Until you no longer can because there is no choice at any vendor.
As your post demonstrates, today's tech industry is full of fans who don't realize they are proverbial boiling frogs. Long gone are the days of choice. We lose hardware and convenient models are retired while the prices just stall for years or rise (texas graphing calculators, anyone?).

Small form factor products (minis, tablets, phones) are a window into the PC market's future. We will be running tpm locked down OSs and mobile apps on our desktops because those are current Apple and Windows and Google goals. And we will be made to like it.

Apple just looks slightly more ridiculous doing it because they are in full dark dominatrix regalia. Her whip creates a new industry fetish from scratch every 18 months. Then we the masochists just crouch down llicking her boots and call it trendy, and she starts planning something even kinkier just to hold our attention while other attention-starved harsh mistresses copy her moves and notches. And drain our willing wallets. Did I mention there is no choice?

The walled gartden was set up shop and walled our towns in without consent, but we all just stayed willingly. We can never live this lotus eater trap. Noticing the Stockholm syndrome is hard for the victim

I'm still waiting for OLD tech to reach my phones. My home router was high end costing 125$ 11 years ago. Wifi N (draft), with the 5ghz band. My first smartphone in 2011 cost double, but was single band. A poorly researched Bestbuy laptop a year later cost 850 but lacked both the 5ghz band and bluetooth. It's on the last legs of its second battery refresh and some hardware and functions are impacted / falling apart, but I can't replace it for a newer one, especially losing Windows seven in the process.

But I digress. The current cheap Android 7 phone 1 year ago cost as much as my router from a decade earlier but the Android mfrs still don't see fit to Support the second band. On the Samsungs and LGs that do, I see the 40mhz high speed modes are incompatible, so the commoditized chips are least-effort implementations. If I truly want to hold off just to get THAT crippled version of 5ghz tech that isn't anywhere near today's Wifi AC offerings, I'll have to hybernate a long while. And sadly, I am pining for the time when Wifi 6 and/or WPA3 drafts have obsoleted anything available today for security reasons.
I am hurting for a camera replacement, but hear even AC only comes with the multi-thousand dollar DSLRs, and a handful at that. Guess I'll never be able to retire my lousy, router 2.4ghz band at this rate...

As for GPS, I only care that it cold boots quickly and not jerk around too much. My cheap phone's implementation is failing at both, and it is a pipe dream for me to expect 0-year old tech that offers little more than higher precision for the old functionality to cascade to my needy hands faster than the more functional wifi flavors. I only get satisfaction if I go out there and pay top dollar, though... but diligent research can't be ignored or you end up with a moderate midrange purchase that you consider a sunk cost, like my semi-inadequate 2.4ghz band laptop.

This is informative, thanks. More examples for "perfect" is the enemy of the good, but leaving each company to implement things on their own led us to almost two decades of randomness. Prior to ubiquitous Android and Apple accounts every phone switch kept making us face the question "will my next phone support my previous one's SIM card so I can carry my contacts without manual regeneration of my address book? will it even have a sim slot?"

With this dual-sim situation we'll have another 2 decades of annoying disparate arrangements. The US yet again fosters intentional levels of functional fragmentation on phone service because of greed. From what I hear under other threads, the problem isn't extant in Europe and Asia. Standards in those lands have apparently been implemented properly all across the markets so you don't have to go "Oh, you're on $cheap_provider so I can't do $activity with you there" (though I find it weird that this perfection reportedly requires turning the second SIM into a receive-only call sink). /. historical posts also state that Europe apparently has no fragmentation when it comes to taking any regular non-premium phone / sim across the continent as you travel and just connecting it to any provider.

I am also thinking of Android fragmentation since the economics follow a similar "we the providers won't establish nor follow nice standards... they are anathema to our business models of vendor lock-in, planned obsolescence."

Numbers coming out at this particular point in history are not selfless, especially so soon after the last standard started shipping.
Numbers are ALL about an upgrade threadmill. They're trying to set us up for the camera megapixel wars all over again. Or the Chrome vs. Firefox versioning wars. Eventually you end up losing the numbers and gaining them again (Windows is a terrible example of this)

In a world where we end up with fragmentation and planned obsolescense is a system where security theater has a profitable cry for easy, mandatory upgrades. WPA 3 is coming out soon. Without real research this late into the night I'd guess that's Wifi 6 material. Except, my router is 2 versions behind. And not a single Wifi camera out there* actually comes close to version 4, if you count the 5Ghz band. I bought a cheapo Android v7 phone 12 months ago to replace my 4 year old v4.4. The latter has had lots of time to catch up, but still failed to acquire support for that band, among several other things.

Again, I don't want some kind of standards board demanding that I support Wifi N+1 lest we get disconnected because nothing really supports N-1 fully. I want people to suck it up and do it like a job posting where someone sits down and clearly states the demands, and I pick one device for the job, even if it's partly outdated. Until all new phones in a month can be guaranteed to ship on a specific version "number", I can't trust the dumbing down. After all, your Samsung Note version 9 is different feature-wise from the Samsung J's sold the same year, so no single standard should be allowed till we're ready to put the production-line where their mouths meet our wallets.

* short of 2 expensive topend DSLR models (read, not at all pocketable)

Replying to myself to clarify that I *do* agree with the GP post's apparent position that Firefox shouldn't NEED tweaking for sane defaults in the first place.

"Yes" and "no." Tools do not decide how they are used, but software is in the unique position of being heavy-handed with dark patterns when it comes to hiding defaults.

By doing things for us like Apple does, the spirit of "getting things done" is perverted by those who pretend they are the only ones capable of deciding what gets done.
Outright removing options is why all browsers are at best on my "reluctant use" list. My former "Trust" is long gone because power users do NOT get a say anymore. I have seen dozens of bugtrack submissions to Firefox and Chrome where "won'tfix" and "this works as designed" show the ridiculous nature of software failing to do things for us because "right and wrong" changes over time. It would sure be offensive if your hammer autoupdated one day and refused to continue being useful nailing anything that didn't look like a nail just because it's "wrong" or deprecated in the eyes of the designer. I know my use case, and how to protect myself.

* insecure http iframes? blocked by devs.
* running javascript scriptlets from the addressbar? blocked in some of them. Don't care to test now
They treat their power users as if they were all mindless users with no option to stop the warnings.

0) features being discouraged and then removed or chrome's requiring long command line switches that they silently deprecate on a random version upgrade.
1) pasting scripts into a console, like when you're troubleshooting? major pain on Firefox where you take it like a slave and have to use "allow pasting" because some jerks in the industry these days believe the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few requires tons of naggy handholding. https://stackoverflow.com/ques...
2) Trying to apply the fix above requires going into about:config where the browser yells at us slaves again with big fat warning at some point. It makes us humble ourselves picking "I'll be careful, I promise!"
3) injecting my own extensions into the browser? outright blocked or subverted by dark patterns. When I'm using recent versions of chrome there's a big fat warning on every startup stating the browser is endangered by my conscious choice. I'm not aware of a way to disable the warning. I have an older version of Chrome on a different boot OS where no such warning was required some years back. That version is too old to even see Google's extension store so I can't download new ones there.
4) one thousand papercuts that make the life harder for someone focused on control, chipping away at our entitlements every new release... we now have the "Not secure" labels appearing everywhere, the "your self-signed certificates are death incarnate!!!1!!!!" attitude and others.

So true!
Ok, here's something painful and tangential:

SINGLE band Wifi N devices are here to stay, just like B and G stubbornly refused to leave*. I hate upgrading, but I've been itching for the goal of shutting off the 2.4 band for good ever since buying a ~$120 Dlink router in 2007!

Pure dual band is still an unreachable goal everywhere that isn't apple-centric (and you'll likely still have visitors on older phones). There's always that new phone and printer and almost every low and high end DSLR camera quietly ships with the 2.4Ghz band and lower speeds. Even if you have that ONE new device to keep around, it'll force drag you back along the rest of our neighbors in noisy 2.4 bands and away from progress for another 10 years.

* Reminds me of the manner we put up with Android 2, then 4.4, now 5 (when 8 has been around for 10 months) and IE6 and Windows XP

"You still bought it" assumes that the client was aware of the adapter minutiae at purchase time rather than unboxing time. NOPE.

When you buy that expensive smart tv, samsung phone or iPhone you do not get to choose the type of adapter --there may be some outcry when Apple changes ports to kill your historical investments, but there is only ONE Apple just like there is only one Samsung. You do not get to vote with your wallet.

So if you want the device, you buy it and sigh.
There is no interchangeable parts standard for power cords like there is in PC land. Most devices (microwave ovens, washers, refrigerators, standing fans, toasters) have a single cord that you are not free to cut away safely and replace.
There is also no descriptive system to find out which fat adapter orientation or slot consumption size you'll get with your device in advance (like when you freely research your AGP cards for taking 16x slots in your PC versus 1x slots).

This issue happens with most tech these days. Mid-range point-and-shoot cameras now offer some kind of Wifi option. So do most cheap phones and laptops. What they don't officially say is that they never plan to add dual-band support (and you'll need have that shameful lesser-devices 2Ghz band open for them despite the congestion). This is part of why impulse purchases and blind switcheroos are bad --sometimes even long-running research and forum questions say little about the hardware when you need something like Linux chipset support.

I've noticed with alarm that more and more non-laptop devices are forcing these on us. Cableco boxes and smart tv shouldn't be reminiscent of laptops. The brick will likely end up hanging badly from a corner and have one of the brick-touching segments end up tearing itself. This will either stop the power transit altogether one day, or cause a short circuit.

Sounds fishy. It's like saying those javascript bitcoin miners are not "designed" by lazy, greedy people and instead had an imperative to even consider keeping my computer "safe" by alerting me indirectly (via slowdowns and subtle 100% CPU results --only if someone technical knows where to look) when I get myself too many tabs mining and watching videos on multiple sites all at once.

Replace this well-known maxim so you put goodwill and profits in place of malice and stupidity: Never attribute to *malice* what can be explained by *stupidity*.

The adapter guys just design something to power their own hardware and cover their butts by leaving a subtle label saying "1.5 amps", "0.5 amps" and perhaps add the ground prong at most. Remember that time when everyone making cheap USB 3 cables that burned down non-approved devices was forced to pay for someone else's damages due to ill-advised user action? Nope

The hole here is that every product fends for itself because liability / lawsuits. Miniaturization is expensive^W^W shaves profit margins. All that they're required by law to do is done, and nothing more.
Nobody designs to protect someone else's hardware except for the power strip and ATX power supply makers themselves.

Nobody babies us by even suggesting to protect your investment thru buying your own power strip. They assume you have a reliable mains power circuit brakers.

Nope. It's been proven that the "vote with your wallet" world leaves you in a world where your money is no good, and or it gets astronomically unlikely to find a local store carrying a "classic" good like 4:3 screens, 3 inch smartphones (old people aren't social media junkies and even they got along just fine on even 1 and 2 inch displays) and non-smart TVs

You have 2 cases:
1) you buy the device. there is no warning because there are no labels or even online mentions of the cable it forces on you. You sigh and purchase a new power strip to place perpendicular to your existing one since the new fat plug doesn't fit in your 1-1-1 setup with 2 too-narrow empty plugs.
2) you rent the device. The cable box only comes with one type of cord. You cannot switch cords, boxes or cable companies. You sigh.

It would be nice if the cords were interchangeable a-la USB phones, but even those have a myriad nonstandard wallwarts delivering to the last-...mile^H^H^H inch near your wall ;)

The problem here is that this watch is very close to useless without the middle man, as evidenced by its utter inability to tell time.
The problem isn't the pairing, but the ill-intent behind the design causing the need for users to pair it: Why does the WATCH lack an actual internal clock battery so it won't just forget the time when the charge dies? Sometimes a smart watch is just a watch --why should the power to tell time be torn away from you and I with nary a watch-related failsafe?

What am I using the smartwatch without pairing it, AC? Nobody is complaining when others here admit to having a useless tablet bought with promises of yesteryear that was condemned to be repurposed to the living room or kitchen. Besides, pairing to the phone is cumbersome, requires an app that phones home on us and is the equivalent of those mandatory presence checks that required your CD game to take up the CD drive as proof of purchase before the game could be played.

I actually disable text and app notifications and eventually just keep the watch disconnected. Bluetooth actually chews thru the battery on both the watch and phone. I have 2 phones that know of the watch and it's a pain to have them fight for control of the watch. The company is turning off the servers and the forced registration / login and pairing process is now a pain, so I tend to disable the app and it's a bother to have to reenable it just to set the clock.

But going back to my reason and use cases... besides telling TIME, a watch has alarms we might employ as a wakeup call for our jobs. But most people don't have a watch these days. Smartphones aren't advised to be left laying near our heads under under the pillow overnight. So if choose to move the smartphone away from my head at night, I'll lose the utility of the vibration option. I'd need to wake up the rest of the bedroom with an audible alarm. Why must I do that, when the Pebble "smart" watch has this handy vibrating function and might be nice and useful as a cheap, non-smart timepiece?

Besides traveling a few years back in time to cancel my Pebble purchase, I have no other options with the watch other than making use of it. If someone is forced to settle for a smart TV due to lack of other options, there's nobody forcing him to make it "smart" and let it do unknown things on their network by acquiescing to reveal the home Wifi password

UX teams at Microsoft, Google and Apple started this downward trend. Junk slowly destroyed our multidimensional interactions by hiding options from our (or, should I say "their") property by removing a visual dimension at a time.

We're devolving from the already-poor web3.0 husks of Menus, Toolbars, and local help files so revered in the eighties and nineties to a place where none of them exist even when a screen is present (your phone is less and less likely to have physical buttons so when on fullscreen you end up pixel hunting, long-pressing the screen looking for hidden popup menus, and quitting a program because settings option only appears from certain hidden contexts... )

So now it's common for the only option to be a blank screen with an ill-placed hamburger menu and minimal output and they're killing even that.* We've fallen a long way down from the days when a rich menu had a Preferences entry that led to a dialog with a multiple rows of tabs.

The commercial world is basically hiding all help files, menus, toolbars and buttons behind a blackbox, offering screenless products that are forcing users to move their vocal cords to trigger little more functionality than a linear command-line. They're stepping back into the DOS days, except worse... those times used to gift us with keyboards and a screen, and obligatory user training on usage and error correction back then. You end up with situations like everyone slashdot who on this week's Google Home outage may have thought of visiting the store because the "Sorry, something went wrong" error for all commands and even involving local alarm clocks or casting. It's the ultimate blackbox-ification since the product is broken without the net (there was really no help or GUI indication of what to do, so it's not hard to empathize with the guy).

We now have the Pebble "smart" watch where the date/time menu makes it impossible to actually SET the date and time. When the device is discharged it resets to 12:00 of some obscure day. A watch with such a reasonable set of hardware buttons shouldn't have to be paired with an app on a phone just to tell it the time, man!
Chromecasts and Fitbits are worse, with no screens. I see more "convenient" Wifi features from printers and recent dedicated cameras that want to roam free on our home networks (along with IoT garbage and Windows 10 and our Sony smart tvs ) and demand installation of an always-on app. There used to be a time when we do a one-time wired setup where a CD installer took care of everything, and then some http maintenance config option would remain for convenience without having the company spy on you.

We even have this little-used WPS button that could get adapted precisely to get past the issue of inputting a Wifi password on a screenless device. Heck,
all bluetooth devices avoid the App trap by having a pairing button and a clear default pin... but no, people just want to plug something in, install an app that will snitch on them, and then be locked out of their verbal command line when the service hiccups.

* And like their Google map page does when you visit blocked scripts "When you have removed the javascript, what remains must be an empty page". Infuriating, considering 20 years ago the word ran maps oblivious to javascript settings, so this "must" is self-imposed, and with ill intentions knowning today's greed for analytics crimes.

Must not live in the USA then. Look up Equifax's 2017 leak of 143+ million records on US dwellers if you need your memory refreshed about systematic collection that is dispassionate about YOU taking any consumer-ish steps. The big financial system is set up so they go straight to all your financial entities, which then happily leak YOUR data in the form of unhideable credit reports available to anyone with the right background. I believe this is supported by governmental edicts (think, public court records and not so public loan and default information) in exchange for who knows what.

When I saw the 340m number, I thought "wait, are they even in the US alone?" Lo and behold, as of tonight, http://worldpopulationreview.c... estimates 320 million US inhabitants. Either we have tons of foreigners inadvertently caught in the web (ouch, you poor Europeans in practice were too late with your GDPR) or the data is replete with dead weight (almost 10% being dead North Americans).

I posit there is a healthy mixture of both, with a sprinkle of fake and inaccurate data in there... Credit reports from a decade ago were full of discrepancies between the big 3 credit reporting agencies wrt the accounts they were tracking, plus inaccurate addresses / Dates of birth / mixed data that belonged to a relative. I saw this same trend with my name under Spokeo et al as recently as 3 years ago, so I won't hold my breath that a greedy firm with more records than feasible US householders will actually have accurate data.

Think "number padding". Just like Facebook's "1 billion active users!!!!!!111!!" claim fails to clarify what percentage was bots, fakes and well-meaning sockpuppet / alt accounts you guys all have for discreet stalking :)

I've seen people get really nervous when the choice isn't "yes" and "no".
Computer users and choice do not mix well, though I hate how UI design has taken this to extremes.

In my experience, giving people detailed explanations triggers the attention deficit disorder unless they're heavily familiar with the product and confident in light of freedom rather than hand-holdy.

Slashdot recently had a GUI discussion where we gleaned that legacy MacOS designs heavily leaned on action verbs like "Save" "Discard" "Cancel" or "Save" "Cancel". Writing this, I seem to recall an age around Windows 95 or so where 3-choice dialogs were common... nowadays it seems devs are lazy and just hook in the System API that automates all dialogs to OK/Cancel.

In decades past many a program written like this had the pleasant unintended consequences when an otherwise English-only prompt with a long english question shows buttons with appropriate language translations for those buttons.