I bought this speaker yesterday to give to my Mom.

I bought the speaker because my Mom wants to listen to my brother’s podcast, but her ipad doesn’t get loud enough for her to hear. My brother bought the JBL – Xtreme Portable Bluetooth Speaker and recommended that I buy it for my Mom, which was my intention. However, when I got to Best Buy, I found it cost $300, which was a lot more than what I wanted to spend. Instead I found the one above, which I bought for basically $100. I charged it last night and have been listening to it and it should work fine. But I’m not crazy about this speaker.

I understand that this is entirely a portable speaker, so it runs on a battery. The battery is recharged using a usb cable. So periodically, you need to plug it in to your laptop. When I was looking at these in the store, a guy came up to me and started talking about these speakers. He said that the usb cord only charges the battery. So if your battery is dead, you can’t just plug this in to your laptop and use it. You have to wait for the battery to charge. And in a year or two, when the battery no longer takes a charge, the speaker will be garbage because there’s no other way to run it. I’m not sure if he’s right, but he said that he has the jbl one that my brother has and had wished that he knew that before he bought it. If that is true, and I’m leaning to believe that, it’s really poor design. So I was looking for something that I could just plug in to use. I get that it means it wouldn’t be portable at that point, but at least it would be usable if the battery died.

Then I started to think about how I’d use the speaker and I realized that for me, portability isn’t that big of a deal. But I like the idea of connecting via bluetooth. I mainly have Apple products and I have an airport express that is connected to my stereo to use, so I could play sound via that. But, it limits me to Apple products, like iTunes. I listed to lots of podcasts and I’d like to be able to play them on my bluetooth speaker. And I could use iTunes for my podcasts, but I like using Clementine. And I’ll be honest, part of this is that I want to move away from Apple products. This could be an entirely different post, but Apple is moving in a direction that I don’t necessarily want to go. As an example, they’ve taken most built-in connections off of their laptops. You get a single usb-c connection. Then you have to spend even more to buy all these dongles to do things that used to be built-in. I still use my ethernet connection a lot. I’m a system administrator and have to check if jacks are live or not. I also use usb a lot. I really don’t want to have to carry a handful of dongles everytime I go to someone’s office to check things. Right now, I need to be able to support Apple, Windows and linux. My macbook pro has been great in that I can run virtual machines with each of those operating systems, so I check things in all of those. The one improvement that I would like from Apple would be to be able to get more ram to make my virtual machines run better. I’ve upgraded my macbook pro from 2012 to 16gb of ram. Five years later and that’s still the most I can get. In fact, I bought a new (to me) macbook pro from Apple’s clearance section because it still had usb connections. It doesn’t have the network one, but Apple has definitely given up on that port. In my mind, I’m thinking this is probably the last laptop I’ll be buying that I’ll use at work. Once I’m not longer working, I can use whatever OS I want and these days I’m leaning toward linux. And so I’ve been looking at programs that I want to use that run on linux. That’s how I found Clementine and it’s worked fine for me. So getting off this tangent I just took, I like the idea of a bluetooth speaker because it doesn’t care what the OS is.

I haven’t been able to find a bluetooth speaker that I like, so my idea now is to build what I like. I like the YouTube channel Kirby Meets Audio and I actually bought some plans from him. It looks like a fun project and I think it would be exactly what I want. We’ll see how it goes.