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Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

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Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#81

Post by semi-extrinsic »

m_mueller wrote: post #18
GuiA wrote: post #7

Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it's an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well. There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are? I am currently typing this from a 2016 ma…

I have similar experiences as you. I think it comes down to what is each persons' relative level of 'good enough' for each of the usecases. My 2013 Macbook and even more so my iPhone SE are 'good enough', and so far I haven't found anything else in their categories that can come up to that level. But when it comes to smart home or networking or car electronics or various other places where markets are still fragmente…

> But when it comes to smart home or networking or car electronics or various other places where markets are still fragmented such that earnings per device are small to negative, it's clear that the simpler the better.

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.

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#82

Post by [deleted] »

GuiA wrote: post #7

Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it's an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well. There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are? I am currently typing this from a 2016 ma…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#83

Post by thaumaturgy »

jsz0 wrote: post #73
microcolonel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had considerable problems between MacBook Pros and Airport Extremes in both noisy and extremely radio-quiet locations. 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.

That's quite unusual in my experience. Even most low end / lost cost routers are pretty damn reliable these days. In an office complex with more than a dozen competing networks I use wifi 8 hours a day and rarely have a blip. Have you by any chance being moving one of the same wifi devices between all the different places you've had problems? Another thing, which wouldn't explain all the different locations, is a pro…

fwiw, I own/sort-of-run an MSP/break-fix shop, and we see a lot of this sort of thing. People only ever call us when something's busted, so it distorts our perception of the reliability of technology, but we literally spend all day, every day troubleshooting technical issues.

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.

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#84

Post by pawadu »

microcolonel wrote: post #21
new299 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of technology is pretty flaky. I think you have a couple of issues however: 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 mo…

I've had considerable problems between MacBook Pros and Airport Extremes in both noisy and extremely radio-quiet locations. 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.

my co-worker has an apple wireless keyboard at work (BYOD). if he moves it more than two inches it will disconnect from his MBP (also BYOD). _very_ annoying when I need to type something for him...

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

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#85

Post by a_imho »

GuiA wrote: post #7

Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it's an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well. There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are? I am currently typing this from a 2016 ma…

Here's hoping kiss is waiting around the corner to be the new fad.

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#86

Post by thaumaturgy »

_greim_ wrote: post #27
GuiA wrote: post #7

Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it's an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well. There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are? I am currently typing this from a 2016 ma…

I've definitely noticed certain people seem to deal with more glitches and breakage than others. Not saying any of these are you, but here's some speculation as to why: 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 every…

I'll add:

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.

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#87

Post by m_mueller »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #81
m_mueller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar experiences as you. I think it comes down to what is each persons' relative level of 'good enough' for each of the usecases. My 2013 Macbook and even more so my iPhone SE are 'good enough', and so far I haven't found anything else in their categories that can come up to that level. But when it comes to smart home or networking or car electronics or various other places where markets are still fragmente…

> But when it comes to smart home or networking or car electronics or various other places where markets are still fragmented such that earnings per device are small to negative, it's clear that the simpler the better. 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…

Funny that you mention induction stoves - that's exactly what I was discussing among other things in above link. I hate those touch stoves with a passion. What were they thinking? It has one job!

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#88

Post by jyrkesh »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #83
jsz0 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite unusual in my experience. Even most low end / lost cost routers are pretty damn reliable these days. In an office complex with more than a dozen competing networks I use wifi 8 hours a day and rarely have a blip. Have you by any chance being moving one of the same wifi devices between all the different places you've had problems? Another thing, which wouldn't explain all the different locations, is a pro…

fwiw, I own/sort-of-run an MSP/break-fix shop, and we see a lot of this sort of thing. People only ever call us when something's busted, so it distorts our perception of the reliability of technology, but we literally spend all day, every day troubleshooting technical issues. For routers specifically, people are going to have a wide range of experiences depending on the brand (and sometimes model) they purchased. The…

I don't have any professional experience diagnosing problems like this, but I've managed more than a few large-ish home networks (many roommates, large family w/ a ton of devices, etc.) in sprawling houses with thick foundations all the way to signal-dense apartment buildings where 2.4GHz is all but useless.

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-...

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#89

Post by proaralyst »

sumbry wrote: post #76
fragsworth wrote: post #54

I was given one as a gift, but I can't bring myself to plug it in. The device sends sound to their servers to process what you are saying. They probably aren't sending all the sound, but if they aren't, I can't be bothered to keep up to date on if they change that policy. Is it unreasonable to assume that the NSA is logging (or will eventually be logging) everything sent over the Internet with this device around?

If you're seriously worried about the NSA logging things - I'd be more concerned with the device you carry on your person every day, with a microphone, two cameras, a GPS device, 24 hour battery, and probably 10x the processing power of the Alexa. It seriously is no worse than OK Google or Siri and you should seriously be more worried about your cell phone.

The device I carry day-to-day needs to be specifically compromised. With voice assistants using an internet service, only that internet service needs to be compromised. For bulk surveilance, I think it's far more likely for the Echo servers to be attacked than my smartphone.

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#90

Post by croon »

new299 wrote: post #15
GuiA wrote: post #7

Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it's an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well. There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are? I am currently typing this from a 2016 ma…

A lot of technology is pretty flaky. I think you have a couple of issues however: 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 mo…

> 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.

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