One of my frequent hobby horses is the area of portable music players (formerly called Walkmans or MP3 players, currently "DAPs"). I simply don't understand who would want to buy any of the currently available players because they'll are so terrible to use. The good ones were killed off by a combination of streaming services and Android devices. There are no more light-weight, simple players with high capacity, physical buttons and good battery life. You know, the kind of thing you could put into your pocket take on your run without bruising yourself. The kind of thing that has a legible screen, sane menu layout, that can read tags from your files and let you simply drag playlists into them. I know that there are people out there who want the same thing, but manufacturers are instead releasing gigantic bricks with protruding knobs and weird edges, huge battery-draining touch screens, running some dreadful Android hack of an OS. "This one had TWO DACS!". Really! Well I'm not in a sound-proofed listening room with €10000 monitors, I'm on a bus with some IEMs. Reviews rarely discuss the most important aspects of a portable music device, and instead gush like wine critics about the ... I don't know, smell(?) or taste(?) of the music. I'm only half joking. The more prestigious the reviewer the more bollocks they write, and half the time I can't even find mention of the weight or size. Or when they do, they're plain wrong (eg: "The Shanling Q1 is a light weight portable device"... No it's f*cking not, it's an awful brick with a shitty OS, bad battery life, overly sensitive buttons. I don't care how well it sounds if I can't get playlists into it and don't want to use it because it's a heavy blob with a shitty interface.
13 years ago Rockbox on the Sansa Clip+ was great. If we could simply produce that with today's tech I'd take it in front of any of these ludicrous hulking house-bricks that cost an arm and a leg.
Am I off-topic?