I used to wear a Xiaomi Mi Band on my right wrist. Honestly there’s nothing really wrong with it, but I bought it at launch, my mom wore it for a year, then I wore it for another year, and then the strap snapped and the charger went missing… I figured I’d just buy a replacement part, only to find the official store had discontinued every accessory for it, and the prices on Taobao were somehow higher than a brand-new one cost back then. Forget it, I got my money’s worth, so I gave up. But wearing something on my right wrist had become a habit, so I thought I’d get something else to wear. What though? Maybe something that actually looks good? That’s how I came across the Misfit Ray.

I’ve bought plenty of cheap earphones — the Edifier H293P, the Amazon Fire Phone stock earbuds, the QianShui 39, the QianShui 25 — and they all broke. Yeah, all of them. Some cracked, some snapped, some got mysteriously eaten away by liquid. Not sturdy at all. My main use for them is leaving a pair by the bed plugged into my tablet. I don’t listen to music, I just game with them, so you could call them sleep earphones. But these things just don’t hold up. The only two that survived any abuse were Apple’s EarPods and the Xiaomi Hybrid. That said, the EarPods sound kind of muddy and don’t seal that well, so the ones I actually used most were the Xiaomi Hybrids. Right, the original Hybrid that sold for 99 yuan. My verdict back then was it’s not as bad as people say — it’s at least a proper hybrid driver, and the sound is passable for games. Then my dad asked me for a phone — he had a Redmi Note 4 — so I ended up giving him the Hybrids. But out with the old, in with the new. I happened to see Xiaomi had released a Pro version, so I just bought it. That was back in November last year.

I bought my mom a Xiaomi Mi Band 2, so her old optical heart rate Mi Band landed in my hands. I tried wearing it on my right wrist, since my left one already has a Moto 360 2nd. Honestly I wasn’t expecting much from this thing. I even installed the pairing app on my backup Nexus 5X. My demands were low — mostly I just wanted to see if it could track my sleep quality, and whatever else it did, whatever. Since it has an alarm function, I set an alarm on it identical to the one on the Moto 360 2nd. The original band strap was disgustingly filthy, so I swapped on a spare yellow one that came free when I bought the thing.

I bought a Mi Robot Vacuum because my room gathers way too much dust—the kind where you leave your phone out overnight and wake up to a layer of dust on the screen. I tried sweeping once a day, but it still wasn’t enough, so I figured I’d get a robot vacuum. I looked on Quora and couldn’t afford anything they recommended, until I was scrolling X (Twitter) and saw that creep Wu Lao’er’s avatar, and thought, why not just follow Wu Lao’er and buy Xiaomi stuff? I assumed the Mi Robot Vacuum would be hard to snag, but it turned out to be in stock on the official site… so I placed an order. Ordered in the morning, and EMS delivered it that afternoon. Damn impressive…

People gotta treat themselves, sure—but you also have to factor in the possibility of gifts. So how does a Xiaomi hater like me end up with a Xiaomi Sign Pen?

I don’t remember where I read it, but at least one line stuck with me as pretty reasonable. “A lot of people gradually realize that their devices — everything except Apple — have almost all been replaced by Xiaomi.” I don’t use Apple, but looking back, there’s quite a bit of Xiaomi around me too. Mi Band, Redmi phone, Mi Power Bank, Mi batteries, Mi Piston earphones, Mi power strip, and… a Mi latex pillow.

Buying these earphones was an impulse purchase. I was helping my mother buy a Xiaomi Mi Band, and I figured I’d add some Xiaomi batteries to the order. My hand slipped, and I bought a pack of AAA batteries instead. I only noticed the mistake when the package arrived. Not that AAA batteries are useless to me. Thanks to that mistaken pack, the crappy TV in my room no longer needs me to hunt for buttons on the unit itself, because its remote’s batteries died long ago, and they’re AAA. So I thought about ordering the Xiaomi rainbow batteries again, this time AA. But batteries are so cheap that shipping is never free, and shipping alone costs more than a battery, which is a bad deal. I figured I’d add something to hit the free-shipping threshold, and that’s when I saw the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid earphones. I hadn’t looked into what the market thought of the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. I’d only heard bits and pieces, and naturally none of it was good. “For that money, go eat a nice meal.” “It’s just garbage.” “I pulled them off after 30 seconds.” “No sound quality whatsoever.” “Boomy, can’t hear the vocals at all.” Anyone with even a passing knowledge of earphones would say the same. I was inclined to believe they were trash too, because at this price, unless it’s a specialist manufacturer, they’re all the same: boosted bass and nothing else. But these are hybrid drivers, and I’d never heard a hybrid before. And… I needed something to pad the order. The power banks were out of stock! So somehow I bought the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. Or you could say I bought batteries and threw in a 99 yuan hybrid to hit the shipping threshold. So the question is, how do they actually perform? I hate keeping people in suspense—as the title says, “they’re not as bad as expected.”