Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush
Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it&#x27;s an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well.<p>There is a question that&#x27;s been bothering me for years now, to which I still don&#x27;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?<p>I am currently typing this from a 2016 macbook that for some reason won&#x27;t keep disconnecting from my WiFi router. Last week, iOS decided to randomly delete all of my saved locations in the Maps app. I&#x27;ve never had stable, fast internet anywhere I&#x27;ve lived in the US in the past 8 years - every few days or so, shit just doesn&#x27;t work for a bit. I&#x27;ve owned things like a Nest or Philips Hue in the past, and they randomly reset to factory mode or desync&#x27;d from my phone . Half the time I try to play my PS4, some stupid patch fails to download, or PSN is down, etc.<p>The more things like the Amazon Echo I would have in my house, the more irritating my daily life would be - because I don&#x27;t want to deal with the 5% of the time where I have to repeat my request 5 times for it to tell me the weather, or the connection to the Amazon server is lost and I can&#x27;t play any music. This 5% of the time across dozens of devices results in being annoyed 100% of the time.<p>All of this is why I mainly use a record player to listen to music at home (no DRM, no problem with servers being down or albums removed remotely), really like my GameCube for video games (put a disk in and play, no patches to download), still exclusively buy paper books, am fine with dumb light switches, and so on.<p>If you think this entire thing is ridiculous, I fully agree - I make my living contributing to this industry! But either people are living through these same annoyances as I am and they&#x27;re fine with it (in which case please teach me your secrets), or somehow I&#x27;m getting a worse experience with technology than 99.9% of the population (I guess statistically such a person must exist, and it is me).