About the village in my heart, the difficulty of choice and mental disorders.
A friend of mine once pulled a funny trick. It was back in 2004, and the now legendary Nokia 6230 has just entered the market.
The mentality of young people of that time differed little from the so-called post-Soviet one. Buying a new thing, people planned to own it for a long time, take care of it, carry out repairs of any complexity and, possibly, leave it as inheritance. There was also such a phenomenon as 'to get something' or 'to find something', and on the street, seeing a new thing in your hands, you could be stopped and asked where this thing was acquired. It seems incredible, but it is true, there were very few mobile phone shops, much less than bakeries or pharmacies. And the release of new phones was accompanied by increased interest due to its still 'curiosity'. A 'color screen' was already a necessary minimum, and the appearance of a camera peephole in the middle segment turned all previous phones into creepy antiques. The situation was funny, in the work collectives and students it was customary to ask to 'show' the new phone, but they did not ask about the camera's resolution, but about whether it exists in principle, no one thought about the existence of a focus. And then one quiet evening my friend, in a moment of weakness, took and bought himself a hot new product – a Nokia 6230 phone. And since he was far from home, he decided to return by taxi, for which he stood on the edge of the roadside and raised his hand. Is it any wonder that in a world without Yandex.Taxi and Hubert, as well as before the advent of taxi companies with affordable prices, falling asleep in a taxi, with a probability of at least 50%, lost your property? So it happened with my friend, who 'lost' the phone he had just bought. The most interesting thing happened next – from the next salary, he bought himself exactly the same. The man achieved his goal, showed character and conquered karma. But was it worth it? Did the purchase of the Nokia 6230 in 2004 make a little more sense after this adventure? No, I didn't. Most of the population could not pay for unlimited GPRS, and there was very little suitable content on the Internet. There was a telephone, but the capabilities inherent in it were not implemented in practice.
Later, the operators began to turn inside out almost inside out, luring the user into the WAP network
The internet has gotten better these days. 3G, LTE and the departure from WAP allowed electronics owners to do what they love – read news on the go, send 'themselves' via messenger and post other people's thoughts on social networks. But purchases of useless things in a moment of weakness did not go anywhere. And here are some thoughts on the matter.
Buying a TV with DVB-T2 support and Android
Wireless television of the DVB-T2 standard already exists, as do many TVs with support out of the box. The question is, is it worth buying a new TV set to watch DVB-T2 channels if you can buy a separate tuner box for 1,000 rubles.
Typical offer: DVB-T2 tuner + remote control = 900 rubles
If your old TV doesn't have HDMI, then yes, it's better to buy a new TV with this feature. But if there is such a connector, then it makes no sense to overpay. New TVs with truly revolutionary LED screens are expensive, and TN matrices have not made any significant evolutionary leaps in recent years. Our old TN TV is most likely no different from the same new one at the same screen resolution.
Let's touch on what is now called 'SMART TV'. Buying a smart TV doesn't seem smart if the smart feature requirements are all about reading news, watching YouTube and watching movies with a paid subscription through the Android app. And there are objective reasons for this – inexpensive 'smart' TVs have extremely weak chipsets, at best comparable in performance to the eternal MediaTek MT6580. It comes to the ridiculous, with a 1080p screen matrix, the 'smart' TV is not able to play YouTube videos of the same format.
Even a smart TV from the A-brand does not give guarantees, it's better not to even talk about cheap analogs.
The only sensible way out of this situation is to buy Xiaomi Mi TV Box, if the buyer does not want to deal with the firmware. Or he knows what to buy.
At the exit we get our old TV (free), plus 1,000 rubles for a DVB-T2 tuner, plus one of the models Xiaomi Mi TV Box (from 2,600 rubles) or another Android – prefix. In any case, the number of wires ugly coiled behind the TV is increasing. But what is it to us? We won't see them if we carefully hide them. Such a split combination has a long life ahead. The appearance of TVs will change, and LED-matrices will become cheaper, and a thrifty owner will always have the opportunity to transfer 'smart' functions to a new TV. One way or another, with this approach, when choosing a TV, you can concentrate on the main thing – on the image quality, without distractions.
And this is a reason to remember another friend of mine who, without consulting, bought himself a smart TV Xiaomi and for a long time looked for DVB-T2 support from him, which was not there. The purchase was spontaneous, triggered by the moaning of his wife, who wanted a new good TV with Wi-Fi. Dear women, remember, not everything is better that is new, not everything is 'better' that Xiaomi.
Buying a smartphone for the camera
Buying a camera phone just because it's a camera phone seems like a strange idea. It may be a secret for many, but on the Google Photos WEB page, you can literally turn almost any photo from 'terrible' to 'okay' with just a few clicks. I suggest using a simple algorithm – first, from the proposed change options, select the one where the supposedly white object looks white, and then tweak the detail and chroma sliders until you like it:
Photo from the review Alcatel 1 after processing (on the right). I like two things – the increased detail and savings of 20,000 rubles when buying a smartphone.
Many are ready to overpay twice for an advanced camera, but why? Such a camera for the majority of citizens is exclusively psychological in nature, it was put in the user's head by marketers of the heyday of digital technology, and since then it has been lying there, taking money out of our pockets. Most of the really beautiful photos in public and social networks are taken with digital cameras, and the success of the rest is due to the content and meaning, not the quality of the picture. From these prerequisites, a simple conclusion follows – buying a smartphone for the sake of a camera, a person flatters his pride, there are no other objective reasons for this purchase. Although, it is likely that high requirements for a smartphone camera can have people who suffer from a constant desire to zoom in and out of objects in a captured photograph using pinch movements of their fingers. In 1955, the advent of televisions led to a mental disorder called zapping. the desire to constantly switch TV channels. Could it be that the development of digital cameras in smartphones gave rise to 'pinching'? What do you think?
Purchase 'not to be worse than others'
This argument used to work great in villages. Yes, it was in the villages, when people were in sight of each other and your leaky felt boot could evoke a feeling of superiority in a neighbor who recently bought galoshes. The owner of the felt boots saw this superiority and was ready to do a lot to wipe the impudent smile from the neighbor's face. Alas, this simple technique based on personal inferiority is still perfectly exploited by marketers. We are shown successful beautiful people with new smartphones, thus appealing to the 'village' that has dug deep in our souls. And if an adult may not succumb to this trick, then a teenager has practically no chance, because the formation of his character just falls on the period of the 'village', at school, and then in an educational institution, where everyone looks at each other's 'boots'.
The intro of the popular channel MatiyMay, iPhone is there, there will be views.
The most rational behavior in this case is a complete denial of the reality imposed by marketers, an approach to buying focused on the demand for smartphone functions and practical tests. And only on them. Otherwise, a spontaneous purchase is inevitable.
Perhaps it is worth pitying our conditional owner of galoshes, because he, too, became a victim of a spontaneous purchase, having seen galoshes on the feet of an advertising gentleman and bought them.
Instead of output
Well, what conclusions can there be? Spontaneous purchases are called so because they occur at the time of loss of self-control and / or under the pressure of psychological pressure from a loved one. There is hardly a reliable way to protect yourself from them and at the same time remain sane. And yet, sometimes with our spontaneous purchases we hit the bull's-eye and then use accidentally bought things for a long time.
Friends, please tell us about your spontaneous purchases and the further fate of these things. Has it ever happened that an accidentally purchased item surprised you in an amicable way?