The first minute of every phone call is torture now | Hacker News Reader

The first minute of every phone call is torture now

theatlantic.com

243 pointsfirstbase442 comments

Article plays up the fumbling for effect, but is otherwise spot on. The PSTN was immensely overbuilt. Old Western Electric equipment is, literally, built of tempered steel, from the crossbar switches in the CO to the red telephone on the desk. The human artifice erected in between, electrically and mechanically connecting a microphone at one end to a speaker at the other, was staggering in its analog complexity, and yet it worked with astonishing reliability. And, to put it in modern terms, all of it was for just one single "app:" voice calls.

It all began moving to digital relatively early in the 60s, but even well into the 90s many systems were still functionally analog, with copper wire pairs carrying analog signals in a /not-metaphorical/ loop between callers.

Today we have comparatively infinitely greater capacity and capability, and there's no going back, but the "core experience" of the modern voice "app" is without a doubt a pale reflection of its original progenitor.

There is also something incredibly "simple" about the end result of an analog connection - literally a pair of wires connected across thousands of miles.

Digitalization has added so many layers people don't even know - it's sad that there aren't many actual direct analog connections you can make anymore to see how "realtime" it was.

I love my electric guitar.

I remember overseas calls having a huge lag. Now I can call across and works and chat with perfect audio and video. I think we’re romanticizing the past and failing to recognize the ways in which calls are so much better.

Nothing can avoid the speed-of-light lag, but full-duplex and things have made it certainly better.

It's very noticeable on globe-spanning links (which is where video actually starts to help because you can use the silent visual cues).

Yeah, the delay on digital phone calls still trips me up. It's nothing like being face-to-face or an analog call. I'll take the static, just give me sub-20ms latency!

if you want to see how complex and overbuilt it is, https://www.youtube.com/c/ConnectionsMuseum has coverage of all the old PSTN equipment you could ever want

i can't claim to _understand_ it half the time, but there are big rows of mechanical automatons galore

Absolutely. Same with turning on a TV these days. People used to flip a switch, now it's a highly technical process that takes a few minutes.

Yes, this is the point I wanted to raise. It's not just phones. The first minute of everything is torture now. It takes minutes to turn on the TV and navigate menus and establish connections to sources and get to the point where everything is buffered and playing smoothly. I watch a lot less TV than I did when I was younger, despite the vastly expanded amount of content that is available, because it's just too much trouble.

Other appliances are similar. Playing music, you used to turn on the radio and maybe dial in a station. Or put a record on the turntable, or a cassette tape in the deck and press "Play".

Appliances much the same. You had power and maybe one or two analog dial controls. Controls in your car were the same. Everything was tactile. Feedback was both physical and immediate. Nothing needed accounts or logins or apps to use.

It doesn't have to be. If your devices support HDMI-CEC[0], then you can turn on 1 device and everything sets itself up. For example, I can turn on my PS4 and it automatically turns on the TV and sets the correct input.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control

My Samsung TV "smart" feature overlays for 1+ minute when using HDMI-CEC.

How about gaming? Nintendo 64 > power on > play Mario Kart within 10 seconds. The experience as a kid was truly magical, and in a sense it still is.

One thing not taken into account on this rant (and it is just a big rant) is the incredible increase in scale. Nearly everyone has a phone and can make phone calls now and we're almost 8 billion people. The old, understandable, analog system would have never scaled like this. Quality didn't degrade because of greed or degeneracy. It was a trade-off and I say the level of access we have now trumps whatever nostalgia people feel for the past decades.

You may be correct that we made the right choice with the tradeoff, but saying that the old system worked better (for those who could use it) is not nostalgia. Audio quality (and communication ability) on zoom is objectively far worse than it was over analog copper lines.

Why are you comparing zoom calls to analog phone calls? My transcontinental, zero marginal cost whatsapp phone calls are pretty good.

I haven't used that - how is the latency?

It's not great but it's good enough for, again, a free call half way across the globe.

And then there was (european) ISDN. That was peak voice.

Not really. Transmissions were perhaps reliable, clear and fixed, low latency, but the bandwidth was still quite limited (64kbps). I still remember first time I used the yahoo! voice chat (VoIP using DSL on my end) with a decent sound card and head-set. It sounded like my peer was in the same room (1v1, voice only then -- with multi-party the sound quality degenerated quickly).

Unconvinced. In the same room you wouldn't wear a head-set, would you? :-) Also Mumble at 64kbps can sound really good. Anyways, didn't do/have that the time, so no comparison.

The reliability, clarity, and fixed low latency were nothing to sniff at, and ISDN didn't lose on quality by any means. In a different universe, it might have gone on to be a dominant technology.

The data rate was 64kbps. The audio frequency bandwidth of G.722, the most widely compatible codec over ISDN, is about 7kHz. Typical analog phone line bandwidth was about 3kHz, so a single ISDN BRI D-channel call was already twice the bandwidth of analog. This was sufficient for ISDN to be suitable for links between sports arenas and FM broadcast stations, for example. Other codecs with better compression (like MPEG) over bonded D-channels for 128kbps, could provide more like 20kHz audio bandwidth (in stereo!), which is close enough to "broadcast quality" 22kHz to be useful for coast-to-coast broadcasts and remote studio recording.

In our timeline, however, Carterfone and the breakup of AT&T opened the doors for all kinds of development in voice-band modem technology. 56K modems were good enough, and they worked with existing last-mile equipment on existing POTS lines, leaving ISDN to find a niche with small business and broadcast. When "always-on" DSL entered the market to compete for Internet subscribers, ISDN was finished. People cared more about data rates than latency, more about the Internet than point-to-point links, and the market ISDN was aiming for had moved on by the time it arrived. Rapid deployment of fiber and T1/E1 quickly ate up whatever was left of ISDN's apple... not because ISDN wasn't very good at what it did, just because people didn't much care about what it was good at.

Which, I suppose, brings us back to the point of the article: advances come with drawbacks.

What? My Zoom call (I actually use MS-Teams) can include dozens of people, with video, who are from all over the world. The old phone system wasn't able to do that - especially at the cost of Zoom. People today would be shocked to know what our monthly phone bill cost was back in the day in today's dollars and the lack of value purchased for that money.

World population by late 1990s was 6 billion. Landline audio phone calls were reliable with fixed guaranteed bandwidth, albeit expensive. Today there are more people, but has there been a linear increase in 1:1 calls? More bridge/group/conferencing calls, yes.

Was penetration of phone services the same back then?

There wasn't a comparable 1:1 mapping/surveillance of device to human, but phones and public payphones were widely available in Western countries.

But not in the 2nd/3rd world or in rural areas or poorer areas in the first. I would suggest that the ubiquity was in the wealthiest sections of the 1st world, not the western world.

Because phones aren't allowed to have bezels anymore for some reason, I'm constantly hanging up on people because there's no room for a proximity sensor to turn off the screen so my cheek presses the "hang up" button. It tries to use the front camera as a makeshift sensor, but it doesn't work very well.

Recently I reacted with incredulity when the people on the other end could properly hear me through a newly-connected Bluetooth device -- it's more jarring to me when this stuff doesn't fail.

That's not problem of a bezel, but either crappy software or bad sensor, never happened to me through 11+ years of using Android phones with touch screen.

Better choose decent phone next time, mind sharing what phone causes you this trouble?

Samsung Galaxy S10e (with recent software). It wasn't cheap. And all my previous Android phones were fine too, but this one only has the little hole in the screen for the camera. There is no sensor.

Return the phone, it's broken

There's no way Samsung made a phone with no proximity sensor

.. well, then again, they did make the Note 7.. https://youtu.be/0IVk8PsSgEI

I know it's not using a proximity sensor because the front camera turns on when it's trying to fake-proximity-sense. I also know what a proximity sensor looks like (I've worked with such sensors for my job), and there isn't one. It's just a bad design; form overrode function.

S10 series should have under screen proximity sensor, so there is no way for you to see it unless it lights up during function, it's white flashing LED

https://nasilemaktech.com/samsung-galaxy-s10-series-proximit...

are you using samsung phone app or 3rd party app? see my other comment with links how to resolve it

I do sympathize with users who have to distinguish between the kind of brokenness that warrants returning the phone, and the kind of brokenness which is simply the norm in this space.

Not sure if the device really is the issue here. I've the same phone, it costed me $600 when I bought it 3.5 years back. And till date, it's the best phone I've owned: not too big, headphone jack, expendable storage, physical dual sim, capable cameras and Touch ID that's located just right. Importantly, I've never had issues that you mentioned (dropped calls or Bluetooth glitches for that matter) I use this phone (S10e) every single day for calls and music etc. In fact, I'm typing my response on it now

What I mean to say is - there's a very high chance that your device is broken.

You may be using different software version, maybe they fixed it. It was very popular model, I really doubt if it had such serious issues it would not be fixed.

I found guy reporting it as software issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/galaxys10/comments/bzv9oq/proximity...

though other says it's faulty design https://www.reddit.com/r/galaxys10/comments/d94ob7/proximity...

Samsung recommended to return the phone, some people had luck with changing Touch sensitivity settings and Accidental touch protection https://piunikaweb.com/2019/03/18/samsung-galaxy-s10-proximi...

possible to test it here to see whether it's hardware or software issue https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/the-proximity-sensor-is-n...

But considering not all people have this problem it's either software error, software setting or some batches had hardware issue or they fixed the design.

I have an S10, literally never had an issue with this

I have an S10, literally did. So which anecdote wins?

The point is parent's generalization is wrong because it's either caused by faulty hardware or software issue, but it's not widespread problem across all new (Android) smartphones, just because you and him experience this issue.

Also just throwing my hat into the ring, writing this on a S10e. It's not perfect, but I don't have any issues with the sensors, no ads, and it generally just works about as well as any other phone I've used.

Huh, I just switched out my s10e after a few years and I never had this issue. It didn't even occur to me that the face-detection method had changed.

S10e definitely has a hw proximity sensor under the screen, but Samsung also adds infos from touchscreen to complement this sensor. I used a s10e and loved it, but not on Samsung sw and I never did calls so I can't say much about it.

Circa 2012, top 60% of an Android call screen was unresponsive to touch and never had phantom touches. As the buttons creeped upward, I get phantom mute, hold and even hangups.

My father's phone had the same problem (some HTC abomination), but with the mute button rather than the end call button. I'm not sure if it was due to cheek contact with the screen or some gyro sensor thinking that the phone was flipped upside down, but during a call the phone would randomly mute its microphone.

Same happens to me with the mute button. It also seems hard on newer phones to find a position where the speaker is clear - shift it by a millimetre and now you can’t hear anything. The phone is so big that holding it completely still for a long call is uncomfortable. People ask why everyone holds the phone out and uses the loudspeaker now, well…

Worse yet, the "muted" and "not muted" states of the button are visually distinct when looking at them side-by-side, but if you just see one in isolation, you'd be hard-pressed to determine which it is. Gotta poke it a few times to see it change, you know?

Yes. It is either Hang up, Mute, or Worst, suddenly on speaker phone so the sound would blow up my ear.

There are many other aspect of "calling" that has gotten worst, including call quality, codec and signal etc. My thinking is that no one calls anymore and no one gives a damn about phone calling.

I still remember I used to buy Motorola Phone just because of their Crystal talk.

Personally I think it was two things reinforcing each other:

On one side, a natural decline in people using the phone (replaced by texting/apps)

On the other side: the cell companies no longer “encumbered” by laws around landline reliability, cramming ever more phone calls in to the same amount of bandwidth

The cell companies could have the clearest call quality by a wide margin, if they chose to. TBH, (and I know I’m an outlier) even though I talk to people for maybe 5 hours a month, I would still switch providers to one that offered call a quality equivalent to being in person

> suddenly on speaker phone so the sound would blow up my ear.

This being so bad is a phone design issue that goes beyond the touchscreen.

Well designed phones have two microphones and speakers, so when in speakerphone the top becomes the mic and the bottom the speaker, preventing deafening people in the event of an accidental switch.

This is one of the reasons why I always let the phone hoover a couple of centimeters from my face when talking to someone. Utterly ridiculous!

This is the way you are meant to hold a phone anyway. In the manuals it states this (e.g apple says 5mm-15mm from your head). This is to reduce SAR.

What is SAR?

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/specific-absorption-rat...

Summary: Specific Absorption Rate - how much RF energy your head is absorbing.

The stock Android dialer is a complete UX hellscape.

Every other time I need to dial a number, I will be randomly interrupted by some dialogue to enable a feature or to learn about X, when I'm urgently trying to make a call. It's so f-ing rude and intrusive. And it's designed to trick you into enabling shit without giving you time to think it over.

It's such a scummy thing to do, but hey, it's Google. Imagine having to make an emergency phone call, but you can't until you tap through all the prompts. Google basically broke core functionality to do this, and there's no way to disable this nonsense.

Seriously, I just want my phone to be a phone, not some feature riddled shit app that does everything (poorly).

That must be the Google Dialer app. The one in LineageOS which I guess comes from AOSP is perfectly fine and never bothers me about anything. Come to the dark side! ;-)

I am using stock Google dialer and don't have such experience either.

Anyway, OP can always pick the one that works for him. There's lots of options.

I've literally never experienced this with the Google dialer app.

What phone are you using? That sounds like a terrible experience, I'll need to make sure I avoid it.

For what it's worth, you can install a new dialer from the Play Store. Or you can grab an open source one from F-Droid. The Simple apps are quite popular because they just do one thing and do it well, i.e. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.dialer/

Or just use an iPhone.

This is the problem with Stockholm Syndrome. You think you're on the right side the entire time.

The things two prisoners whisper through the gates...

No thanks, I'd rather shoot myself in the eye than have to use Safari.

You can use any browser on iPhone.

You can use any browser skin on an iphone. They're all the same web view.

Right, but the underlying engine doesn’t matter much practically speaking. I don’t think I’ve ever run into a situation where the browser on iOS limited me from doing things I would want to do on mobile.

I use FireFox on iOS because it syncs with FireFox on my laptop.

I disagree, plenty of posts here that start with "doesn't work on my iPhone".

Apple forces you to adjust to their terrible browser engine by taking away your users' ability to install another browser. Many websites put in the effort to make their stuff work on Apple devices but that's far from a given.

The browser engine is exactly why I don't want to use Safari.

And instead of option to pick dialer, be stuck with the crappy one provided by Apple(lack of spam detection, lack of business directory), with no option to change. Great idea.

That's a great dialer, but unfortunately one cannot choose a default phone number for a contact with it. So for contacts with multiple phone numbers (and that's most of my important contacts, your use case might be different) one must choose with number to dial each time that person is called.

Pixel 7 Pro, but I wouldn't avoid it because their dialer sucks. It's still a really good phone when compared to the iPhone/Samsung Galaxy/etc., and it's the only Android phone series I'd consider in the future.

When I had a Samsung Galaxy, I installed the full suite of Simple apps onto it because the included apps sucked so bad. Simple gets it mostly right from a UI/UX perspective, and I was happy to support the author by purchasing the apps in the Play store.

I have strong suspicion you are not talking about Google's android dialer but some chinese ad-infested knock-off. When I used to have crappy Xiaomi, I had ads everywhere - settings, basic 'android' apps, most probably dialer too, definitely SMS sending app and so on. Threw it away and never looked back.

There are premium androids who give users completely different experience, be it Samsung, Sony, Google etc etc etc. Literally hundreds of models to pick your match. On my S22 ultra I never saw a single similar ad since I bought it. I wish people stopped bashing android just because they cheaped out and then found out that cheap phones are actually cheap to get revenue back in baked-in ads (there are other concerns coming from Google as creator but that's a different topic, since there is no saints among phone manufacturers and lure of ads revenue is too strong even for Apple)

Samsung phones were actually highly ad laden until they realised it was hurting their brand about a year or two before you bought yours. I'm expecting ads to slowly slip back in.

Huh? I've had numerous Galaxy phones since S8 and there's no issues with ads throughout the OS.

Same. I've had an s8 and and s20, neither have this ads issue described.

Xiaomi makes fine hardware with overly intrusive firmware installed on it which they sell for competitive prices. The solution is the same as with any other Android device: install one of the many AOSP-derived distributions on it and you have fine hardware with clean firmware offering OTA updates and more freedom than any vendor-supplied distribution offers, not to mention waaaay more freedom than the Apple/iOS combo offers.

Yeah but as father of small children, camera that is always in the pocket is hugely important for me. AFAIK Xiaomi camera app/drivers/whatever is the proper name is a signed blob that has no source available, so something more basic is used instead in those free distros. Thus photo quality suffers since its finely tuned for given sensors/lens/cpu combo. At least that's how I grokked it few years ago.

Since then I've realized phone is by far the most important device in my life, so not cheaping out on it anymore and seeing the difference in every photo.

You're probably talking about some chinese dialer on top of android, Google one is clean and essential.

One thing I always struggle with is that phone becomes painfully slow and heats up like crazy on a call. The one thing it should do without effort seems like the heavier one on the hardware. Wonder how they managed to do phone calls 20-30 years ago if it's such a compute intensive task.

Why do these bullshit comments always seem to end up on top?

“Engagement”

What about iOS where you cant copy in a number and then edit it? Every time I want to call a foreign number and need to add a country code I need to make a new contact and then edit that.

This one drives me crazy in all iOS phone number entry type situations. once you've dialed in the the 10 numbers, it makes it into whatever that little bubble is called that makes it no longer editable. you have to delete the whole bubble of 10 digits, and start typing the whole number again instead of being able to edit the probably single digit that needs correcting.

However, I'm old enough to remember the pain of recognizing a mis-dialed number from rotary phones. Old enough to remember only needing to dial 5 digits. Then the pain of having to dial the full prefix going to 7 digits, growing to full horror going to full 10 digit. luckily by 10 digit, touch tone was in place.

My parents technically don't have a four digit local number any more, but it's the same† national number as it was back then. BT moved two digits from the exchange code to the local part when they digitised the exchange.

†: All UK national numbers gained an extra '1' after the leading '0'; I'm asserting that change doesn't count.

Ohh. And if you think you're so clever and type that prefix before Paste-ing, it doesn't just paste, but replaces all digits you have typed. I also love it when sites omit a country code in their numbers like "(xxx) xxx-xxxx". Well, at least it's not a jpeg.

This!! Why the hell cant you move the cursor thingy and edit the number?? We are on iOS 15 or whatever and they cant get this feature right??

Are you sure that's Google and not your device manufacturer or your carrier? The dialer on my Android phone seems OK. I'm not going to claim it's the best UX ever, but it certainly doesn't interrupt me with dialogs about anything. Android phones are infamous for having carrier-required crap pre-loaded.

I switched from LG to a pixel. I don't regret the better hardware or more frequent updates, but so many tiny things were substantially better on the LG.

Biggest peeve: on the LG phones I had, you could use the volume buttons / menu to silence or turn down individual applications. On the pixel, out of the box you only get a global media volume control.

Also have experience with the stock phone dialler putting up prompts while I am in the middle of doing something else, which never happened on LG. The other big annoyance is the timer portion of the clock app is significantly harder to use.

All that said, I will happily take stock android on the pixel any day over any Samsung product.

Yea, I feel like there's a big cargo cult element to the claims of carrier skins being crapware by default. I remember the moment I realized that the moto x (first post-Google moto phone) and the contemporary galaxy s both had solid advantages over the pixel. Eg Samsung beat pixel to the quick settings menu by YEARS (and by extension iOS by even more years), and this is now an industry standard.

Notice how in this conversation, no precise program name or version was brought up. "The stock dialer on an LG", "the dialer on a Pixel"...

On a computer (a real computer), the first words would be something like "On Firefox 106.0.2 64-bit", but phones have such abysmal user control that most of the time we don't even know what programs we're running.

To be honest, I'd have to do some digging around to get exact versions of a fair amount of my software on my latop- much of it isn't immediately surfaced in the UI, and where it was installed from could be from several places.

In android, every app version is found in the exact same place on my phone:

Settings > Apps > (select an app) > very bottom has version number. App details takes you to the full details page in the play store, which shows the full name of the app and the publisher name.

Pixels are great as long as you don't need to call 911.

Pixel 7 Pro.

Right now, this is my only major gripe on an otherwise great phone.

I have literally never experienced this on my Galaxy S10, or any Android before it. Is this new?

To be fair, a good chunk of Android in total is a UX hellscape. This coming from a lifelong Android user. One of Android's greatest strengths (customization) is also it's greatest weakness.

The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less!

If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent.

That's funny - my experience is digital is much clearer than an old analog line.

My observations, in order of decreasing quality:

Analog Land Line local call > WiFi Calling through cellphone > Analog long distance call > 3G/4G/5G Cell > Home VOIP service > Zoom/Meet/etc.

With the first two pretty close to identically high quality.

Zoom is entirely dependent on whatever hardware the participants are using. My team switched to using cardioid mics and the audio quality is stellar. It's just when you get that one guy dialing in on his mobile phone with an old pair of wired earbuds with the cord mic that's not anywhere near his mouth. Usually from India, with horns in the background...

VoLTE is far superior to 3G calling and deserves its own category here imo. Night and day difference.

That can certainly be true, I've lived places that had problems maintaining a moisture-free analog network and it could be irritating.

Yeah definitely. Well we haven't had analogue phone lines for decades but compared to landlines, mobile can be much better - especially now we have HD Voice which landlines (and call centres apparently) can't access. Maybe it's the extra echo cancellation that's the real problem.

Clarity and latency are at odds here. Digital can, with enough bitrate, encode more clarity than your ear can hear. Radio stations use two-channel ISDN for remote studio links so it sounds like the interviewer and interviewee are in the same room, sometimes you'd never know they aren't unless they announce it.

But ISDN is all but gone, and all other digital voice systems are packetized and suffer awful, terrible, excruciating, reflex-fumbling latency. No matter how clear they are, I'm forever tripping on — no you go — okay as I was — go ahead — um okay — aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

> ISDN-BRI never gained popularity as a general use telephone access technology in Canada and the US, and remains a niche product. The service was seen as "a solution in search of a problem", and the extensive array of options and features were difficult for customers to understand and use. ISDN has long been known by derogatory backronyms highlighting these issues, such as It Still Does Nothing, Innovations Subscribers Don't Need, and I Still Don't kNow, or, from the supposed standpoint of telephone companies, I Smell Dollars Now.

Wow, that explains everything why Americans insist that analog is the way. I will always miss ISDN, but the march of technology insist on IP I guess.

The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the signal from the phone before they heard it over the air.

Audio quality on cellular is widely variable. If both ends support VoLTE/HD Voice, the audio quality is actually superior to analog.

I have to agree. People forget how many frequencies made it through the Bell System and the wire lines. Maybe long ago it was 100% analog, but somewhere along the way they started adding in digital compression and that usually meant stripping out all but the most important frequencies. There were several decades when a dial phone to dial phone call produced pretty horrible accoustics.

Sure but somehow I've only experienced that a handful of times so it's not very "actually superior" in my actual life.

I'd like to experience that. I've never had a cellular voice connection that was even remotely as good as the old analog PSTN.

It's wild when I'm talking to family on Signal, which seems to run high quality VoIP even on a non-VoLTE-capable phone. (and the hardware seems to be VoLTE-capable, just Sprint never released the appropriate modem firmware _in my market_, and I've been unsuccessful at hacking apart a rom from india...)

But as nice as the quality may be, the latency still sucks. It's just the nature of the beast.

VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in. This has repeated for every single "improvement" in VoIP technology over its ~40 year history, the tradeoff always goes in the direction of making more money instead of offering better service.

VoLTE doesn't do it on its own.

If you're calling within the same carrier with "HD voice", AMR-WB at 12.65kbps scores a higher MOS than old-school G.711 64kbps PCM (and is more pleasing in some ways that the MOS doesn't capture).

Sure, if they'd just give us another couple dang kilobits/second it'd be way better still, but...

At this point, the bandwidth used for voice is pretty much irrelevant from a cellular capacity planning point of view-- people use >5GB/month on average and 24/7 12kbps calling is less than 5GB/month.

> VoLTE with fancy compression didn't make audio quality better, it just freed up bandwidth for carriers to cram more channels in.

Not just that, it’s also used for additional carrier lock-in!

(In Canada, carriers were barred from selling carrier-locked phones some years ago, but since VoLTE, they don’t support VoLTE functionality on any phones that haven’t been certified for use on their network, which is limited, in practice, to phone models that they sell themselves. Normally this means you fallback to 3G for calling, unless you happen to be roaming with a carrier/country where 3G service has been dropped, in which case you simply don’t get any voice service.)

Low-latency for local calls, yes. High quality sound, also yes.

But for long distance, no thank you. I will not go back to the 90s just for that one reason alone. It was hellish calling across the Atlantic. Like 15 cents a minute with a 1.5 (sometimes 2) second delay between speaking. And having to remember the dialling sequences and complexity around looking up foreign phone numbers, both of which are now just built into the cell phone.

Or having to trudge around in the rain for a phone booth and having to page through a worn out phone book just to make some dinner reservations. Yuck. I'll take the bluetooth shenanigans, thank you.

Or having to trudge around in the rain for a phone booth and having to page through a worn out phone book just to make some dinner reservations. Yuck.

Pretending like this was the only way to make a dinner reservation reminds me of the juice loosener informercial from the Simpsons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viejY6UZ5Bk

I didn't pretend it was the only way, I was saying that there are times when one is out and needs to make reservations or call the wife that went into labour or call work after a car broke down. These were actual, real things people did back then. Thankfully I'm young enough to only have had to do it for a couple of years, but I do not have Merry England syndrome around what phones were like in the mid nineties.

Even caller id is a major win on its own.

In the 90ies I used 'calling cards' to 'dial in' to Frankfurt, and then via touch tone entry of the real number to Florida. Interestingly that wasn't only ridiculously cheap, but much better quality than dialed directly via my native Telco/ISP. Also no latency, sounded almost as good as native ISDN.

"The key word there being analog phone lines."

No, the key words are uncompressed and non-packetized. The best telephone voice quality ever was ISDN from handset to handset. Digital end to end, 64Kb/s without compression, and rigidly clocked at the bit level. No noise. No jitter. Switzerland had ISDN to the home for years. Also, in Europe, there was power over ISDN, so the phone didn't need AC power or batteries. A friend there was annoyed when they forced him to convert to inferior VoIP, which, even over fiber, is worse.

In Ireland, until _weirdly recently_, after ISDN had died out for pretty much all other purposes, every government minister got an ISDN phone installed in their house, to make them easier to interview in the radio.

Cellular phones used to sound good back when they were FM and not packetized, as well.

I'm not sure about the exact year but many phone lines stopped being analog in the early 70's and almost completely by the 90's

I agree about the delay that sometimes (way more often than it should) occurs in digital calls, but the voice quality of analog calls was shit. It was band limited to something like 8kHz (so maximum of 4kHz signal making it to your ear). That seems like a lot, but it really isn't. There's a significant amount of high end that gets lost and makes everything seem muddled. I remember making calls over 22kHz audio codecs in the late 90s and the quality of even that (maximum frequency transmitted being 11kHz) was way better than an analog phone call.

If you want to see an example of cellphone latency, watch your local news. When they send a reporter to cover a remote story these days, they nearly always use a cellphone as a camera (cheap, ubiquitous, good image quality, and they don't need to pay a separate camera operator).

When the anchor in the studio says "And now over to Lester, who is reporting from the scene" - there's a 1-2 second delay before we hear and see Lester respond.

Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails.

It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email.

It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail.

The subject line takes only 15 seconds to write but will significantly reduce receiver anxiety, both synchronously and asynchronously. Sending a text after the call is not the same because it’s not in context.

I remember proposing this to WhatsApp while I was working at FB but the WhatsApp culture seemed uninterested in feature ideas of any kind. Hopefully someone else does it eventually.

"It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail."

Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you, if it was something important and she did not reach you? And what would force her, to use a potential subject line?

Otherwise it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it will be a killer feature, as most would simply ignore it.

I used to have a phone with DND but if the same caller tried twice in a couple of minutes then it would ring.

Is this through Tasker or something? I would love to have this feature.

default iphone feature

default android feature as well [0]

[0]: https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335?hl=en#zipp...

I guess this explains why spam calls to my home phone do an immediate retry.

> Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you,

LOL. She does. "Call me"

Very helpful.

I think the problem there is that a lot of people just won't bother. Some people would just put "pick up" on that subject line, or leave it empty (surely you wouldn't make it mandatory, nobody would accept that), or any number of things.

I personally hate unscheduled calls, and I'd love it if everyone sent a text first to check if you're free for a call, and only call after you've accepted, but... that's just never gonna happen.

I like the idea, but it will never take off. People are fundamentally lazy when it comes to these things. Look at the surging popularity of voice messages in some circles, shifting the burden of communication fully to the receiver. Even if you had the feature, I'd wager most subject lines would stay empty, or just contain the bare minimum like "hi".

But if other people are lazy, why would I entertain interruptions from them? I generally don’t do any work voice or video calls because, simply, they are an interruption. So they need to have an agenda and be scheduled. And indeed, I do not listen to voice messages; type it out or don’t send it at all.

That’s ok. Metadata improves context but isn’t mandatory. Some people want it, others don’t bother.

It’s like sending a calendar invite. Sure, you can send an invite with nothing but your email address and a date+time. But many people would find an empty invite a bit rude. It’s just polite to include some context about the meeting. The phone call should evolve in that direction.

If it's not mandatory, then what's the point? You can already send text messages if the message is important. And since it's optional, both spammers and your lazy family will leave it blank making it useless to filter out spam.

It doesn't have to be a burden. My watch already provides me a quick-select list of responses. So when I make a call, instead of one generic send button, how about two? One of them labeled "this is a emergency" or something like that. Maybe even a little list of a half dozen of the most commonly used subjects, so I just click the one that matches.

No reason to make people work any harder than they do now.

> Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails.

Yeah, I think it's called IM.

> It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context.

That's called DND, my phone is 100% time in DND mode. There are already filters for spam calls based on phone number.

> It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!”

Maybe tell wife to write you IM/SMS or just communicate through IM as priority, if you desire text communication?

> Maybe tell wife to write you IM/SMS or just communicate through IM as priority, if you desire text communication?

Not the parent, but Dog knows I have been trying. Some people just don’t understand how disruptive an unnecessary phone call is.

This feature would be super useful, since nobody I would ever willingly talk to would use it I could dump all calls with subjects to voicemail (and then not check it).

> It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context.

It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function. If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone?

Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?

>Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?

Direct to voicemail, of course, with a message saying 'text me' for automatic transcription. As they say, its a feature not a bug [to not be interrupted]. In a perfect world I'd have a secretary or AI to screen calls on my behalf, but I don't.

Ironically, you almost do. Last week I updated my S22 to Android 13, and one of the new features Samsung claims to have implemented[0] is to have Bixby pick the call for you, transcribe what the caller says, and display it on screen, giving you a choice to pick up the call, or type/select a reply that Bixby will then say to the caller. With spam call detection being an established feature for years already, the ingredients for your AI assistant are already there.

Now that I think of it, I might actually try this the next time a telemarketer calls.

----

[0] - I haven't actually tested it, nor seen it in action - just saw it being mentioned when I reviewed "Tips" app after update.

Pixel phones have call screen feature today, and anecdotally it works great. I haven't picked up to a telemarketer in over a year.

https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/9118387?hl=en

Thankfully you’re not charge of designing my phone

Is there a 5-6 inch pad available? If not, then that's not an alternative, can't shove a 10 inch tablet into my pocket. And while it's called a phone, the primary function for many (dare I say most?) is definitely not doing voice calls, hell my phone app icon isn't even on the homescreen anymore, that's how little I use this device for phone calls and I use it for hours every day otherwise.

> Is there a 5-6 inch pad available?

Android tablets? Several.

I'd be interest to know what those are. Smallest I've been able to find is 8 inches.

Hmm, I was going to get back to you with a list, but it seems most of the 6-inchers have been discontinued. The Amazon Fire 6 would have been the most prominent example.

There are some, but none of them would be suitable for consumer use.

I stand corrected!

Samsung Note series of phones. I've been using them since the Note 3 and could not imagine using any other device without a stylus.

Yes, it's primarily a phone by market segmentation. But it's a small tablet by features.

> If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone?

1) Do they make devices that aren't phones that are the size of a note"pad"? The smallest non-phone tablet devices are now (with the death of iPod touch) the size of (at best) a small note"book", not a sensibly-sized-for-portable-usage note"pad".

2) That doesn't even solve the problem as tons of Internet-connected messaging software now supports calls, so I feel like you are missing the point in some sense: the person you are responding to is seriously talking about WhatsApp!

tbf, it depends. I make/receive around 1 call per month, if that.

To me, it's a good quality camera that I can fit in my pocket.

>It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.

No, it's not. You sound like a dinosaur. A phone's primary functions are 1) text-messaging apps, 2) camera, 3) dating apps, 4) banking apps, and various others. Phone calls are somewhere around #20.

Not according to the mobile OS engineering teams at Apple or Google. Phone calls are intentionally given priority over other functions.

> Not according to the mobile OS engineering teams at Apple

Phone calls haven't forced full screen takeovers for several years on iOS, and have the same UX as 3rd party VoIP and Video call apps...

Priority isn't solely limited to forced full screen takeovers.

dating apps over phone calls is an absolutely ludicrous take that demonstrates a disconnect from reality

Definitely not. It depends on who you and your circle of friends are, of course, but dating apps are definitely way higher usage than phone calls among anyone I know. I use my phone as a phone less than half a dozen times per year. If the phone functionality vanished, I don't think I would mind.

the disconnect is that you're not able to see outside your bubble. Your average iphone or android user is using the phone function far more than dating apps

How do we know who is in a bubble? :) When I walk around downtown, I see hundreds of people on their phones, and maybe one or two of them is actually using it as a phone. Obviously I don't know if they're on dating apps specifically, but they are enormously popular, so it seems plausible.

A quick google search will show you that you could not be further from the truth :)

No, they're not. In the country I'm living in, *no one* uses phone calls except for rare things like delivery people calling because the box doesn't fit in your apartment's delivery boxes. Absolutely no one under the age of 50 uses voice calling to talk to their friends or family; they all use LINE texting.

I haven't taken a phone call in over a month now (from the Amazon delivery guy). I use dating and texting apps every day. For actual talking to friends/family, I use voice and video chat functions in chat apps.

You only do voice calls six times in a year?

Something on that order, yeah. Looking through my phone's call log, I had a call with a friend in mid-August, and another with another friend in mid-July. Prior to that was a call with my mom in April and that's as far back as the log goes.

You sound like you’re disconnected from reality.

Phone = Telephone: The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice", together meaning "distant voice".

Distant voice communication is the entire purpose for a phone.

Just because you want or expect your phone to do more, doesn’t make your desires the primary function of the device.

The save button icon is also a floppy disk.

And geometry is from the Greek γῆ (gê) 'earth, land', and μέτρον (métron) 'a measure', referring to it's original use as a tool for surveying farm plots in flood plains. It's obviously expanded much past that original definition to the point now that the original definition is simply one small application of the tool. In fact an application that the vast majority of practitioners will never administer.

Names change much slower the function generally.

The way I like to look at it is: Imagine a world where the concept of a phone call never existed. Then, suddenly someone invents an app that:

1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device

2. Rings and vibrates your device

3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device

4. All of this is triggered remotely, from anyone in the world, without any kind of user identification or authentication, besides a spoofable number

No app store's rules in either major ecosystem would allow such an abusive app. Yet, only because the legacy concept of a "phone call" exists, not only is the app allowed, but it's preloaded on every device out there!

If things were different, things would be different, certainly. But things are not different, so things are not different.

I assume you are using android or some ancient version of iOS.

Currently on iOS, #1 is not done by any app including the phone, and #2-#4 are in fact allowed by App Store apps.

It's a pocket computer.

The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data.

The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy.

When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smartphone and treating as such and recognizing it as as computer, a laptop for your pocket.

I expect those born in the last century to be most resistant to the deprecation of the 'phone call' as a concept. People also reminisced about having phone lines that were partied together. Imagine what scammers would do with that today.

I doubt people from the last century are the ones holding on to the idea of a phone call.

Whatever telcos are doing these days would have led to jail time in the 1990s.

I would like to see a return to the government passing QOS laws for safety critical services, then enforcing them.

Since everyone is dunking on twitter these days: How is it legal for them to slap an auth wall on top of emergency response agencies' feeds? If I MITM'ed the emergency broadcast system with such bullshit, I'd go to jail. Twitter is used during emergencies by at least 100x more people than emergency broadcast.

Unfortunately it kind of fails at being a good pocket computer (all else aside they got rid of the concept of files and replaced it with nothing). The fact that it fails at being a phone too is just adding insult to injury.

As a phone, all cell phones are terrible. In the wired-phone era companies used to advertise on call quality. Nobody does that any more because the quality of cell phone calls is so abysmal that text with (or without frankly) emojis is an order of magnitude better for communication.

If they made pads the size of my phone that could still use cell network internet and that I could put a custom OS on I'd consider it.

People who never experienced a really good connection when no more than a little of the phone & switching network was digitized, surely have no idea what they're missing. I've never once heard a call since that era that was as good—VOIP, Zoom, cell network, modern POTS network, whatever.

> It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.

So? This is a way to improve phone calls.

Hah, no it's not, I don't even have the phone app on my home screen unless I search for it.

t's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.

Not for about fifteen years or so, no. I don't even have the Phone app on the front page of my iPhone, let alone allow it to sit in the dock. Regardless, whatever the primary function of the device, there is room for improvement over "it's always worked that way".

Phone calls from unknown numbers go straight to voice mail. Same for some people who think it’s fair game to call me and bore my ears off with their life whilst I am working.

Problem solved.

How is it solved for someone who has to have phone calls? Since when saying "it's not a problem for me" solved any problems?

If you are being paid to answer your phone, then answer your phone. I’m not, so I don’t.

Or if you're waiting for a call from _____

Then I add an exception for ______. If they cannot tell you their number (happens with some companies), then they can:

- arrange a call, which is great because then I am guaranteed to have the time to deal with the topic, I do that sometimes with my bank;

- leave a voice mail, which is not great but then I am not responsible for their phone number policy (nobody leaves voice mail anymore);

- send an email (or a SMS, a WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Skype, whatever, I am not picky), possibly to arrange a phone call, also great because I can answer written messages on my own terms and not when they feel like calling me;

- (most of the time these days) have a chat over whatever IM platform they integrated into their website.

My time is not theirs to use however they want. If they want me to be on call, that’s fine, but with compensation.

Exactly!

This is a solution very dependent on individual preferences, though, it is not any kind of blanket solution.

I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.

Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.

> I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.

Well, sometimes shit happen. I can think of a handful of scenarios where I cannot be contacted and it’s right that sometimes it could be important. But I am not living on alert 24/7 because sometimes someone might die. My filtering system lets the second call through, which I think works fine as most spammers do not call twice within one minute. That said, in the middle of the night I still probably would not hear, but not because of that.

(I am sure that the situation was complex and difficult to manage enough for you to have to borrow a phone, and I do not envy you for having gone through it and am sorry you had to. In that situation I would be very upset regardless of the delay).

> Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.

That’s entirely right and I agree completely. But then we are where we are and the world often disagrees with me. Otherwise I could also get rid of my ads and trackers blockers.

“Receiver anxiety” should crawl off into the forest. It’s a youth-millennial thing that inhibits waaaay too much authentic social action. People are just too scared to be human. Just call me! I might pick up I might not.

For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.

also it's very easy to curate a public image of beeing busy if you complain about interruptions because everybody can relate to the feeling.

My mother had no issues calling someone but her parents were upset when she started listening to that damn rock and roll. The youth thing inhibits way too much authentic music. People are just scared to listen to the oldies. /s

Différent generations have different norms and it’s not right or wrong.

While I didn’t understand the analogy, I will happily admit that, yes, I’m making the case that some norms are better and some are worse.

a few generations ago, there was a moral panic that the kids weren’t all right because rock and roll music was corrupting. It was loud, vulgar, etc and therefore wrong.

My point was to emphasize how across generations, everyone seems to think that the youth have bad norms and it’s somehow wrong, and then they grow up and the world keeps spinning, and the cycle repeats.

It’s awfully vain to think that the norms of your generation in your nation at your point in time are magically the ”better” ones.

The parent comment reference a novel idea that phone calls could have a subject line. It’s novel, it’s clever, it would solve many problems beyond just “people are scared to be human”. The world moves on, and we can improve it or we can launch ad hominem attacks on the next generation.

>Différent generations have different norms

Yes.

> and it’s not right or wrong.

No.

This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and is likely the underlying cause for a significant amount of the current social ills that are either new or increasing over time.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess 17 year olds who can’t call people aren’t the reason for societies problems. Certainly less to blame than the 45yo’s who bemoan them.

Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.

Those 17 year olds grow up into adults with the same unaddressed anxieties.

When I was 17 I spent like an hour emailing a teacher telling her I’d be late on an assignment by a day. Because I was very anxious about writing an email to a “superior” and didn’t know how it’d go, or what the “right” email looked like.

Now I email hundreds of times a day, and have constantly shifted deadlines to no professional detriment. I still get nervous emailing a new important person, but you do it anyways.

Do people really forget what it’s like being young? Sometimes you just grow up and move on.

I don't have a problem with phone calls but if someone unexpected engages with me on the street or in a hallway I kind of freeze for long enough that we have walked past each other and then realize that was a bit rude but its too late now.

> if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you.

I mean... aren't you ignoring them? It's an email. Where'd the first one go that the second one is going to be any different?

I miss a very high percentage of legitimate email messages from people because I don't receive many of them (half a dozen per year?) and get like 20-30 spam and mistyped-address emails per day (that's after the spam filters), so I don't pay much attention to it unless I'm expecting something.

Humans I know contact me through whatsapp. Or if they're old (and hell, I'm almost 40, so I mean old) through text or phone. Strangers' only real hope is text. I'll probably miss anything else. And even that is getting so goddamn spammy now that it's not far from being like email: only useful if I'm already expecting a message. I receive stupid political ads for states I've never lived in a couple times a day.

I read your email, got interrupted, and did not reply. Then I forgot about it.

If you email me again, it might get read at a more convenient time, and I'll answer.

Same reason I might not answer your call: I'm busy with something else or not near my phone at the moment. This used to be normal by the way -- if I called your home phone and nobody answered, I'd have no choice but to call again later.

It isn’t visually present in the list of 50-100 emails in my inbox. Mail again and remind. It’s not rude. It’s rude to assume the other person is ignoring.

> It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context

Is this 2018? C'mon - phone calls don't actually do full screen takeovers on your device anymore, do they?

I've changed the settings on my iPhone so that calls are shown like notifications like everything else. So no more taking over the whole screen.

Not sure what kind of phone you have, but my iPhone doesn’t take over the whole screen (unless locked). I have it set to only show a notification.

> Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails.

Pixel phones have call screening feature. It can be enabled for all calls or unknown callers. It asks the caller to state the reason they are calling and notifies you with the text of the reason given and you can choose whether to accept or reject.

If you want something more then you could just ask callers to text you instead.

I like where you're going with this, and particularly with the increase of video calls, it's still strange to just pick up and see a person.

The flow I get people into is to communicate via text (slack, whatsapp, etc depending on the nature of the environment) with a "hey, is now a good time to call", or "I wanted to discuss XYZ", and we can then hash out the best method for communication.

The authors complaint is valid, but I think it is more of a UX issue, similar to what you're suggesting here.

Great handle BTW

Upon reading just the title, I thought this is going to be about prolonged, slowly spoken automatic pre-IVR messages, which appeared during COVID with "due to the current situation, we kindly ask you to be patient because we're understaffed and have more calls".

Now it's just unspoken "you learned how to wait during COVID so fuck you and wait", often mentioning opening hours, even when you call during those hours, website address and other nonsense before a human is even notified about a phone call at the other end.

Fuck you and wait.

> Instead, this: Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.

Noone I know has these issues. The author seems to be impaired in smartphone handling or the US cell infrastructure started to suck. No such issues in Europe to my knowledge. These sound like the issues with Zoom and Meet, not phones. "Can you hear me? Can you see me? Am I presenting?".

i had basically this same problem just yesterday. for years i would take calls with wired earbuds that had an integrated mic. i upgraded my iphone and now i have to use one of those lightning to 3.5mm adapters for that. the official adapters last for like 2-3 months until they begin flaking. not usually a deal-breaker, because it just means ~0.5s of lost audio every couple minutes but…

a recent iOS update made it so that if the earpiece disappears during a call then the OS drops the call. so i had to redial 3 times during my call. eventually we switched to Facetime, which still disconnects me upon audio drops but leaves the other side connected so that i just have to press “join” instead of redialing.

not an infra issue, but it adds up to the same crappy call experience.

I think it's more likely that they've bought more accessories than you and get bit by more incompatibilities. I think the issue is that there's nobody designing the entire end-to-end experience of what happens when you use every accessory with every feature turned on. I'm sure there's QA on all of it, but tickets don't magically create an architecture.

There needs to be a Big(O) table for UX. Number of user interactions and decisions to get to each functionality in each screen size. Then comes prioritization. You can only fit so many buttons and boxes close to the hottest zones of user interaction, especially on Mobile, and even less of them in advertising-powered products.

When someone prioritizes the wrong use case on premium real estate and pushes back buttons that matter to you more, that only gets worse over time - your needs are not their priority.

That is why on mobile at least the giants are not always giant enough to squish competition entirely - one can always provide a better UX than Facebook or Google with a small but focused app that works for your problem better. The real damage to competition comes from device apis that put UX overhead to use cases you serve bette than them, but then give their apps with the same use case UX priority in their next release.

Just like data and code, complexity increases for UX with each added user story and use case, but the screen space remains the same.

I work in UX and I can tell you the people managing these design teams have never even heard the term 'Big-O' much less understand it; in my sphere I find they are mostly interested in boosting engagement metrics on whatever new feature will get them sooner promoted before they exit to the next company and do the same thing.

I love this idea, but my outlook is grim.

Create maligned reward system, get maligned work. It's not like our field doesn't have resume driven development, and honestly why would you do anything else? Doing good work for your employer only pays if it literally pays. If your employer and the market rewards launching features, products, and making metrics go up then why toil away needlessly making money for someone else?

I haven't done user interface design, in anger, for 20+ years. Before the kids renamed it "UX" (old wine, new bottles).

Anywho. We used to consider Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, and so forth. Celebrity UI designers (ahem) like Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen would belabor these seemingly obvious design considerations ad nauseum.

Your Big-O suggestion could be a nice heuristic for scoring and ranking design alternatives. Cool.

Not that design intent ever mattered. The age old tale remains the same. Grind, iterate, validate. (Does anyone do usability testing any more?) Voilá!

Then some PHB doing drive-by mgmt decrees "Those buttons should be cornflower blue. I like the old font better. Just change it all back."

I eventually rage quit UI work. Preferring to have my good taste, experience, skill, and efforts denigrated in other domains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law

It now occurs to me the audience for all that UI design advice was our bosses, not us practitioners. For appeals to authority. For populating our bookshelves, to exude the facsimile of learnedness.

> Does anyone do usability testing any more?

My impression is that it's all quantitative post-fact A/B testing nowadays.

What is interesting, because it was widely known that quantitative usability research was mostly waste and you were much better doing 10 times the amount of it with only qualitative results.

What was not widely discussed¹ is that post-fact testing is also almost useless. It can only tell you what solution is better, but the real gain comes from discovering what problems exist.

1 - My guess it's because it is too obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOMS

My golden rules to make videoconferencing more reliable :

  - Use ethernet. Wi-Fi isn't reliable, your neighbor's microwave can ruin everything.
  - Use wired headphones. 0 latency. 0 connection time. And disables the mic noise-cancelling algos.
  - Use classic phone calls when required. It's more robust and latency is even better.

> Wi-Fi isn't reliable, your neighbor's microwave can ruin everything.

Agree that wifi isn't reliable, but not for that reason: microwave ovens haven't been an issue for wifi since most people switched to the 5GHz band, many years ago.

It's your neighbors, ALL OF THEM, trying to watch 4K on 2 TVs per household all at once.

And why shouldn't they? That's like the whole reason to even have a high-bandwidth internet connection.

They should - but hard-line Ethernet connected.

You would be surprised that most wifis out there still don't run on 5ghz. I mean what do you expect from non-technical people, wifi is just this white box that should work, if not turn off/on and then call support. Ie we (Switzerland) have both bands available from the router and till now even I didn't know that higher band is better for interference, and I am most technical in the family/friends circle.

5Ghz also has drawbacks. Routers support both, usually with an option to either combine them and handle the selection automagically or separate them. Parent is just wrong about routers having switched over completely - and thus the microwave can indeed still be a problem.

Yes there's plenty of reasons, channel saturation, low quality routers, various interferences. My Ethernet cable is easier to debug.

2.4Ghz is still very much in use in many places. I have recent stories from friends whose apartment microwave will cause internet issues.

2.4Ghz is still very much in use in many places. I will use it even though I have dual band a lot due to range/penetration limitations.

I have recent stories from friends whose apartment microwave will cause internet issues.

Could you let us know what headphones offer a control to disable noise-cancelling algos?

When you're on speaker, most platforms have a noise cancelling algorithm to prevent Larsen loops between mic and speaker. Using headphones usually disables it.

Look for USB conference headset

Wired headphones or nothing. I know they're connected because I can see them physically connected. They're charged because photons can move through wires. It's the right protocol because they fit in the device.

Apple gets props for making it break less often than everyone else but it's a fundamentally broken UI and broken protocol.

Any tips on using ethernet when you're renting a house and unable to wire any infrastructure? My only hookup for internet is in a pretty poor spot for wireless connectivity to my office, but I don't have a good way to wire a cable instead since there's an entire living room, a staircase, a hallway, and multiple doors in the way.

Run cables along baseboards, under rugs, under doors, along the stair runners, etc. If the cable needs to cross an egress point, put a rug over it. If you can convince your landlord, drill a single hole to bridge the upstairs and downstairs. If you're in an older house that has straight cold air returns (not a heating duct), drop a cable through there, and pin it to the crown molding.

Does the house have coax wiring for cable tv? If so, get a pair of MoCA Ethernet adapters. I have 2.5Gbps ones running across a large house and they are rocksolid reliable.

First one doesn't really hold in my opinion, 5GHz WiFi has been available for over a decade and won't be interrupted by a microwave. Probably easier to upgrade to a relatively recent WiFi setup than connecting a cable in most cases.

I don’t even pick up my phone anymore unless its from someone I know. Most calls are now just spam.

Audio quality on most calls is also atrocious. I have to keep the phone glued to my ear and walk out to a quiet room to even hear anything.

Email and phone, I hate to say it, are dying. And spam is the culprit in both cases.

This is about local connection problems, audio device with your phone:

>Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.

I can confirm this. However, there is another class of problems, too, which aren't mentioned. Network problems. It is the year 2022 and still in many areas reception is really lousy. I need to hang up and call people again constantly.

It is not really better with FaceTime Audio or any other VOIP tech. It completely sucks! I want to connect instantly and then have a stable connection for at least 30min with crystal clear audio. Am I asking too much for 2022??

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if this is happening to you it’s your fault. You must either live in a coal mine or use terrible tech for your calls. I have voip calls all the time and they’re all what you’re asking for. It just takes a tiny amount of forethought when deciding on what tech to use.

Can you force my boss to pay for zoom phone so we can use voip via zoom? Ah no it must be my fault then.

You mean it’s all fine when you sit in your office using fiber and expensive VoIP gear? But how about when you are on the move? The ‘coal mine’ starts 2 meters outside the center of London and that’s not only for data.

> But how about when you are on the move?

Yep, then too. The stats are extremely clear about this, don’t use cheap carriers and don’t use cheap Bluetooth. Southern England has excellent cell coverage.

I use Vodafone and an up to date iPhone. Voice Calls are so crappy here in Germany its not even funny. I always prefer texting over calling.

I work in Downtown DC, you can see the Washington monument from my office window--and I still get awful Verizon reception on an iPhone 12 pro.

Not according to the data you don’t. There are a couple places in DC that have actually bad signal but not in that area.

I spend a lot of time outdoors hiking and biking. Since 2019, I have noticed a serious stagnation -- and possibly degradation -- of phone reception. Used to be, I could send a text and call someone on even 1 bar of EDGE. Now I basically need >2 bars of LTE to do anything -- less than that and my phone isn't usable.

Maybe I need to pick up a 5G device. I am still using an LTE phone from 2016, so there could be some bands I'm missing out on. But my partner's much more recent phone has even more issues.

On my first iPhone, I could get train information on my phone with a 1 bar EDGE connection in a few seconds. Totally impossible in 2022, you indeed need a relatively decent LTE connection. I suspect this has to do with increased congestion on the cell towers.

I was out of the country last month.

Absolutely no spam on my "in country" sim there. Just exactly what I asked for, useful calls and texts.

The moment I got back, I was inundated with spam and texts.

I don't understand how we've let it get this bad in the USA.

Looks like other countries have it too. What country were you visiting?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045618/spam-calls-per-m...

Paywall

In the UK we have it, but not as bad as in the US. In Germany we don't seem to have it at all

Can confirm. From Germany, have the same number for 15+ years, basically any provider has this number and probably leaked it at some time. Still no spam at all. I think there are heavy penalties for that in Germany.

In the Czech Republic I get like one spam call per year, and it’s usually semi-relevant (carrier, bank, insurance), virtually zero scams or blind marketing calls.

Same phone number for 17 years, dozens and dozens of companies have seen it.

I bought a SIM in Brazil a few years ago and was bombarded with text spam within minutes of putting the card into my phone, most of it from the carrier.

Perhaps your "in country" number was not circulated well enough in the spam networks in a duration of one month?

If you get a new number in the US you'll likely have a similar experience

I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out. My issue with phone calls is 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls

I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off letting scammers operating boiler rooms in India steal money from your grandparents, so they're happy to utterly destroy any utility that a phone has.

It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know. The few times (like now, unfortunately) I expect a call from an unknown number related to follow-up for in-person business, when I answer 95% or more of incoming calls are scams/spam. This is with "Spam Block" enabled, that already blocks known scam/robocall numbers AND NoMoRobo, what slips through is still the majority spam/scams.

I can't even imagine walking around with a cellular phone in 2022 without any of these tools, it's probably a hellscape just like using the web in 2022 without uBlock Origin, NoScript, and PiHole.

We can do better, and the adtech industry + the telcos making money off straight up scammers has destroyed the very fabric of technology as used for social connection.

> I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere.

Not trying to defend US or its telecoms here, but I think it has more to do with scammers trying to maximize for profit.

Just like with malware heavily targeting Windows instead of macOS/Linux, or some apps prioritizing iOS instead of Android (by either launching as iOS-only and then introducing an Android version later, or just not holding up the quality and polish of the iOS version on Android). It isn't because Windows is inherently more insecure, and not because Android is a worse platform. It is simply because it makes sense moneywise.

Why would a scammer focus on targeting low-disposable-income countries, if they, on average, can extract as much money from one US person as they would have to from 10-15 people in Phillipines. For scammers, it seems to be simply more profitable and efficient to target US residents.

This is nothing to do with low or high income countries. Europe exists. I've lived (and had local phones) in Ireland, Germany and the UK. I've never had a spam call. I've had less than 10 spam texts ever. The US (from an outsider perspective) just doesn't seem to enforce consumer protections in general.

> Why would a scammer focus on targeting low-disposable-income countries, if they, on average, can extract as much money from one US person as they would have to from 10-15 people in Phillipines.

I don't think anyone disputes this, but apart from Canada (which has a largely similar telco structure) no other developed country has this plague of undesirable robocalls. You could probably net a similar payout in the UK or Germany but as far as I'm aware there isn't a robocall problem in Europe (and the only problem that is remotely telephone-related is those scare scams where a malicious ad displays a number to be called, not the other way around).

Are you implying US is the only non-low-disposable-income country? lol. This isn't a problem in say, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, etc., as it is in the US.

Also, the most spammed country appears to be Brazil, and it is far from the top of the disposable income lists. Many among the most spammed countries don't register on the top disposable income lists.

There's something else at play here. Likely legislation/regulation.

Spam info: https://www.truecaller.com/blog/insights/truecaller-insights...

Disposable income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

> Are you implying US is the only non-low-disposable-income country?

Not at all. The rest are just not that viable for a multitude of reasons. How many people do Switzerland and Australia have, compared to the US? Much less. And Japan isn't english-speaking, so I dont expect foreign scammers putting effort into learning japanese just for that. They already struggle enough with english.

To be fair, all of that is just me trying to reason through it myself, so there definitely could be other reasons at play here as well.

Your spam info link is to Truecaller, which measures how much their users in each country get spam calls. That's definitely not a random sample of each country's users, so it's hard to say whether their conclusions are correct.

I hadn't considered the money angle before, but it makes a lot of sense. The poorest US state (Mississippi) has higher per capita disposable income than the 6th highest-ranked country (Norway). Every state other than Mississippi has a higher per capita disposable income than Australia. There are a ton of Americans, they're rich, and almost all of them speak the most popular language on the planet. The US has a high fraction of immigrants (12% of the population), so many Americans aren't immediately suspicious of accents. Compared to other countries, the US is a big juicy target.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/303534/us-per-capita-dis...

> I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out

I bought airpods day 1 and I've had every single issue described in the article. Carplay is unreliable. Airpods are unreliable. As apple hardware steadily improves, apple software steadily degrades.

I got a Pixel phone and spam calls have almost disappeared (1 a month). They seem to be doing something around extra screening that's pretty good and useful.

If you're using a non-Pixel Android phone, you may be able to get the same benefits by switching from your manufacturer's Phone app to Google's. Doing this on a Samsung S22 Ultra took me from tons of spam calls to none.

Where does one find this magical app? I see lots of "phone" apps in Play Store, but I can't identify one specifically from Google.

> I have never had any of the issues described in this article

Really? Because a telephone call is, by definition, between at least two people. And even if you have your shit sorted out, I find it surprising that every one of your contacts does too. Because although I, too, generally have the process down pat (it's true: it's crazy there needs to be a process around this now), a lot of the people I talk to sure don't.

Can echo GP. Simply have not had this been a problem for me. I call. Other party picks up. We start talking.

> American telcos make money off letting scammers operating boiler rooms in India steal money from your grandparents, so they're happy to utterly destroy any utility that a phone has.

Not sure how telcos profit off scammers. Especially since I would imagine many times their payments are fraudulent. If anything these scammers waste the telco’s time too.

This problem clearly isn’t getting fixed but I feel like saying “telcos make bank off scammers” is just too easy of a reason. There has to be some underlying reason this is a hard problem to solve.

The telco of the user who places the call pays the telco of the user who answers the call. Every scam call that’s actually answered is money in the pocket of the telco that serves the scam victim.

> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know

I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. I tell people this whenever I give out my phone number.

Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you, if they want to reach out they can text or email, and I can't imagine many urgent situations where they can't text, can't forward the message through anyone in my contacts, and can't directly get the authorities to contact me.

The only exception is automated phone calls (e.g. call from a random number for an interview or to confirm 2FA where I can't do SMS), in which case I have to temporarily disable silencing calls. But systems where you get called once from a random number and can't call back are really awful for other reasons...

> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list.

My ringer is always silenced, I get notified to calls because I have notifications for calling enabled on my watch. I should consider disabling notifications altogether for calls not in my contact list.

> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. [...] Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you

I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were running late due to extenuating circumstances and were now ten minutes away.

I think this was probably better than involving the authorities?

Presumably, had silenced call be the social default, the parents would have added your phone number into their contact list on the first day of school, sort of like how you have to add someone on a chat app to talk to them.

Or they would have seen that there was an actual message left and called back.

That's how I tell the scammers from actual calls 95% of the time - the scammers never leave a voicemail.

I wish that were the case for me. Most calls and most resulting voicemails I receive are from scammers.

It's frustrating because all we'd need is some way to trace calls back to source providers and then let us apply client-side filtering akin to UBlock Origin. Easy.

Parents do not, as a matter of course, have my cell phone number. It's fine for a few families to have it (because e.g. I had to call them), but if every parent in the program was able to message me at any time of day, I think I'd have a problem.

Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have called Anna, and Anna could have called the parents, and then Anna could have called me back to relay what the parents said. It just would have taken longer.

Of course, Anna is occasionally sick / on vacation / otherwise unavailable, in which case there's a second person—let's call her "Vivian"—who I can reach out to in an emergency. We're an after-school program, so we're not set up to have a centralized office phone, but I guess parents could add Vivian to their contacts as well.

But I'm happy I was able to just call the parents.

If someone is looking after my child, I have their number. I block calls from unknown numbers adn and some prefixes, and silence calls from numbers not in my contacts. This is pretty normal I think (because of spam).

I've only once had the problem that someone from the school used their personal mobile to call me and didn't get through, but I was already calling to let them know I'd be late.

There's no reason for parents to be able to contact you socially unless you invite it, but surely you should contact them from a school/shared number?

I'm suggesting this not for the sake of others, but for your sake. Given that people will block unknown numbers, I would think using a known number makes your life easier.

It seems odd to me than an after-school program has no set way for parents to contact the program without going through a relay-style process. I agree that the solution shouldn't be "give out your personal phone number," but it also shouldn't be "rely on a person that's not at the program to relay calls to you."

Put another way, how would a parent contact the program in an emergency? They'd likely (as you illustrated) go through an intermediary that may or may not be there. That seems less than ideal, and certainly wouldn't be something that I'd be happy about if my child were in the program.

Y'know, that's a great point. I actually don't know how things look from the parent's side--I can tell you for sure they don't have my number, but "Anna"'s number must be a business phone, as I know parents always have a number they can call.

Android has the option to ring if the same number calls within 15 minutes. I find it handy at least (though my robocall level is really low compared to the tales told here).

The authorities have no reason to be involved. It's 20 minutes, and children can take care of themselves.

At least 99.9% of my voicemails are a couple second long robocalls, but in the rare event of it being a genuine phone call, I get the google transcription of someone saying 'please call me back' on my watch and then I do so. Just because I'm willing to glance at notifications on my watch of incoming voicemails for an instant, doesn't mean I'm willing to talk to hundreds of robocallers per month. Its just too expensive.

Voice phone calls are dead, kid discussion would usually be handled via text or email. I don't really get phone calls about my kids. I believe the more corporate-type environments enjoy the written documentation provided by text/email as opposed to unrecorded undocumented phone call.

The era of always-on low-fi audio connections was very short. Just 30 years ago, parents certainly had no electronic tether and had a home phone number, maybe with an answering machine in later years. And now that technology is completely dead and unusable.

My kid is in CA, I am selling a house in AZ, and my wife is buying a house in GA. Most of my friends are out of state. Voice has immense emotional bandwidth advantages over any form of text. It definitely helps everyone in the stress pool maintain levity. I do prefer all business to be conducted through text formats (email preferred) though.

In the case in the GP, maybe a message would have worked too but I don't see the problem with calling.

That said, I get a lot of spam calls on my Fi phone but I simply don't answer if I don't recognize the number. Fi asks me if the number was spam and it's simple to give a brief scan of the transcript if there is one and tell it yes or no.

> Voice phone calls are dead

I am amused by this blanket assertion. It really depends on the age/type of people involved and the kinds of interactions they are involved in. I am 50 years old and work in both software consulting and run a tugboat company. I had to take over the tugboat company two years ago due to a death in the family. For 30 years prior to that, I was working almost exclusively in software. During the last couple of years before taking over the tugboat business, I had my phone set to do-not-disturb almost all of the time. In the tugboat business, that does not work at all.

For dealing with software people in purely technical matters, text/Slack/Teams is fine. I respect the needs of others who don't like real-time conversations. For doing business deals in software, I often end up having phone calls with decision makers.

For the tugboat industry, it is too fast paced and too much money is on the line in quick deals to screen phone calls.

Don't assume that everyone works the same way.

I'm guessing the reason you waited 20 minutes is because you know a call isn't a casual form of communication these days. I think people would say the norm should be that after 10 minutes you text the parents. In most case you will get a response sooner and if the didn't pick up you wouldn't be left wondering if something went wrong or they just dont pick up unknown numbers.

I get tons of spam calls and texts, but I really never see any of them anymore. I'm on Android and Googles distributed spam detection is really working great. I'll get a notice sometimes that I got a txt moved to spam but most of the time I never see these, and it seems to also block all robocalls too and they only go straight to voicemail.

I probably have 15 voicemails right now I never knew came through because they're junk and auto-blocked.

> There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you

I get a lot of calls from people for whom my first introduction/interaction is a phone call. I make a lot of money and otherwise get a lot of value from some of these interactions. Some are completely bogus telemarketer calls, of course, but I find that being reachable is still valuable. I have learned how to filter out the most obvious telemarketers. I hope that my competitors ignore unsolicited calls.

(This depends on industry and role within an organization. Certainly people who never have to interact with strangers can screen calls. But don't assume this is true for everyone.)

That worked until my son was hit by a car, and my wife in her shock had no idea where her phone was. I’m still to this day guilty that I didn’t pick up the phone the first time it rang.

The truth is that this problem will kill the telephone system and honestly if this is how the telcos treat it, it deserves to die.

What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done?

This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?

>> What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done?

> This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?

Some people have tenuous connections to humanity. In this case, a failure to understand anything surrounding a loved one's accident, other than the provision of physical care. I think that's somewhat more common with tech people, due to how some idealize aloof "rationality" to an extreme.

When I was in the ICU, the hospital went down my emergency contacts and failed to get a pickup until they dialed my dad. The people who were my emergency contacts were good at handling the process and simplifying things for my parents once they found out (shortly after my parents) but they felt some degree of guilt for having failed to have acted.

There are decisions to be made in these situations - notify work, transfer health information, ensure payment stuff is in order, notify people. It's much nicer to have someone handle all of these things.

And, in the end, I think people would have liked to have seen me before I died, should that have been my fate. And that takes flying out of wherever into wherever.

I get the same issues I did in the US here in Iceland, fwiw. I get the added bonus of no longer being able to use many voice activated features because names aren't phonetically pronounced or simply have characters that aren't recognized by CarPlay.

"Call Þórunn mobile." "I don't have a Thorin." "Call Porun mobile" "I don't have a porun".

You can give contacts nicknames and Siri will recognise that instead of their main name.

So if you set Þórunn's nickname to be "thorin" Siri will be able to recognise it. Basically just go through your contacts and give them all nicknames that are English phonetic spellings of their real name.

Not that you should have to do this, but you can tell Siri (using your own voice) how to pronounce your contacts’ names. She’ll transcribe it into IPA or something.

Me: "Call Josh" Car: "Calling James. If this is correct say, 'Yes,' otherwise, say, 'Correction'" Me: "Correction" Car: "Calling Gretchen"

I had to call my mom "Mamma" in every possible field for Siri to call her when I say "Hey Siri call mamma" (I'm Italian but my phone is in English).

Before that she was only "mamma" as first name but I had other "mamma zoe", "mamma ale", "mamma gio" and Siri always wanted to call "mamma zoe" when I said "Hey Siri call mamma".

After filling some fields of my mamma she started asking "Who would you like to call?" and started saying all mammas in my phone book, but when I said "mamma mamma" she started calling a random one or not getting it.

Now that I have my Mamma (first name) Mamma (middle name) Mamma (last name) of company Mamma nicknamed Mamma with email mamma@mamma it works... go figure!

I think I have a solution for you, and it's going to be a mother.

Not to jinx it but I haven't gotten any robocalls recently. I'm in Canada and I wonder if the regulations the CRTC introduced around STIR/SHAKEN might have made a difference already?!

I'm also in Canada and get about 5 scam calls per day.

That sucks. Maybe I'm just lucky then. Possibly it depends on the carrier?

My Pixel phone has largely solved this for me. The built-in Call Screening is stellar and I don’t get bothered by robocalls much anymore because of how well the phone handles these.

Same here! "Call Screening" killed all the robocalls, or potential robocalls.

Likewise. Half the spammers hang up the moment I activate call screening, the other half (probably automated) keep talking and then I hit the spam button. All the (marginal) benefit of saying "take me off your spam list", far less trouble.

Top tip (eu based). Don't hang up. Let the robo talk.

Often, a human comes on afterwards. Don't talk to them. If I'm at home (alone) i try and load some porn on the pc and have that play to them. Otherwise, go to the bathroom.

They're paid to talk to you....if you're not talking, some supervisor will notice and eventually you get blacklisted.

Waste their time, not yours.

> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know

In my case 90% of time people I know call over WhatsApp or other Voip calls.

Whereas 100% of phone calls from 'critical strangers' are over phone. 'Critical strangers' are delivery persons or cab drivers or courier or office colleagues... those who are calling to find out my whereabouts (critical in that context).

I get far more robocalls than real calls.

I really appreciate the call screening feature of Google's Pixel phones!

Yeah, I thought this article was going to be about robocalls. I don't think I'm alone in realizing that for now most robocalls auto-disconnect if they don't hear anything on the line for somewhere between 15 seconds to a minute depending on the software's patience I suppose. This has taught me to never answer the phone for an unknown number and immediately say something, just to put it on speakerphone and let it pick up ambient fan noise or whatever for a minute-ish. If it is a robocall and it auto-hangs up, I win.

If it is an actual person calling it is an awkward etiquette dance for a minute or so while people wait for that polite "Hello?" that the receiver is supposed to kick off the conversation with. I don't know if the etiquette needs to shift in a time of robo-callers or what. I appreciate that there's an increasing air of excuse now of "fiddling with my phone equipment because calls are so rare" that this article addresses (though the article believes this to be a bad thing).

You may be over-doing it. Most robo-calls wait for a second "hello?". So you can say it once, then wait a bit for a human to answer normally. Then if they don't, you just hang up, as the computer is waiting for that 2nd "hello?".

I even just answer with a grunt or in a foreign language (e.g. "hola"). People know I may be juggling a mobile handset, automated systems hang up.

That is something I often rely on ambient noise to do. My work keyboard is quite loud. My home a/c makes a ton of white noise and the occasional thump when it clicks off. It also currently makes a lot of loud water sounds when it is off. I use throat clearing and coughs sometimes, too.

It's a silly game to play with these robocalls what they are/are not listening for and it seems to change from time to time (and obviously from bot to bot). "Dead silence" is sometimes easiest and the easiest way to describe it (though I believe I did mention I generally put things on speaker and rely on ambient noise), but yes, not "required" and it is a dumb space to explore sometimes.

> I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out.

I have had many of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods/AirPods Pro/AirPods Max w/ an iPhone, iPad, and a MacBook since AirPods came out.

I now use a Bose headset. It works. My AirPod devices do not.

> 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls

I have always thought that a simple --and likely very effective-- way to combat robocalls is to charge a nominal fee for all calls not in your address book. That fee could be $1 or more. It really doesn't matter how much other than having to be enough to be costly for those making unwelcome calls.

The charge is levied both ways. If someone you don't know calls you, they pay $1. If you call them back, you pay them $1. The phone company handles this, of course. An alternative is that the charge is registered to their account and credited if you call them back. Being that billing is monthly, the net effect is that no money exchanges hands unless calls are not returned. If you did not respond, the next time the same number calls you the charge is increased by a nominal amount, say, 25%.

Oh, yes, of course, the money goes to you, minus a, say 30% fee to the phone company. This accounting happens at the end of the month, not call-by-call.

If someone wants to make a million unsolicited calls, it's going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of that money will go to the people they are spamming because they will not return the calls. Anyone in your address book is exempt from these transactions.

Without diving deeper, this seems like a simple, clean and perhaps even elegant way to deal with the issue. Let the free market do it. If spammers want to give you hundreds of dollars per month just to make your phone ring, so be it.

Yes, of course, there could be an incentive there for the phone company because, in the aggregate, that 30% might add-up to a nice pile of money. I'm sure there's a creative way to manage that. Perhaps something like a metric based on that income that penalizes them for not doing a better job of filtering the calls. This is where detailed analysis of the proposal is necessary.

I don't understand why a scammer wouldn't just add the number to their address book before calling.

Also as an individual this would be kinda scary. Not to mention the fact I have to share my private address book, but also if my friend forgets to add me I can randomly have to pay?

> Without diving deeper, this seems like a simple, clean and perhaps even elegant way to deal with the issue.

I like your idea in theory. In practice, many of the calls are originating from countries which would not comply with any regulatory framework requiring this, and are in many cases intentionally complicit in scamming. Additionally, it would require telcos to know every number in your address book, something I think is frankly none of their business.

The US situation is fascinating. I got 5 calls this years and 3 were my bank (callcenter, real human) I didn't want to talk to. No spam-block or similar software on my phone. I checked and I have 16 phone numbers blocked total on the phone, that must have been collected over 8-10 years. Germany.

I suppose sometimes there's also a good side to belonging to an older generation (like me): my experience with making phone calls looks like this: walk out into the hallway where the charging station is plugged in, pick up the phone handset, punch in the number, push the green button, wait, and talk. The end.

Did I mention that I don't own a smart phone?

What is this "green button" of which you speak? And how do you "punch in" numbers, don't you mean spin the dial?

Haha, yeah, I actually have fond memories of dial wheels. There was something quite meditative about the clicking sound when it ran back into zero position. But then again, most numbers I called back then consisted of just four digits.

While most communications technology has improved over the last quarter century in terms of throughput, latency, cost, etc., voice calls have become horrid.

Every aspect of telephone calls has become a total nightmare. Constant spam calls, poor audio quality, phones doing weird and random things in terms of answering calls and routing the audio to the proper device.

It is strange how telco's have managed to absolutely devalue their core product so thoroughly.

ergonomics too, long gone are the days where you'd get the call started in one second. I know the market forces that drove the "call" app to become so subpar but it's still impressive how many fragile steps you have to get to someone.

I still remember distinctly when it all started going to hell. At least for me. Cordless phones. The old AT&T handsets were comfortable, you could rest that against your ear for hours. For some reason the cordless phones quickly abandoned that notion and went for smaller size, sacrificing ergonomics to get it. So now it was uncomfortable against your ear, -and- you had all the degradation in audio quality that came with early wireless tech.

Google is working on ‘clear calling’ for Android phone calls:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/9/23344147/android-phone-cal...

The first beta for the Android 13 quarterly release includes a new “clear calling” feature that “reduces background noises during calls.”

That's neat, but background noise is not the issue as much as laggy over-compressed audio. Reducing noise might help make the over compression not so bad, but it won't fix the horrible lags, IMO.

The most interesting part of the linked article is this:

Online, ad-riddled, search-engine-optimized webpages offer folk solutions: disconnect Bluetooth; reconnect Bluetooth; factory-reset the earbuds; reboot the phone; and so on. Like a finger trap, these desires for remedy plunge the user only further into the technological murk and its associated despair.

How did this happen? It’s really bizarre and weird that it’s vastly easier to get basic usage and troubleshooting information through googling for stuff that very few people use (linux command line utilities!) than for stuff that basically everyone uses. Is it just SEO wars? Is it because conversations about sed or something select for much higher skill levels and commitment than conversations about AirPods?

I don't really know, but it seems like you could just short circuit all of that by just answering the fucking phone and not bothering with Bluetootha nd stuff.

I guess, but the whole rest of the way technology and galloping capitalism have transformed work makes that harder. For example, lots and lots of us have to take calls on the move (walking somewhere, driving somewhere, etc.) just because our schedules are so crammed. Try doing that without some kind of hands-free device.

Phone mounts for the car have been around for years and allow for hands free talking. And if you can't answer the phone and walk, I'd say that's a bigger problem than something technology can solve.

That's right. I'm a defective human who isn't as good as you evidently are at somehow participating in a phone conversation on a cellphone speaker over freeway noise, or walking around with my head pressed against a tiny little device pressed against my shoulder for hours. And the millions of people who also find these tasks physically uncomfortable or difficult are just not as fine physical specimens as a robust and fit as yourself. Condescending much?

> Sometimes it’s the connection to the car speakers, via CarPlay or Android Auto.

One issue I've had is that I'll be on a call on my cell phone, and my wife will start the car to go somewhere. The car will then inexplicably attach to my phone via bluetooth — despite my being 30 feet away. Super confusing for all parties involved, and only resolves when my wife drives out of range.

How is it cars can't tell that the phone they're connecting to is not actually inside the car?

Rather infuriating considering most bluetooth applications will get spotty and sketchy, say if I'm working in the garage and playing music over a speaker, and move into the house for a moment.

Starting the car on the other side of the house? CONNECTING.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...

The US telephone system has been digital except for the "last mile" since about the 80s. Speech is encoded as 8-bit samples at 8KHz, giving a Nyquist frequency of 4KHz, and using either µ-law[1] (US) or A-law (Europe) compression - you basically sample at 12-14 bits or so, take the logarithm of that value, truncate it to 8 bits and send it, and reverse the process at the other end.

If you take 24 of those 64Kbit/s channels and multiple them you get a T1[2]; 28 T1s were multiplexed into a T3. Basic ISDN multiplexed two 64KB channels and a 16KB signaling channel on a single wire, but it got very little use in the US.

The signals from those modems we were using in the 90s were getting digitized a few miles down the road, and at the ISP end the modem banks often connected directly with the digital phone system via a T1 line. (In fact "56K" modems relied on having a digital connection on the other end; the fastest modem speed with analog on both ends was I believe 33.6 with a V.34+ modem)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Μ-law_algorithm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier

I expected this to be about the now common pattern of subjecting people to some shit version of Alexa for 10 minutes before you eventually crack and allow them to sit on hold for someone who might actually be able to solve their problem.

Bonus shit biscuits if you allow them to get to some answer from Brenda (the brainless Alexa clone) where you basically say "great news, you can do this online". As if anyone with half a brain would have have been stupid enough to shout at their phone for 20 minutes trying to get your shitty arse robot to understand them if they could have gone online instead.

Agreed, the 2 most annoying thing for me when I have to call into a business:

1. "You can find the answers you need online at our website: w w w dot our business name dot com" - First I would never call if I could do what I needed online, second get me to the menu already. I hate waiting 30-60sec+ for a prerecorded message that doesn't tell me anything new.

2. "We are experiencing higher than normal call volume" - Bullshit. I'll bet my right arm that either that message is always there OR you are "somehow" always horribly understaffed which is your problem, not mine. I accepted this at the start of COVID but pretty much every business has left that message in even well after it was reasonable.

Normally we have no calls. Then you came along. Our on call is getting dressed, just a few minutes.

3. "Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed"

That's a good one, as if I've ever remembered or trusted that menu options are the same. It's another one of those useless platitudes that just wastes time. Surely anyone who just hits a number and gets connected to the wrong place will just call back and listen to the options the second time, no need for that useless message.

I'd greatly prefer if they just immediately started listing off menu options.

Also a variant on #1 that drives me batty is when they use that in the "hold music". Every 30-60 seconds the music stops and a voice repeats the BS about how you can find what you need online. It's a tease, you think your call was finally answered, and it rubs salt in wound by advertising something that clearly failed in it's task.

Every 30-60 seconds the music stops and a voice repeats the BS...

...at four times the volume of the hold music, so you can't just set volume and forget it. And when a human comes on, that will be attenuated at least 10dB from what the hold music was.

Pretty sure this is like, did you unplug it, wait 10 seconds, and plug it back in again? They want to say "listen carefully" but have to dress it up a bit so it doesn't sound rude.

I had a recent trip to Japan, wanted to exchange some yen before I left, so I called around to a bunch of local banks and got to experience some exquisitely terrible phone systems.

The worst, and this is a new one to me: you get a 30 second message about how you can do everything online (except ask if they sell foreign currency), and how the menu options have changed, and then you finally pick the option to talk to a teller... and after half a dozen rings with nobody answering, it says "sorry, guess nobody's around" and JUST FUCKING HANGS UP ON YOU.

Also, turns out banks no longer keep foreign currency on-site, not even Wells Fargo which was always a go-to for me. Another case of "COVID gave us an excuse to do what we've been wanting to do for a long time"

Yeah, you gotta give em like a weeks notice and even then they might give you a bad rate.

Yes I thought it was going to be about the true hell that is calling any company now. Phone menus for at least a minute and then connected to someone with long Covid and/or new hire that has no idea what they are doing or forgot how. Then transferred to another and another and another. Covid annihilated customer service.

It was terrible before, I'm not sure Covid could have made it any worse.

I don't know if it's directly due to Covid, as the grandparent asserts, but it's pretty indisputable that the quality of customer service has eroded across pretty much every industry sector, at least in the US. This could be due to companies generally being short-staffed, but it does seem like even when you interact with someone the intelligence level (or maybe more charitably, the experience level) of the people you interact with has gone down.

Yeah I can see that. Calling big companies has been terrible forever, but customer service in physical stores has gone downhill. Mostly they all seem short-staffed. Seems like lots of stores let people go, and didn't replace them in favor of self-checkout systems.

Really grinds my gears when you go into a physical store and they say "oh, we don't have that but you can order it on our website!"

Bit of self reflection required about thier likely employment prospects.

I had such a good (in-person) customer service experience last Spring I have to mention it here. Wife and I upgraded our phones. We both subscribe to month-to-month cell services, so we always buy unlocked phones from Apple. The problem is, Apple no longer sells unlocked phones from a physical U.S. Apple store unless you are signed up with a major carrier. The Genius who helped us with our purchase recognized the problem and logged on to the online Apple store and helped us order our new phones from a different, still-close-by Apple store, for pickup the next day. Though we picked up at the store, the order was placed online (by the kind Genius) and we avoided the major cell carrier requirement.

Quick tip - screaming profanities at the voice assistant typically takes you directly to a customer support person. (Obviously, don't scream obscenities at the customer support person)

Not sure if you'll understand all the Scottishness here but I think you'll appreciate the message...

https://youtu.be/TqAu-DDlINs

Don't tell her the truth, make her puzzled.

Few days ago I had to help my grandma with hiding some utility cables behind a cover on a new door. I decided that a guy from tv cable company would be the most experienced with this and called their support. Please describe your issue? TV has no signal (it has). Are you at home? Yes (no). Let me check it... hmm, it's okay on our side. Did you try to rescan channels? Yes (of course not). I'll transfer your call to an operator, please wait. Sure, was nice to meet you too, stupid bot.

Make sure that you "have" a direct service problem and it doesn't align with scripted or online solutions.

As if anyone with half a brain would have have been stupid enough to shout at their phone for 20 minutes trying to get your shitty arse robot to understand them if they could have gone online instead.

There are plenty of people who call-first, to be fair.

Ignore the voice tree. Just shout profanities or "representative". Decent systems will pick up your frustration and divert you to the human queue.

This often works, but not always. And it's not always clear when it does work; the systems don't usually say something like, "Since you would like to set our entire executive leadership team on fire, we will transfer you to the next available agent."

If it's a subscription service, you can just say you're calling to cancel. If anything will get you on with a person, that will.

Add a couple minutes about how the call is being recorded and there's nothing I can do about it

This has reached new heights when calling USCIS for immigration issues. You have to avoid certain trigger words or the callbot will shunt you into a loop that can only terminate with it sending you an email on how to do something on the website, then hanging up. If you say "operator" it will go on a spiel about how helpful it is and you should ask it a question. If you say "operator" again it will hang up on you. The only way to get to a human is to look in online forums where people share the magic phrases that get it to direct you to an operator. Most of these have followup comments saying "no longer working as of $date". The US government basically hates immigrants or anyone trying to help immigrants and is happy to make things as aggressively unpleasant as possible for them. It isn't a bug, it is intentional.

Did the author ever try just not using headphones or other smart/connected devices to take the call?

Misclick and end the call? Call back.

Rushing and can't take the call without headphones, let it go to voicemail and call back when you can.

We have agency and autonomy. We don't have to use all the tech we have all the time. Everything around a phone call has 'progressive enhancement' from the bones up. That also means we can easily toss out all that 'enhancement' and be left with the same basic feature set.

Like everyone I sometimes fumble around with my headphones if they don't auto connect and its frustrating but its not a big deal. But far more often than not everything works well for me - starting the call on my watch and moving to my phone as I look for it, starting on my phone and moving to my headphones, starting and staying on my phone.

Tech recruiter here from Switzerland, and our mobile coverage is probably one of the best in the world.

One of the things I hate most is that I often can't hear people.

Selling people jobs on the phone is stressful enough, but extremely annoying if I don't get feedback whether the person even heard what I said.

I only answer the phone - and that includes FaceTime and all other audio calls - to my wife and my mum.

Everyone else - particularly cold-call sales droids - can do one.

Maybe we need to unbundle the phone again. Maybe "a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device" isn't what we need in a single device after all...

It is definitely what I need, and I don’t think I am alone. Phone calls are such a minor functionality of these devices. If we do that, that will be the death of the phone as quite a lot of people won’t bother carrying a second device, or give up on their pocket computer.

I cannot read the article due to the paywall, but just to vent.....one painful phone pet peeve for me that's declined recently is the art of people leaving a useful voice mail.

Ok, I get it. There's a few technically-challenged people that struggle with emails and texts and prefer to use their voice. I'm perfectly happy to deal with that.

But they call and leave a voice mail that focuses on the wrong information. They'll agonizingly slowly spell out their first and last name (D-as-in-dog, E-as-in-elephant, etc) and phone number (even though any digital system provides that already) but not even mention what they're calling for.

What should be a 15 second voice mail like "Hey Mark, this is Denise from the Jersey office. Please send Rachel in sales the paperwork for order #9485. Let me know if there's any problems with that. Thanks!" turns into a 2 minute long voicemail that is physically painful to listen to and that ignores the only necessary piece of information required and turns into an unnecessary game of phone tag.

Voicemail is essentially "Here, you type this email for me". I delete them unheard. But I'm an old curmudgeon.

I disagree! With ubiquitous voicemail voice-to-text functionality, I find it fast and useful, plus it can be sent using a hands-free device in a car.

I would argue that you’re a zoomer curmudgeon rather than an old one. :)

I think it is because you want an acknowledgement that the recipient listened to your voicemail and will follow through. Without them calling back you will be in the dark. Also, for cases like exemplified with, email is probably better. Calling to talk is for more complex stuff that requires a conversation.

Why not use voice-to-text to send an email instead?

My previous post was lighthearted, but I have had problems with voice-to-text in noisy cars. I suppose there’s a chance this issue be carried over to the receiver’s voice-to-text software.

“Dictated but not read”

Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” has an anecdote about him writing that as kid to some person he wanted to impress, and it predictably having the opposite effect.

When I can tell Google voice is messing up what I'm saying I'll end with dictated not read. I got it from the Simpsons. Only a few people get the joke. What's funny is I use it for important communications and people I need to respond to not than others

turns into a 2 minute long voicemail that is physically painful to listen to

Not like it's any less painful on a live call. I wish I had a setting to automatically tase anyone who calls me and when I answer the first thing they want to know is what I'm doing. As if it's up to them to judge whether what I'm doing is more important than whatever bullshit they've called me up for. You tell me what you need and then I will tell you if and when I can do it. Sooner or later I'm going to start answering these people honestly. "Oh, nothing much Sharon, just browsing some naked anime women."

I use sipgate. They transcribe every voicemail into an email with mp3 attachment. That makes it easy for me to just email people a reply to their phone call.

> and phone number (even though any digital system provides that already

Speaking of which, when I call any customer service, they ALWAYS ask for my phone number. I've been baffled by this for awhile. Why? Can't they see it?

I wonder if caller information is just unreliable enough that they always ask anyway, because even if it gives the wrong number a smallish percent of the time, that's bad enough that it's worth taking the time to ask.

not if you are spamming your number when you call

That is one of their verification points for your account. They want to know whether you know the phone number on file with them.

Being forced to convey things like addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, etc by voice instead of text can be incredibly painful, and of course it gets worse with poor quality connections, accents, non-native languages, etc.

I almost wish there was some low-tech thing for sending text in-band in voice calls, like DTMF but for all ASCII characters, or some 75 baud protocol / tones so you could be like 'Ok, I am sending my name / email / account #. <sending> See it on your screen? great! screencap it... copy and paste it into your app now, etc!'

I literally just have VoIP routed DECT handsets all over my house like it is 1999 and it works great every time.

Cell phones have become jacks of all trades and in the process have become difficult to use as phones.

“Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it.”

This has never happened to me - using either wired headphones or AirPods which connect rather seamlessly to the phone even mid-call. Just get headphones that work well with your phone’s model.

The whole article sounds very “millennials discover telephony” to me - either that or the author is in way over their head and don’t really know how to use the smorgasbord of devices they appear to have maneuvered themselves into.

AirPods aren’t that seamless for me. The switching between phone and MacBook is pretty good, but there is still an element of randomness if the phone will connect to the AirPods or not.

Add in a few more switches such as in the car or a Bluetooth speaker and the article rings true for me.

My right AirPod bud regularly (as in 2 out of 3) needs to be put back into the case and taken out again, in order to connect.

The left one just works.

I won't buy them again.

I used to have such problems with older Airpods. Since I got the 2nd gen Airpods Pro pretty muvh every issue is gone, they work perfectly every time.

That's (a) hard to believe and (b) in the minority if true. I think this stuff works so poorly all the time that some get accustomed to it or some are just lucky. I had it happen on my desktop computer and the monitor's audio today because the audio device got confused after a Remote Desktop session. There wasn't even a wireless connection involved. I had to run to get wired headphones.

If anything, in my experience, it is service providers' cell coverage and cell reception on phones barely designed to be phones that are all so abysmal that it doesn't even matter if everything else works well. They alone make cellphones terrible as phones when on cellular.

And in general, BlueTooth sucks. I need to do an incantation to keep my PS4 controllers connected, a problem reported by many in various forums.

My first thought before clicking through to read the article was: This is about the torture of using automated receptionist systems.

It was bad enough when you had to go through a wall of numbers. Now, with speech recognition, it is probably ten times worse: "In a few words, tell me what...". I am so sick of it I usually end-up saying something like "attendant" or "real person" repeatedly until the thing drops down to the last "else:" statement and connects me to a person.

As far as some of what the article covers, this is one of the reasons for which I still use wired earbuds. The wires have never been a problem. I just don't want to deal with the nonsense. For example, I was watching a movie in bed on my iPad one night. The wireless earbuds disconnected and sound came blasting out, waking my wife.

In addition to this, CarPlay implementations just seem awful. Not sure if this is on Apple, the radio manufacturer, the car maker or a combination. Just yesterday, my 2020 car simply refused to connect to my iPhone X no matter what I did. Most of the time it works fine. Yesterday, I could not get CarPlay to come up if my life depended on it.

As others have mentioned on this thread, Pixel's call screener largely solves this problem. For me it's a godsend feature and prevents me from getting into a bad mood from answering multiple robo/spam-calls in a day. I seem to have a heavily recycled number (multiple owners before) - as a result, I seem to have been receiving more than one person's share of spam calls.

For those unfamiliar: you can use Pixel's call screener to accept calls from unknown numbers. The effect is, an automated voice from your end handles the call, all the while printing on the screen what it says. It also transcribes what the other end says (mostly correctly). So you can "see" how the call is going, on your screen - its like a chat unrolling in real time. If you are convinced the call is legit (after having read enough of it), there is an option for transferring the call to you/mic and then you can take over. It also has some canned prompts you can have the call-screener speak out (these options appear when the screening is in progress).

Very helpful!

Honestly I'm fine with this as a consequence of modern convenience. The real torture for me in that first minute of a phone call is the usual:

"Hi, how are you?"

Then I have to pretend they care (they usually don't), give them a 0.02 second explanation of how I am, then to be nice I have to return the same useless question before we can actually talk about their reason for calling.

The only reason people do this is to verify that the connection is working, which it often isn't, as detailed in the article.

> Hello?

> Hi, this is Bob calling from Bob's car repair about your 1979 Ford F-350. It appears that..

> Hello?

> Hello, can you hear me?

One or two instances of that and suddenly everyone wants to have the "How are you" conversation every start.

I'm glad I don't have this problem. I hate telephones and everything about them, and try to live my life having as few "telephone conversations" as possible. That life choice long predates the pandemic.

Airpods? Ear buds? WTF. I can't relate to this world at all. Just email me and I'll get back to you if/when I check it at some later date.

Now get off my lawn.

I feel like I'm in another universe from this writer. 9.9 times out of 10 my AirPods connect immediately when I pop them them before answering and if they take a second longer we are in <10 seconds before everything is good to go. The caller shouldn't have any of these issue (if they do they are a moron, connect your headphones, if you want to use them, before you make a call) and the callee doesn't have any issues if it's a scheduled call. It takes some nerve to call someone without texting/emailing about it ahead of time if it's not an emergency and if they need a second to get headphones in then that's all on you.

Not to mention headphones aren't a necessity. Sure they are nice but if someone calls me and I think it's going to be quick I just answer and hold the phone up, it's not the end of the world.

I have a newish iPhone and airpods. I have my pods in much of the day. When my phone rings, it rings through the pods. When I answer, 7/10 times the call is first answered going through the pods, then transfers to the phone, and I have to hit the button on the phone to transfer it back to the pods, where I hear "...ello? Can you hear me? Are you there?" Just 5 seconds or so, but still dumb. This worked fine a few months ago. I have changed no settings.

> The caller shouldn't have any of these issue (if they do they are a moron

Quite frankly, you don't have the slightest idea of what you're talking about, and it's incredibly rude and insulting for you to call anyone having these issues a "moron".

I have a pair of AirPods, and an iPhone, and an iPad, and a MacBook.

And when I put on my AirPods, probably about half the time they connect to a different device from the one I intend when I take them out and put them on. Or they connect to my phone but not the phone app. Or they connect and then immediately disconnect as maybe another device takes over.

The whole process of getting them to a) connect, b) be selected by the phone app, and c) not become deselected/disconnected because I did that before some other device/app takes over... well yes, it's frequently 15-45 seconds. Half the time it works seamlessly though.

> It takes some nerve to call someone without texting/emailing about it ahead of time if it's not an emergency

You know, other people regularly call friends/family/colleagues. Same as you'll get calls from your doctor/gym/etc. about rescheduling. Honestly, it takes some nerve for you to judgmentally declare that nobody should be like this.

You need to find some empathy, and understand that your personal experiences are not universal ones.

It's quite hard to reply to a comment when you keep editing it (I count at least 3 edits so far).

Maybe "moron" is a bit of a stretch but this isn't difficult to do. I don't make outgoing calls before I have my headphones in (if I want to use them) and I've never had them connect and work prior to the call then randomly stop working when I make the call. Your issue with your AirPods jumping to different devices sounds annoying, I've personally never experienced it, I also disable/enable the setting that says "Don't auto-connect unless it was the last device you were connected to", the auto-switching "magic" isn't good enough to rely on in my experience. This is my frustration, people who complain about how something (often technology) doesn't work the way they want it to without doing any work on their own to fix/improve it.

> You know, other people regularly call friends/family/colleagues. Same as you'll get calls from your doctor/gym/etc. about rescheduling. Honestly, it takes some nerve for you to judgmentally declare that nobody should be like this.

Literally only my family calls me and they are the only calls I answer save for when I know I'm waiting on a call. All my coworkers use Slack/Zoom, all my friends use Discord/iMessage and then move to Discord Calls/Audio channels or Facetime Audio if we need to talk. In fact I don't think I even have phone numbers for half of my closest friends or most my coworkers, there is just no need. As far as doctor/gym/etc they go to voicemail and I'll read what they said later. I reject wholeheartedly the notion that anyone has the right to unilaterally interrupt me and be able to speak to me at a moments notice. If you feel differently then so be it, I do not care how you utilize phone calls, I'm only speaking to my own experiences and what I (and most my peers) expect when it comes to phone calls. I never said everyone thinks this way or that my personal experiences are universal (though again, I've heard the exact same sentiment voiced from nearly all my peers).

My airpods generally work, but I ONLY pair them with my phone. I used to pair with my computer and other devices and it caused issues all the time.

>It takes some nerve to call someone without texting/emailing about it ahead of time if it's not an emergency

That is a very, I dunno how to put it, but born after 1990 view of customs.

> It takes some nerve to call someone without texting/emailing about it ahead of time if it's not an emergency

Err, wait. WHAT?

How old are you? I'm in my 40s, but even I know this is a reasonably common gen-z social norm.

I can't remember the last time i actually held a phone to my ear... I always always have a bluetooth headset/car around.

these days I wear an AfterShokz "bone conducting" headset pretty much as soon as I get up in the morning till i go to bed.

I listen to podcasts/audiobooks/music and make calls on it all day... no issues.

Huh, I didn’t know that bone conduction had progressed that far. Do you have a headset with or without the boom mic? Is it always paired to one device, or do you switch between a few? If you do switch it around, does the handoff work well?

Asking because I’ve loved the idea since I first heard about it, and might pick up a headset myself now that I know they’re of decent quality.

No boom mic. it is fine in most scenarios.

The model i have is paired with one phone. not sure if the newer models have multi pairing.

Music is kinda crap on them. but everything else is fine.

I also have a set of Bose QC45's for Teams and decent music listening. that also supports multi pairing

Is the app required to use that headset? I've read that the app requires excessive permissions.

I very often have my Sony earbuds connected to my iPhone, but I don't really like talking through them, so when I get a call, I usually just pop them out and then select that the audio should come from the phone speaker, which works. But then, just 10-15 seonds afterwards, if I haven't put my earbuds in their case (which I might not have been able to do yet), they will reconnect, hence switching the call back to them. And this dance continues until I manage to find the case or simply give up.

To me, this makes no sense. I could understand that the phone might think that I want to switch to my headphones if I take them out of their case during my call, but why switch back to the headphones that I've actively chosen not to use just a moment ago when I haven't even put them back in the case in between?

Often it’s the wireless earbuds, which won’t reconnect or are connected to the wrong device.

More often the fact that no matter how much a reviewer praised your earbuds' call quality, it's total shite and the person on the other end of the line will ask if you're in a car or using speakerphone.

Not sure if it’s because I have a big head or mumble but nobody can hear me clearly on AirPods. It’s fine with wired headphones where I tend to hold the mic in position more. It’s annoying because AirPods are great apart from that.

Technology promised a sort of communications revolution, but communications are now a fragmented mess.

50 years ago if you wanted a job, you looked at the news paper.

Today if you want a job, you need discord, indeed, craigslist, hackernews, and a countless amount of other sources.

It has become counter productive for the end user.

My Nokia 6030 dumb phone answers calls instantly with no fuss, has physical buttons, is tiny in my pocket, indestructable, and lasts a week on a battery. It is what every phone should aspire to be. It's a shame so many people try to stuff computers into theirs.

> Often it’s the wireless earbuds, which won’t reconnect or are connected to the wrong device.

Wireless headsets seem to have intentionally crippled functionality in many areas for no particular reason[1]. The point of being wireless is that you aren't connected to a device. Why do they need a logical connection? If you're listening to two devices, just accept the packets from both devices, and play them over the audio output.

[1] See also: if you turn on the microphone, you can no longer have audio output in stereo. It switches to mono, because... because.

Tangent:

> It had its quirks—You’re muted, Cathy, and so forth—

There would be a simple solution: add a good ole' vu-meter.

This would also help with incorrect gain, which is why they had been present on recording equipment for almost a century.

> There would be a simple solution: add a good ole' vu-meter.

They're already there! Google Meet, for example, has them, and they also show whether the mic is muted in Meet itself or not. I can often tell that they're muted in the meeting because not only is it that their mouth is moving and no sound is coming out, but also because the little "muted" icon is perched on their tile. The same exact way they could, if they looked at the indicator.

Wow, I didn't realize this was a common enough problem that someone had to write about it. I don't have any of those issues. I mean, I've had a few times where a call was dropped, but that's really rare.

One thing that really improved life for me was intentionally never setting up the voicemail on my current number. I am unable to accept voicemail. I've had it this way for 4 years now- I do not miss checking voicemail, and I'm not bothered by people unable to leave it. They can text or email.

> I didn't realize this was a common enough problem that someone had to write about it

I don't think it is, but The Atlantic is no different to all the other web based magazines / newspapers -- they have to keep churning out articles to keep readers' attention, it doesn't really matter what the content is anymore, we all just need to keep seeing new headlines.

I've experienced the issues with the weird connections issues, not being able to hear people etc, but the worst for me is when I call someplace and I have to suffer through the options spoken to me by a chat bot. Or worse it asks me to "say what I am calling about" in a few words, and it doesn't understand. Or I have to get through three different levels of menus before the option to speak to a representative comes up.

The worst torture I've experienced is when I want to use the screen on my phone during a call but the damn proximity sensor keeps blanking out the screen.

I still remember the awe I got each time I called someone and they also used a BlackBerry and had HD calling and how goddamn good and clear it sounded, like holy shit, I can't believe phone audio could sound this good.

I'm not sure if that was only a Canada thing or not, but you instantly could tell if someone else was on a BlackBerry just by how startling good it sounded. I haven't heard anything remotely good in years.

I only very infrequently experience the issues described in this article, and I definitely would not consider it torture.

Re. the other comments about robocalls, I use the "Silence unknown callers" on my iPhone and it works quite well. The only drawback is that you have to remember to disable the feature if you are expecting a call from someone who's number you don't know (eg a delivery driver.)

Phone calls and Zoom calls are such garbage compared to the old landline system. Jitter and latency just makes it unpleasant. Phone calls used to be so clear: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HnlqrMWVYCs

Oh, I thought it would be something more... interesting.

I have a voice that does not match most people's associations with my name, so the first minute of every phone call is spent explaining myself (sometimes it feels more like justifying). I've been mistaken for phishing attacks and got hung up on a few times too.

Not everything is a zeitgeist, Ian.

Outside of mobile computing/internet, I do not use my phone. I am sure with very minor adjustment I can get away with getting rid of a phone number entirely.

So many services are just plain better with the internet as the abstraction vs. a phone number.

The first minute of every article like this one is also torture. First it seems like the page loaded and you can start reading, but then you are going to be hit with a massive, all encompassing pop up covering the page. If you're lucky, it's a cookie consent modal, to which you basically have to consent; the other case is a paywall and the content might never have been there to begin with.

You can brave the elements (the DOM elements) or zap away annoying modals, and if it's a paywall you might find an archived linked in the comments (thanks to anyone sharing these by the way) but either way you are in for a jolted start. If you are really in a hurry you might just bite the bullet and accept all cookies, muttering quotes from 1984 in the process.

Then there are the autoplay videos, good luck finding the X button on those, and have fun actually clicking one.

It's been an annoying first minute but you can finally start reading, only that every paragraph break is now an ad to something else, a focus grabbing div to additional content on the site, or - my favorite - another autoplay video completely unrelated to anything. Aside from videos, most of these are still present even in reader mode, for the clever reader.

Ad blockers help with some of these issues, but media articles today are just a total crapshoot, unless it's a personal blog, although those might turn out to be a marketing funnel for something, and oh why don't you sign up to our newsletter for the actual content we baited you into clicking, which in turn is an ad for the class they are promoting.

I envy the younger people online who never knew the internet before it became this weird annoying minefield of attention traps and poorly disguised marketing ploys.

What kind of monstrous device is the article writer using?

I literally just pick up my phone, press accept, and say "hello".

Is he talking about something completely different yet referring to it as "phone call"? I don't get it.

what about unwanted phone calls... of a different kind?

I've been complaining for years how touching ANYTHING in the ios phone app initiates a call. Can there be a setting for "confirm before calling"?

I've called spam numbers back.

I am curious why we still have telephone numbers. The technology have not changed since i was born and my internet calls are just as reliable.

It seems unnecessary to have infrastructure for two different technologies that do the same thing.

I read articles like these and have a melancholy reassurance that these aren't Amish problems, but then I get sad because other people have to put up with it and don't see a way not to.

In my very limited experience with the Amish, I have found they are one of very few groups that can be trusted to build a website.

I have experienced precisely zero of the things listed in this article.

Read the article, suggested update to the headline: "The first few seconds of some phone calls contain a mild inconvenience every now and again."

Should we expect phone calls to scale the way software does? Maybe we should lower our expectations or find a way around it

I simply use wired earbuds with a built-in microphone. Works seamlessly every time.

This article is basically "old man yells at cloud"?

> Then we got Zoomed out and became desperate for phone calls again.

We did?

This all started when Apple got rid of the headphone jack.

I solve this by basically never talking on the phone.

This should not have been an article.

This article is not wrong.

I thought only old people still used the phone for making calls.

Thing is there are a lot of old people.

And there are more being created all the time!

Yeah, but new old people bring their habits from younger years like not using phone for making private calls.

You'll need a few years yet for that. Most old people around today used rotary phones unironically.

Hell, I'm not even that old (41), and we had a rotary phone until 1988 or so. We also had a touch-tone cordless phone, but the corded phone in the kitchen was still rotary.

I expect there are even younger people than I who used rotary phones as kids.

That would depend on the country, yet I'd consider late 30s to be the age. Also I am using the phone daily to call anyone - family, coworkers. It'd appear, around here, the ear buds have not caught up.

Even rotary cell phones [1] I'm old but that is too much for me.

I just bought my first smart phone and spent a while in developer mode quieting it down to extend battery life so some old people can do this.

[1] - https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html

> so old people can do this

Some can, many won't. Eye sight and dexterity problems have a lot to do with this. When you can't see and your hands shake it's a lot easier to just "hey google call so-and-so."

Fair point. Edited my comment to include some.

And all of them were once the youngest people on earth.

Define “old” :)

Also even those of us who don’t ca that much, do receive calls since some entities still prefer to call you (government, medical, education). It’s either that or snail mail - despite the fact that most of them have my email address.

Like many comments in this site, this is very US centric. Where I live (in Europe) no government entity calls anyone. They might send an SMS as confirmation or notification, but formal communications are sent electronically. Nobody under the age of about 45 calls on the phone as a regular matter.

Well I’m not in the US :)

> I thought only old people still do phone calls for private communication.

FTFY

Just yesterday I received spam call, my only response was answering with "Yes?", then when they started to talk about something I just hang up without a word, they wasted enough of my time and energy. Private matter I communicate 100% through IM or video calls within IM, it must be very rare ocassion that my retired father calls me on the phone or that I have to call wife because she is not responding to IM.

>they wasted enough of my time and energy.

compared to the myriad of ads plastered everywhere. I suppose the latter has just been normalized - yet the amount of 'energy' (as in joules; or as in human frustration) is unparalleled compared to the one spent on unwanted calls, or just calls.

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