So — I use an Android phone for most stuff, but I use an Iphone Max for Duolingoing (because of reasons), and I was wondering whether I could listen to music from my Android phone as the same time that I was listening to the French-ey voices from the Doulingo app on the Iphone. There’s something in Bluetooth called “multipoint”, but it wasn’t clear whether that would give me what I wanted, but in any case, I’d have to install the Sony Headphone Connect app to enable it on my WH-1000XM5 headphones.
Gadget makers are notoriously bad at programming, so I wasn’t expecting this to be pleasant, but… oh lard.
I have indeed read the above (it was just a couple of sentences, after all), so I agree and “Start”.
I’m not reading all that. I’m happy for you though. Or sorry that happened. But I “Next”
“Disagree and proceed.”
Hey, didn’t I just disagree? OK, disagree with this second thing…
WTF?!? Another one?! Are these the same or different? I DISAGREE! START USING!
OK, I guess that’s fine.
No that’s not fucking fine! Notifications from this app? ICON BADGES? “Don’t allow”
Why not GET THE FUCK OUT
OK, now I’m “registered”… I hit “OK”
What?! Argh. “Later”
Er ok, I have nothing to restore?
Er, ok, “next”.
“LATER”
YES! LAST STEP! “NEXT”.
“LATERS!!!!”
AAARGH. And er… Cancel or OK? “OK”
YES!! Complete! Just a few steps after the final step!
And that’s a pretty minimal screen, but nothing’s happening. I wait a while, but nothing. So I exit the app and start again. Surely now I’ll be able to twiddle the setting.
Er… this apparently took so long time that it lost connection to the headphones.
And now… it wants to run me through the setup again!? NOOO
*phew* It’s not the same setup; it’s something else… So “LATER”
WHAT?! Complete!?!
Oh, except for this very informative grey box of information. I did wait for a while, but nothing happened. “Close”
OOOH! I have a menu.
YES! There’s the “Connect to 2 devices simultaneously” button I wanted to enable.
This is surely the best app you could conceive of to allow you to change the settings on your Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones.
And, no, it doesn’t actually seem to help with my use case. “Multipoint” seems to deal with having two phones connected to the headphones at the same time, so that you can switch between different sources rapidly. But it doesn’t actually allow playing audio from two sources at the same time? I just want some background music while Duolinging…
I’m not at all sure — this apparently is a totally unheard of use case or something, but perhaps there’s a way anyway? I don’t know.
There you go. Sony wasted my time, and now I wasted your time.
Paying it forward like a champ. I’m pretty sure that’s what it means.
(But to be serious for a second, I do realise that the app isn’t as horrible as it is just because it’s made by programmers who couldn’t program their way out of a moist paper towel. (Although that’s true, too.) All the “data usage” stuff they want people to agree with is so that they can sell the data about what you’re playing to whichever bottom-feeding ad agency bids the most — not so much that when you’re listening to Talking Heads that you get ads for really big suits, but so that when you’re listening to a Joe Rogan podcast, they’ll know to spray you with Ivermectin commercials on all platforms. And all the pointless “features” they want you to enable are presented as a gauntlet like this because they’ve found that when they let people enable them “by hand”, people don’t, and whichever VP in charge of whatever feature has a bonus that depends on metrics that say how “useful” that feature is. So you’ve gotta brow-beat people into enabling this stuff — somebody’s pay depends on it!
If you were really suspicious, you could suspect Sony of leaving the multipoint stuff disabled by default just so that people have to install the app — there aren’t any downsides to enabling it by default, after all: It just allows people to switch between connected devices faster.
Some people at Sony want this app to look like it does, and are rewarded for it, and they will have metrics to show how successful it is. But you have to ask — how many people go through this shit show and go “fuck this! Next time I’ll buy headphones from Apple: they just work”. But there’s no easy metrics for that tied to this app, is there? So it is what it is. At least it’s easy enough to uninstall the app after switching multipoint on.)
> you could suspect Sony of leaving the multipoint stuff disabled by default just so that people have to install the app — there aren’t any downsides to enabling it
I have the previous model (XM4) and the multipoint feature has a failure mode where it fails to connect to one of the devices until you factory reset the headphones. Which is annoying when I leave my laptop home and go on a walk with my phone and headphones, and the headphones think they are still connected to the laptop and I can’t listen to podcasts.
> how many people go through this shit show and go “fuck this! Next time I’ll buy headphones from Apple: they just work”
I did this after the XM4 and can confirm that for the most part, the Airpods just work.
> All the “data usage” stuff they want people to agree with is so that they can sell the data about what you’re playing to whichever bottom-feeding ad agency bids the most
> how many people go through this shit show and go “fuck this! Next time I’ll buy headphones from Apple: they just work”
I despise Apple and their MO. But putting those two quotes together, that’s how I ended up owning and iPhone. And also why I am thinking of getting an AppleTV and disconnecting my LG TVs from the internet.
Turns out most, if not all, smart TVs, snap pictures of the content you are watching and send it to the manufacturer (or some ad agency) and they use some image recognition thingy to know what you are watching. WTF.