There was a recent forum thread with users claiming the Pinebook Pro is somewhat usable with Jitsi Meet; and the Pinebook Pro has a more powerful CPU in it than the Pinebook which has the same chip as the Pinetab.

Maybe going with a refurbished Surface or similar would be a better option; talking to an elderly relative is an use case that hardly calls for open hardware.

If you need the person to understand Less need for specialized skills/info is good. Less availability of that info when needed, I just can't see how that can be good.

An hour of coherent explanation by a friend is worth more than an hour of pointless frustration at a company, no?

Correct me if I'm wrong (oh no, needing specialized info to make a general argument!) but modern cars don't have carburetors anymore, because it turned out to be an evolutionary dead end of sorts?

Maybe the same thing is bound to happen to Bluetooth anyway; and I believe that the better its workings are exposed to those who want to know it, the sooner people would be able to replace it with something that works better, thus generating less waste - of both resources and time

Consider we're not just already failing to build products that "just work", we're making it hard for users to make things work at all. There is obviously an incentive for that - Sinclair's law. However, imagine developers were actually incentivized to design beautiful, internally consistent systems, and expose their inner workings in an accessible way. How do you go from this proposition to the conclusion that everyone would have to become an expert in everything to do anything?

If everyone had access to the information needed to fix their problem using basic reasoning, but wanted to do other things, they could be able to find a nearby person who knows a little more and can help - as opposed to wasting time posting in support forums, waiting for customer support's non-answers, having to learn Google-fu to find if someone had the same issue, and eventually throwing the goddamn thing in the trash.

As an aside, I do have an axe to grind here; I did buy a pair of Bluetooth headphones the other day and, and do like chucking them in the bin even though they just work, just because I'm sick of being locked into yet another half-arsed wireless technology. I'll probably just give them to someone less demanding, because I don't want some landfill dwellers on the other side of the world inhaling my headphones. I've also reached the point when if anyone asks me for help with computers I recommend trying pen and paper instead.

Anyway, the fundamental distinction I'm trying to make is ternary: - having to learn things that make sense (competency and proficiency are enjoyable), vs. - having to learn things that pretend to make sense but don't (being good at those also feels good but I suspect is devastating to mental health), vs. - outsourcing all of your learning and going on with your life (until the Morlocks eat you)

History in general feels very much like one of those over-engineered legacy systems where every change is slow and painful, and the current maintainers can only guess why things have ended up being in a certain way, and hope trying to fix them doesn't suddenly make them worse. If you only have pure human universals to deal with in your life, I envy you. Otherwise, you might need to acknowledge that a lot of the "demands of life" are simply arbitrary constructs that beg to be challenged, renegotiated, optimized.

Maybe everyone becoming an expert in Bluetooth configuration or whatever is not pleasant or desirable, but in my book it beats destroying our economy, species or ecosystem by a thousand small cuts.

TL;DR: "Specialization is for insects," anyone?

It's important to note that siloing users within a proprietary namespace is also part of that UX. As usual, users come to demand what they've been force-fed long enough: so now you have the media complaining about privacy with a tone of learned helplessness while absolutely unable to wrap their heads around federation.

Delta Chat (https://delta.chat/en/) is an interesting project that provides a IM-like experience on top of email infrastructure. However all levels of the stack have become so bloated that it is nigh impossible to release anything that users won't perceive as shoddy without VC-scale funding.

Especially as the kids whose brains grew up on videogames are already becoming decision makers and shaping society in their own image. Not saying that's a bad thing, either - the world is probably better off resembling a video game than a bad trip.

There's all this talk of ethics and of logical fallacies that's making the rounds, and then you have this failure to realize that non-techies are conditioned to see technology as some sort of black magic that you have to be a special kind of not-quite-person in order to be able to make sense of.

No matter what spin you put on it, life in our society is not simple. Any kind of tool tends to work better if you're using it with some degree of understanding how it works.

If only our industry would somehow magically stop enabling entitlement and complacency (and make it easier for users to "do their homework")... then maybe things would actually "just work" much more often.