Does Today’s Tech Just Work?

The scope of this article is going to be slightly different. It’s not going to have a particular focus on one particular device or operating system.

Rather, it’s going to be me sharing a few incidents of technology just being very weird.

The kind of weird where things don’t work the way they are supposed to, and geeks like me struggle to pinpoint the cause for the trouble.

One such incident was with a friend of mine. He was someone who cared about the technology he used to some extent and paid attention to minute details that the layman would not.

He recently bought a Boat Stone 100 Bluetooth speaker based on my recommendation from Flipkart.

I do not recall what price the speaker was being sold at, but it was a steal.

The first few weeks were amazing. The speaker connected to all his devices without much delay. Sound quality also did not see any huge problems as well.

But problems began to show up soon.

For context, this friend of mine has a Mac and a Windows 10 laptop (he did it update it Windows 11 later). Both of which he uses actively for consuming content with the speaker.

Then weird things began to happen with the Windows laptop.

The speaker would at first connect to the Windows laptop without much trouble. But soon there began to emerge a delay.

The delay itself was happening was not too terrible or unmanageable. But with time a very interesting problem cropped up.

After successfully pairing, and then playing some content, the speaker would work fine. Till my friend paused the video, after which the speaker would not perform at the volume it was set at.

The solution to this also proved to be very interesting and weird. By continuously, turning the volume up and down on the laptop or speaker itself (kind of like how you let an engine warm-up?), the speaker would proceed to slowly give out the volume level we had set it at.

The same speaker had no such problem with the Mac. The core issue of it might have been an underlying driver issue.

We both tried every solution possible that came to our minds. But the speaker still proved to have a mind of its own whenever it was connected to the Windows laptop.

We soon gave up and began to use the speaker with the Mac for convenience.

A few months passed, and my friend updated to Windows 11.

After which, the problem seemingly disappeared. Which led to us concluding that there must have been something wrong with the way Windows 10 interacted with the Bluetooth speaker.

It was convenient that a major update fixed the problem for him, but it’s quite sad to think that if he had stuck with Windows 10, he probably would have had to get a new speaker for general usage.

Another tale I have that I and many of my friends have experienced with connecting our laptops to external displays. I have only seen this glitch happen with Windows laptops, but I’m sure Macs are also susceptible to the same problem.

The issue involves display scaling.

I have seen this issue happen with two laptops, the Acer Aspire 5 and a Lenovo Ideapad 310.

The Acer had a dedicated GPU, while the Ideapad didn’t.

For some reason, mainly driver issues I suppose, the output on the display was zoomed in. This meant that any video or game that was put on was missing a lot on the bigger screen.

The problem also persisted on both laptops despite having different video cards for HDMI output.

Even now if you go to YouTube and look up scaling issues the amount of troubleshooting videos is alarming, to say the least.

And this was one particular problem that I never bothered to fix. HDMI connectivity and video drivers have always traumatized me since then.

I also want to add something to this.

I’m one of those people who love to use the Night Light feature on my device. And my laptop is no exception. Something cool that Windows does is that it applies the same tinge to any external display that your laptop is connected to.

Macs don’t do this.

It’s such a weird thing to not have and I guess you can live without it. However, it’s incredibly useful to have external displays replicate the effect, especially at night.

I could go on and on, with many different stories that are directly and remotely related to tech that I have encountered over my life.

But I won’t because then this article will become too long, boring, and cribby.

What I am trying to get at here is that despite all this advancement in technology, sometimes, you just can’t manage to do the simplest of things.

I’m pretty sure some of you reading this article while maybe not having the same problems with your technology, have certainly had some problems that made life that much more difficult.

Here’s something that I think a vast majority of us will relate to:

Getting the printer to work.

Be it with your computer or wirelessly, the thing just never seems to want to work the way you want it to.

The article sounds very bleak and cribby, but then again, it is what it is.

I hope that companies give some focus to these little things that go a long way.

It’s not possible to write out an entire list of what these small but important things are. But with time and testing, a lot of these small issues can be ironed out.