crab

Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

To my surprise, even Spotify's standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify's standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar's ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that's apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn't grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would've added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

Our conclusion is that the quality "difference" is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.

Then everyone needs to download and make an account on said app, they already exist and none are unanimous.

Everyone has a phone number that gets used for auth and other things. If that system doesn't change then RCS is way better.

Never looked into it, what's so bad about RCS besides it being proprietary? Way better than SMS in my experience.

RCS seems to be pretty openly licensed out to other OEMs, definitely a lot better than iMessage.

It's still proprietary though, a far cry from something like Matrix.

Nice. In the rare chance that you haven't heard of GrapheneOS, now you have.

Did you get your phone from your carrier? In addition, some brands do that with cheaper phones. Can buy unlocked phones.

Maybe try Google Pixel or iPhones that have terms against pre-installing shit.

Companies can choose who works there just as people can choose who to work for. If companies don't like what an employee is wearing then they can fire them, and if people don't like what a company isn't allowing them to wear they can quit.

Apparently the replacement parts for their phones are significantly cheaper than almost every other manufacturer. (I have just been hearing this so I don't know for sure if it's true, correct me if I'm wrong.)

Overall their phones seem to just be to a high standard. 5 years of support and other components that make them the choice for GrapheneOS (Privacy/Security focused rom that has greatly contributed to upstream Android)

VPNs can be a tool for privacy but 99% of the time someone is tricked into thinking it's antivirus by a nordvpn ad

Personally, I don't want a huge hole in my phone and case that I'm never going to take advantage of. Wireless headphones with noise cancelling and such are far more convenient when outside than the open backs I use at my computer. The DAC in most desktops suck so I use a USB-C to 3.5mm anyways, makes it really easy to plug into my phone if I ever needed.

Just my opinion for my situation, but I would honestly rather buy the same phone without a headphone jack than one that did.

In my experience, Wayland has been the one that "just works." No disabling compositing, higher than 60 refresh rate on my monitors, screen share portals, and a few other things that annoyed me about x11. From what I hear, x11 is ancient and wasn't designed to be used as it is today. Waiting on a couple features but never had any stability issues, hopefully more app devs realize it's existence and switch from x11 like all it's devs did.

GrapheneOS is what keeps me from switching from Pixel.