My iPad wins by a large margin the lowest bang for bucks of any competing device I ever purchased
A locked down device with no multitasking, even the browser download is interrupted if I switch away.
The true embodiment of paternalism, it protects you from all the scam in the world, except the noble ones who are willing to pay the 30% share.
It has some multitasking on the latest versions of iOS. You can drag a YouTube window up by the bottom right corner and open a Reddit window on another part or the screen if you truly need to be distracted from distraction by distraction.
From your comment I don't know you have tried this or not, but get some sessions with the best trainer you can. Singing and even speaking with a good voice is incredibly counterintuitive for some people, speaking from experience.
You might have everything needed for a great voice expect the skills, or you might be trying for a voice that's far from what works well for you.
You gave up some convenience to avoid voting for a bad practice with your wallet.
I admire this, try to consistently do this when reasonably feasible.
Problem is, most people don't do this, choosing convenience at any given moment without thinking about longer-term impact. This hurts us collectively by letting governments/companies, etc tighten their grip over time. This comes from my lived experience.
Society is lacking people that stand up for something. My efforts to consume less is seen as being cheap by my family, which I find so sad. I much prefer donating my money than exchanging superfluous gifts on Christmas.
As I get older I more and more view convenience as the enemy of good. Luckily (or unluckily for some) a lot of the tradeoffs we are asked to make in the name of convenience are increasingly absurd. I have an easier and easier time going without these Faustian bargains.
IMHO The question is: who is in control? The user, or the profit-seeking company/control-seeking government?
There is nothing we can do to prevent companies from seeking profit. What we can do is to prefer tools that we control, if that choice is not available, then tools that we can abandon when we want, over tools that remove our control AND abandoning them would be prohibitively difficult.
It's simple: Lawyers creating market for themselves and other lawyers. A head of legal department at Netflix would have a better job and pay if ge has 50x more employees. Hence, the incentive to find ways to get involved in everything, even if it arguably hurts the company's revenue, let alone the rest of the market.
Essentially the flip side of any critical but low maintenance part of your system: it's so reliable that you can forget to have external monitors, it's reliable enough that it can work for years without any manual labor, it's so critical that can break everything.
Competent infra teams are really good at going over these. But once in a while one of them slips through. It's not a failure of the reliable but critical subsystem, it's a failure mode of humans.
If this happens, it will mark the slow end of an era, one fed up person at a time.
Change comes gradually, and then suddenly
reply