagues express genuine surprise that this is even possible; they've only ever seen induction hobs with touch, and thus assumed it's necessary to have touch on induction.

They're easier to clean. They look better. They're possibly cheaper.

You add supposedly safer as well. Since no heat is generated unless the pan is on the stove, it's safer for kids. Apparently the jury is still out on the technology since it uses electromagnetic currents:

Another Dangerous Cooking Appliance – Induction Stovetops - http://breastcancerconqueror.com/another-dangerous-cooking-a...

Health Issues with Induction Cooktops - http://www.livestrong.com/article/312052-health-issues-with-...

Is Induction Cooking Safe? - http://www.magdahavas.com/is-induction-cooking-safe/

If you want to cook, you'll have to take portable appliances onto the deck or into the basement because kitchens are solely about looking good now.

There are snarky analogies to web design in the above, BTW.

Outside of that, big fan of it. Despite only using a few features.

I'm less bothered by flaws in implementation, and instead bothered by failing to live up to potential due to artificial limits.

For example, the original Xbox had Ethernet and a harddrive, but it's capabilities were completely hamstrung by the OS. It wasn't until the device was hacked did it really come into it's own (spawning XMBP=>XBMC=>(Kodi|Boxee|Plex|...).

I got the Echo when Amazon was offering it to select Prime members for $99, so I didn't have much expectations for it. I was happy that I could change the wake work (Because Alexa is the name of an ex-gf), and the kitchen timer, and news feature were more than enough for me.

Once they added Spotify integration, it was well worth the cost to me.

We used to use my Xbox One to watch DVDs and such. Oh, but since I don't play it that often when we settle down to watch the movie: 30 minute download and update. Movie night ruined.

I finally bought an old, dumb DVD player that first came out in 2005. We're much happier with that.

To try to counter potential selection bias I'll give my boring answer: I would be really pissed if those things kept happening to me, so you're not particularly intolerant, but they don't. I get hard to fix wifi problems maybe once a year.

1) Q4 2015 MBP, top of the line - kernel thread crash on suspend, causing it to wake back up. Semi-random, kinda interesting except when it woke up in my bag and seemed to almost catch on fire ... repeatedly. People told me to take it to the Genius Bar .. I seriously doubted they could figure the issue out. It would've been a back to the factory situation (I sold it -- after verifying the hardware was still good of course).

2) Sometime in 2014-ish? I change the wireless bandwidth on a ubiquiti router at the office -- all the Macs go offline, Linux machines do not. Suggesting a bug in WiFi. This is not unusual for WiFi on any device (not just macs) in my experience. I disagree with the idea that it Just Works generally.

3) Macbook Pro 2013 - enabling IPv6 stack causes kernel crash when trying to disable.

4) and to make it clear I'm not just picking on Apple: Sony PS4 with a dual band 802.11a/b/g/n wireless router -- constantly drops connection. Figured out it was because of the 5GHz band. Had to set up a separate wireless network just for PS4 with an older router. Sony should put up some time and money to help fix these driver issues instead of leaving it entirely on BSD volunteers (assuming they're not using a custom driver, in which case they should, you know, fix it).

5) Making PSN a requirement was a terrible decision for the PS4: lizard squad DDoS the day after I got it. Updates kicking me out of PSN. Unable to log back in, etc. I will never buy another console gaming system with this requirement, if I can avoid it. If I can't I will do serious research first.

This is why I'm back to homebrewing/hacking hardware and putting Linux/BSD on all my stuff ... at least I then have a clue of how to debug this kind of weird shit, even if it is a PITA, and at least if things don't work, I can blame myself, rather than having to say I paid for it. Certainly no sense paying for premium consumer stuff either, even if you have the money. Spend it on something else.

No it's not just you.

But I'm also in the same boat with using older "dumb" tech. People can't believe I buy cd's still, but hey, you can get nearly anything used on amazon for a few bucks and it's DRM free!

I just get annoyed if something that would work instantly otherwise doesn't work at all. Say I want to put on music while cooking - putting on a record or CD would take 5 seconds, and work 100% of the time. But if Spotify is down, or asks me to update my password, or has removed the album I've played every week for the past year from their library, or I have to re-sync my bluetooth speaker, etc., then now I'm dealing with this instead of getting on with my cooking.

Whether this expectation is unreasonable or not is clearly a personal matter, but for me it seems like a pretty basic thing to demand from the objects I own.

That's not my experience at all; the damn scratches in CDs made me switch to an MP3 player as soon as I could afford one, back in the early 2000s.

Streaming audio is still shitty, that's true, but MPD reading off of a local disk actually works reliably.

I love those people who choose to purchase the bottom-tier internet, and then bitterly complain about how terrible the customer service is. "So open your wallet and get an ISP with good customer service" -> cue look of hate from them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXV/comments/5jh1em/103_patch_blac...

While waiting for the update, I wanted to comment on HackerNews, so I clicked on the 1Password icon in Google Chrome, and attempted to login. It crashed, and a bug report was sent to their team. I think I've come to expect that most software is poorly written. What further compounds that fact is a lot of it is not open-source. Tons of bugs are out there, with only a handful of people to actually fix them (when they have the time of course).

Also, I try to avoid consumer grade equipment when possible. I'll be switching to the Ubiquiti products soon enough, as I've heard nothing but positive remarks. The same issues exist in other fields as well. For example, a friend of mine does painting for a living. Consumer grade equipment like rollers and hand brushes can't even come close to expensive machinery such as a spray machine. Or a mechanic using a hydraulic lift on a vehicle versus common jack stands.

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

As software has taken over everything, we can safely extend this to all technologies.

I think every time I work on a type of software for work, I can never trust it again. I have javascript disabled by default, images disabled by default, cookies disabled by default. Smartphones are too inconvenient to carry around, so I use a Nokia and keep a smartphone plugged in at home for tinder.

Even on my workstation, I got fed up with desktop environments so I don't use them.

Echo, at least, does not need to be charged.

The only things I have that aren't wired are iDevices, my laptop, a petnet feeder, a harmony hub and the echo. I hope amazon comes out out with an ethernet adapter like chromecast has. I don't have much hope for the other two.

I could be partly to blame for that though because I don't like that fact that every thing they say into the echo is recorded and saved into the cloud so I limited what they could do with it. Don't want all my kids silly activities saved and tracked like that.

The Echo gets things wrong a lot more than 5%. I agree, that takes the fun out of it and becomes increasingly annoying. Sometimes, its quicker and easier to simply type in the search in Google.

I love my paper books!!

I still truly do not understand the full appeal of the IoT. I play with this stuff as a hobby, but I am always asking myself "would, I really use this in real life?" and 95% of the time the answer is no.

Also, I hate using voice assistants. By the time I say "weather" I could have typed it into the browser (and 1/10 times it doesn't hear me properly and gives me some jibberish I'm not interested in).

I use Ruckus Wireless WiFi paired with PFSense and HP Layer 2 & Layer 3 switching at home. I chose a building with 1Gbit fiber to my unit.

Things work great for me. The cost is crazy high for the typical consumer though. If I didn't run my own business from home I couldn't afford it.

Regarding the Macbook, you might have a hardware defect. I changed the Wifi/Bluetooth adapter (Macstore) and it now works flawlessly. It used to drop weirdly on some Wifi networks.

I am cranky when I know someone could have fixed a bug or UI defect and since I know what the problem is, have some good clues as to their thinking on the issue it makes me more cranky.

Also I'm getting older.

I like to believe that there is an AI out there that managed to avoid CAPTCHA and is messing with us at the worst moments.

I've been using macbooks for 5+ years. Have never had a wifi issue with Airport Extreme. Not even once.

I just like to think I have a keen sense of where technology doesn't make things better, just more complex.

I still mostly use paper books, paper to take notes, have a physical journal, whiteboard, and calendar, and generally not a lot of home automation. It's not even that the technologies don't work so much as they don't offer anything I need -- eg, why manage the overhead of a digital online calendar between multiple accounts when some paper and a thumbtack works fine to share plans for meals with roommates?

I just don't think complexity is the same as progress, which makes a lot of modern technology sort of unappealing -- it's complex (and hence error prone) solutions to simple problems, usually with a side helping of exploitative psychology and selling your personal information.

Pass.

I think there's an entire world of record albums that never saw the light. Sites like discog makes me want to start a collection.

But I very much agree with what you wrote. I'm not sold on voice interfaces, that one time where it asks you "Sorry, can you repeat it again?" is the last time I'm using Google Now.

But more importantly I just feel like I look stupid talking to the air alone. Also feel like I have to strain my voice and focus when I'm talking to a machine which adds some friction.

I do miss the days when we didn't have such bloat. Games would load instantly and ready to play without signing into facebook or being awarded without doing anything.