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I always thought that the main difference between the M2 Air and Pro is that the MacBook Pro has active cooling, which essentially means fans. Has anyone done a side by side comparison to show if the MacBook Pro with fans actually performs better than the Air? I guess someone may want to squeeze a little bit more power out of the thing. I would believe the theory that they still have the enclosures. I can't see the M2 MacBook Pro being a thing for much longer.
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Aug 13, 2022 05:54
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The reviews ive seen have all said that the M2 Air throttles its hardware really hard if you are doing anything that is intensive. You wont be playing games or doing video encoding on it. It seems to me if you really want to do intensive hardware stuff its actually better to get the Mac Mini Pro or whatever its called.
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Aug 13, 2022 06:02
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I said come in! posted:The reviews ive seen have all said that the M2 Air throttles its hardware really hard if you are doing anything that is intensive. You wont be playing games or doing video encoding on it. Eh. You definitely can play games or encode video on an Air. If you're fine reducing graphics settings in games a bit, and only occasionally need to encode a video, you shouldn't talk yourself out of an Air if you prefer everything else about it. Generally speaking the worst CPU throttling seems to be about 2/3 of full speed. That might sound awful, but M1/M2 full speed is so good that 2/3 of it is still decent. I played through The Witness (a fairly pretty 3D game) on a M1 Air and it ran very smooth at half the native display res. Still looked great too. (IIRC it did OK even at full native resolution, but I wanted to keep the game's power use down to make it more practical to play on battery.)
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Aug 13, 2022 09:22
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BobHoward posted:The M2 MBA is half speed only when measured by throughput. Its latency is still fine, and for many tasks (notably including swapping) latency's at least as important. There's no way this is true and it has the same IOPS with only one chip.
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Aug 13, 2022 10:38
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I said come in! posted:The reviews ive seen have all said that the M2 Air throttles its hardware really hard if you are doing anything that is intensive. You wont be playing games or doing video encoding on it. This depends entirely on the context of the videos you're encoding, how long they are, the extent to which you're using overlays/rendering effects, and your output codec. MacBook Airs aren't production machines and never have been but if all you're doing is 10-12 minute 4k clips exporting to h.265 or using ProRes (for whatever reason) they do great, perfectly usable and very speedy. If you're trying to render out longer clips in less accelerated codecs and/or are making strong use of color correction, after effects, overlays, etc, sure it'll throttle pretty quickly and pin itself but you knew that because that's not a workload for a thin and light laptop, that's a workstation or -- ideally -- a server render.
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Aug 13, 2022 19:26
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Criss-cross posted:There's no way this is true and it has the same IOPS with only one chip. Didn't say IOPS, said latency. The two are related but are definitely not the same thing. Extracting lots of IOPS from a flash memory based SSD generally requires a very high queue depth, which in turn generally requires lots of agents submitting tons of parallel, async IO requests. This is a common thing in database servers, but not so much on personal computers. What happens when Fart.app is slow because of swapping is that Fart.app first tries to access a page that's not resident, and the page fault handler gets invoked. The page fault handler puts Fart.app on ice until that page can be read back in from disk. Once it's ready to go again, Fart.app might page fault on its very next memory access, but there was no way to predict exactly what page that would be at the time of the first fault, so there's not much scope for the page fault handler to predict future faults from the current one to start parallel IO requests in hopes of exploiting high-IOPs SSDs. In short, swapping is serialized, random, and low queue depth. Performance will be mostly be a function of the SSD's latency - how fast can it get through each step in a dependent chain of random IOs?
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Aug 13, 2022 20:02
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Here's the landscape right now. Do you need to render heavy final cut pro projects as your job, and need every minute? Do you do heavy, I'm talking hundred plus tracks mixing for Logic? Are you for some reason playing the... (checks notes) I don't actually see any competitive games that would work here, that require faster frame rates that you would game on a mac for. Then you need a pro over an air. If you don't, then the air 2 is enough computer for you. It then comes down to price and features. Personally, I'd go 16 gigs, at least 512 Gigs. when you spec up the air that way, then yes, I'm leaning towards the Pro, since the keyboard is slightly better, more ports, the speakers are better, the screen is better. But if i was forced to choose between say a 8 gig M1 with 512 and the same in a new air? I'd pick the new air. The keyboard is better than the M1 air, the speakers are better, the screen is brighter, and the MagSafe is dope. There are no bad choices here, just price/cost what are you looking for trade offs. All three are great computers. Hell, every single m1/2 mac's are really set it up and just enjoy it computers. My buddy's girlfriend is upgrading from a 13 inch MacBook pro from 2013. It's getting a little slow. She loves it, and doesn't really want bigger. So i recommended a spec'd up M2 air. She got it in Starlight (looks great in person) and she loves it. Perfect computer for her. Some music work, but mostly it's emails and streaming. She's so happy. That's the majority of people. Expect the M2 Pro. That's a dumb computer. Not a bad computer. Just a dumb one. (also, the m2 air on the youtube videos I've watched playing old games in cross over seem fine, if that's something you care about. I'm sure Dolphin also runs fine, since it did smoothly on the m1 airs as well).
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Aug 14, 2022 02:04
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A friend wants to replace the base storage on their 2013 Mac Pro, and asked me which SSDs. I found the prior list that Binary Badger and BobHoward have recommended for brands/etc., but for the Sintech adapter, does it matter whether it's the short or long versions if it's going in a 2013 MP? I saw where Binary Badger typically recommended the short version, but it seems like people are using both versions for the Mac Pro.
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Aug 14, 2022 17:52
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Don't know for sure, but I don't think short v. long should matter in the 2013MP. On the other hand, why not just use the short? I did when I upgraded a 2019 iMac 27" and it worked well.
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Aug 14, 2022 19:58
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I found a 45W Magsafe 2 power supply in the garden yesterday with a cable in rough condition and covered in goose poop. I don't know much about Apple hardware, can it be modded to act as a generic DC power supply? It looks like it's a proprietary standard so I'm guessing not, in which case I'll just get a replacement cable to solder in and give it away to a friend that could use it or something. Cleaned up nicely with some 400 to 1500 grit sandpaper and a buffing wheel.  
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Aug 14, 2022 22:15
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I'm not dead yet? Here's why I like the short Sintech for 2013-2015 Pros/Airs: better fit when using double sided SSDs (where the NAND is on both sides of the little PCI board.) For SSDs, I've been recommending Inland Premium SSDs, Amazon has the 1 TB Premium for only $89.99, $179 for 2 TB. They now come with Phison E12S controllers which are the same as the E12 controllers but with only half the DRAM (256 MB vs. 512 MB) and they are eminently Mac compatible. The halved DRAM really makes no difference, I still have a bunch of the older E12 versions running in various Macs and the newer ones run just as fast. If you wanted to spend more money, Hynix Gold P31s are $107.99 for 1 TB and $199 for 2 TB..they use a proprietary controller/firmware that was recently tweaked to be Mac compatible. Also, whenever I've bought a not-Sintech adapter it winds up corroding over time somehow. It took five years for a Sintech one to go wonky on me (and from what I can see of newer ones I bought, they're probably not gonna go so fast.) Also, I hold no stake in Sintech if that's bothering you.
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Aug 14, 2022 22:35
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I'd also remind you to tell your friend to update their OS to as recent a version as possible, as Apple actually did some tweaks to rMBP firmware that make working with third party SSDs a little easier; at the very least, the latest / last security patch version of High Sierra or Mojave. If you can upgrade the laptop to Big Sur (at least 11.0.1,) Big Sur includes firmware updates that allow deep sleep and hibernation to work better with third party NVMe drives. Do this BEFORE you get the new drive and adapter for smoothest operation.
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Aug 14, 2022 23:14
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SourKraut posted:A friend wants to replace the base storage on their 2013 Mac Pro, and asked me which SSDs. I found the prior list that Binary Badger and BobHoward have recommended for brands/etc., but for the Sintech adapter, does it matter whether it's the short or long versions if it's going in a 2013 MP? BTW, you mean a MacBook Pro, right? Or do you mean the venerated TrashCan Pro? If it's the trashcan, definitely the short one, you might not be able to close the top shell over the long one. Even if it's a trashcan Mac Pro, most of the same stuff still applies.. get it up to Big Sur, use compatible SSDs, use adapter.. Be advised that the 2013 trashcan pro is kind of a special case, as it uses an NVMe slot that literally sits on top of a modded AMD FirePro GPU and has been limited to work on only PCIe 2.0 x2 channels, meaning the max throughput is like around 1000-1100 MB/sec. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Aug 14, 2022 |
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Aug 14, 2022 23:18
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BobHoward posted:Don't know for sure, but I don't think short v. long should matter in the 2013MP. On the other hand, why not just use the short? I did when I upgraded a 2019 iMac 27" and it worked well. Binary Badger posted:BTW, you mean a MacBook Pro, right? Or do you mean the venerated TrashCan Pro? Thank you both! He actually has the TrashCan Pro, and it sounds like he had the 256 GB blade, and wants to take it up to 1 TB. I'll tell him to get the Sintech short adapter.
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Aug 14, 2022 23:44
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Coxswain Balls posted:I found a 45W Magsafe 2 power supply in the garden yesterday with a cable in rough condition and covered in goose poop. I don't know much about Apple hardware, can it be modded to act as a generic DC power supply? It looks like it's a proprietary standard so I'm guessing not, in which case I'll just get a replacement cable to solder in and give it away to a friend that could use it or something. Ken Shirriff has all the deets: http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-magsafe.html You'll have to work past some safety handshaking. It starts off in an extremely current limited mode for safety, and the computer signals it that it's OK to turn on to full power by providing a specific resistive load for 1 second.
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Aug 15, 2022 00:24
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Looking to sell my 2020 MBA. Is Ebay the best choice still?
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Aug 18, 2022 17:27
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Local is better if you don’t mind it the-wants-it-for-frees via Facebook or Craigslist or equivalent. No fees. Otherwise eBay works
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Aug 18, 2022 17:33
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eBay is my last resort. I typically post in r/hardwareswap, r/appleswap, SA Mart, then ebay finally if no buyers after a few days. The fees on ebay are insane.
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Aug 18, 2022 17:37
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i've bought through swappa.com a couple times and had a good experience, don't know what selling is like though. might be worth a look
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Aug 18, 2022 17:39
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Bad Purchase posted:i've bought through swappa.com a couple times and had a good experience, don't know what selling is like though. might be worth a look I’ve bought and sold through swappa.com and highly recommend it.
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Aug 18, 2022 19:41
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My order of selling attempts is usually Friends or Family > SA Mart > Local Ads > Swappa > a trusted trade in site > a shady trade in site > just keep the thing forever > on the street > in the garage > eBay
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Aug 18, 2022 20:06
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I used to sell a ton of poo poo on ebay but it's kinda expensive to sell there
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Aug 18, 2022 20:42
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eBay is expensive, but I do regularly get unexpectedly high auction results there which in some cases more than makes up for that. Depends on the item though. If it's in high enough demand to sell quickly at a high price locally then I wouldn't bother with eBay, but for items that will have less interest eBay really gets it out to a larger interested audience that will actually bid each other up. For a 2020 MBA, probably wouldn't take that o eBay, but an early 2010s MBP or something, probably worth tossing up on eBay.
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Aug 18, 2022 21:56
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yea a good thing to consider is probably the long tail
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Aug 18, 2022 22:03
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Just remember to keep good records because the IRS might come asking. Not sure how they calculate if it’s income if you sold it at a loss. Is it measured vs original price or some kinda FMV?
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Aug 18, 2022 22:14
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Crossposting my SA-Mart thread here! I am selling my 2021 MacBook M1 Pro 10-Core (16-inch). It's great, but work is buying me a better one! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4010239
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Aug 19, 2022 00:18
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The MBA M2 showed up! Unboxed, set it up. Everything works well. I'm impressed at the battery life. I was sitting on the couch noodling away at getting home-brew installed and some cli apps. A couple hours of that and browsing and still at 94% battery life at medium screen brightness! Also got some vm's installed.. The platform seemed to handle a couple vm's running idle. It obviously won't replace the horsepower of my ryzen desktop had, but I'm optimistic I can run the instances I need for show-and-tell "hacker" demos. Also I was worried going ARM would mean I was going to lose my entire toolset. Not the case. Having to do a few workarounds but not nearly a struggle as I thought it might be. Waiting for the studio display to show up. In the mean time I have an old LG 4k 23" display.
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Aug 21, 2022 06:45
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Grass on your purchase, and also on buying the correct monitor for it.
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Aug 21, 2022 06:54
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evelyn87 posted:The MBA M2 showed up! Lucky! I am still waiting for Tim Cook to ship mine. Its in the preparing to ship phase now, and I assume has to come from China, so it will be a few more weeks.
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Aug 22, 2022 03:08
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So I start a new job with a new company next week and I’ll be getting a 16” M1 MacBook Pro. I’ve always used a windows pc so I know there will be some getting used to. What would be the best headset to get? Any other pointers to keep in mind. Several years ago I did do a hackintosh and it was fairly easy to use and my wife had been using a Mac for years at her job.
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Aug 22, 2022 03:28
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god this blows posted:So I start a new job with a new company next week and I’ll be getting a 16” M1 MacBook Pro. I’ve always used a windows pc so I know there will be some getting used to. What would be the best headset to get? Any other pointers to keep in mind. Several years ago I did do a hackintosh and it was fairly easy to use and my wife had been using a Mac for years at her job. prolly get razzed for this but i’d get the airpods pro. also if you’re going to be using external input for your laptop with an external display I loving love the tragic macpad
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Aug 22, 2022 03:37
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god this blows posted:So I start a new job with a new company next week and I’ll be getting a 16” M1 MacBook Pro. I’ve always used a windows pc so I know there will be some getting used to. What would be the best headset to get? Any other pointers to keep in mind. Several years ago I did do a hackintosh and it was fairly easy to use and my wife had been using a Mac for years at her job. This is going to depend on what you want out of your headset. AirPods Pro or AirPods max are both relatively expensive but as far as ease of use, always working properly, instant connection, good mic quality I don’t think much will beat them (other than beats stuff; which is also Apple owned and has the same chips, but cheaper aesthetics and build quality and different audio tuning.) The noise cancellation in the AirPods max is phenomenal; but some people don’t like how they sound - they are very, very flat and neutral. The headband is also on the smaller side and has quite a bit of clamping force so if you have a larger head I’d suggest finding a place to try them on first. But honestly if your main use case is zoom meetings and stuff you can’t beat AirPods of some flavour.
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Aug 22, 2022 03:37
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I have an enormous head and the apm will fit at max length or with a thin baseball cap on but nothing else lol favourite cans by a mile, though and I’ve had my share of reasonably and not so affordable headphones
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Aug 22, 2022 03:41
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i prefer the powerbeats pro just bc the over ear thing makes it so the airpods dont go flyin out at random. otherwise yea airpods are fine too. but heck any headset u like will work, live ur life
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Aug 22, 2022 03:55
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You don't need special headphones lmao, especially not $600 ones. Just google recommended headsets.
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Aug 22, 2022 03:55
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i don’t think even that poster is real serious about apms. like yeah they’re nice but way overkill. i picked up a pair of powerbeats pro at a local auction because they were labeled as the corded kind. got them for $20 cad lol i would not use them to take calls personally. i find them annoying to wear (great for running tho). the app are imo ideal for this sort of thing but i can’t stand wearing a corded headset at a computer these days anyway my so has been working and lecturing and poo poo since the pandemic started and really likes them (edit: to clarify, the airpods pro) for that purpose mediaphage fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Aug 22, 2022 |
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Aug 22, 2022 04:00
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I’m glad to hear that the AirPods are a good choice for things like Zoom and other meetings. My pc headset was a single ear one and I liked it as I could still hear my dogs get into things. I’ll take a look at the different options.
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Aug 22, 2022 04:05
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yeah i haven’t used the transparency mode on the app but the one on the apm is honestly kind of voodoo
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Aug 22, 2022 04:14
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mediaphage posted:yeah i haven’t used the transparency mode on the app but the one on the apm is honestly kind of voodoo It’s crazy good - I have dogs and kids and if I’m the only adult home I use transparency mode when I’m in meetings and can hear poo poo going on around the house *better* than I can without headphones. The noise cancelling is equally good. And if you have a Dolby Atmos source the spatial audio is pretty great. They’re expensive but very good at what they do.
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Aug 22, 2022 04:42
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when someone says "headset", i usually assume they don't mean portable earbuds like airpods or beats fit pro or whatever. i assume they mean more like a full set of on/over the ear headphones with a mic. what to recommend in that category depends on needs. if they're ok with bluetooth and the codec and compatibility issues that come with it, the sony wh-1000mx5 (or 4) or bose quietcomfort seem to be pretty universally praised. they're also good for air/train/car travel because they have very good noise canceling. those are both expensive at MSRP but run big sales pretty often. if they want to use them for gaming as well, i'd say to avoid bluetooth and get a wired heasdset or a gaming-oriented wireless headset with a custom usb receiver that will get significantly lower latency and allow for better bandwidth than bluetooth. i'm not sure what to recommend in this category anymore. i've been using a hyperx cloud something-or-other wireless headset, and it's fine, but i know a lot of stuff has come out in the ~4 years since i got it and you can almost certainly do better. if you don't need portability at all, your best bet might be to just get a standalone desk mic and a good pair of old fashioned stereo headphones. i did this for a long time and was eventually won over by the convenience of wireless. the drop in quality was noticeable, but i don't think i can go back to cables.
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Aug 22, 2022 05:01
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