Way back in 2012, I saved an article entitled Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time from over at LifeHacker. What caught my eye originally was the initial premise:
Ever been told that you should fully discharge your battery to prolong its life? Or that jailbreaking your phone is illegal? Or that you should wait for the newest Intel processor because it’s going to be “so much faster”? These are tech myths we hear all the time, and likely spread to our friends—but most are just a waste of your time (and in some cases, they can actually harm your gadgets). Here are some of the worst offenders.
What kept me around though, and why I’ve saved the article all these years is the fact that many of the “top ten” are still pervasive, and are still myths.
One that I embrace is debunking the MP3 myth. If you go to any of the audiophile sites, they’ll tell you that having lossless quality audio is the only way to go, that an MP3 at 128 bps or even 256 bps is just a waste of time, blah blah blah. My ex-boss, who I respect, is heavily in this realm and has stereo wire in his house that costs more than all my computers combined, along with the highest quality digital files he can get. What’s the reality? Unless I’m comparing 256 to something less than 64, I probably can’t tell the difference. Why? Because I’m not playing it on super high quality systems and speakers. In fact, most of the time, I’m playing it on the equivalent of a high-quality AM/FM radio. Which means all that superior quality up front is completely lost at the backend. And with that output generator, most people’s ears can’t tell the difference. There’s even some evidence that only 1% of people are even capable of discerning a difference, even with lossless, although there are far more than that who will tell you they can.
The rest of the article talks about hardware specs vs. upgrades, android task killers, jailbreaking an iPhone, malware and Macs, extended warranties, discharging laptop batteries, wifi protection, P2P networks, and tweaking system settings to get speed boosts.
