alt Hacker NewsThere was a point in time ( may be 15+ years ago ) I said MacBook have the best laptop speakers and that was one of the reason I brought them. They are not perfect, as any people who cares about audio will tell you but considering the size of laptop they were the best I could get and decent enough.
Most of my friends, and nearly everyone on the internet was like, who buys Laptops because of speakers? They all sounded the same. Get a Dell. I think it was on either Anandtech or Tomshardware. It was certainly before Reddit Era.
Somewhere along the line, may be 2015 to 2020 Youtube reviewers have been bashing about Dell or other laptops for their crappy cost saving speakers. ( Thank You Dave2D ) And, manage to actually show it in the video how awful they were. All of a sudden "consumer" took notice and have since demanded better speakers. Laptop Speakers in the past 5 years have improved tremendously. As it turns out, people need to learn how to compare. And once they do, they cant unseen it.
But in all honesty in the past few years I really really wished I dont have the ability to tell the difference. To not have the mentality how something could be "better". To stop thinking how everything, from Food, Furniture, Tech Stack, UI, Buildings anything could be better.
Some say it is a gift, I think it is more of a curse. And it is a struggle and tiring. I then discovered my retreat for peace was to go out to nature and enjoy the creation of god.
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At some point a few years ago I didn't want to get a mac with the crappy keyboard so I bought a Thinkpad, I think it was a t480s or something of that era. The speakers were so bad it was impossible to understand the dialogue while watching a movie in a decently quiet room with some city noises in the background.
I've learned to come to terms with this mentality, mainly due to time constraints. Before, I would always do an insane amount of research and benchmarking to find the absolute best in its category, even for mundane things like a coffee grinder. I would aggregate thousands of reviews and turn them into sentiment analysis, cross-referencing reviews, and so on.
Now, I take a more 80/20 approach: I clearly define my needs and shut down any thoughts about features and capabilities that I don't need right now. Frankly, after years of thinking that I might use a feature later, I realise that I never do and never recover my investment in these kinds of gadgets.
Finding a trustworthy review source is key — by trustworthy, I mean mostly in line with your own standards. However, if you can try it yourself, that's always better.
For sound on small devices with clear voice and a good dynamic range, Samsung is quite good with its high-end Galaxy Tab line.
> I then discovered my retreat for peace was to go out to nature and enjoy the creation of god.
Nothing man-made could even compare with that perfection.
The curse of knowledge really. Or perhaps more accurately “awareness”.
You know about things that are to others unknown unknowns. Since ignorance is bliss, it definitely feels like a curse to you, and since what one doesn’t know can hurt them, others would see as a blessing.
Funny world we live in.