My father said he wanted a Bluetooth speaker, to pair with his phone and listen to music. Sure, when he’s home he blasts music from his phone at some ungodly hour every morning and wakes me up with all that boom-tss boom-tss, but since it’s my tsundere old man asking, and he’s wearing that face of “if it’s convenient for you you can just casually buy me one, of course if you don’t I can buy it myself, it’s not like I’m asking you to buy it or anything”—no reason not to buy it. Money spent on your parents is money well spent. But since this was my first time buying one of these, I didn’t want to go too expensive. Buying a Bose felt like a bit much for him—start with something with good value for money, so it won’t hurt if Dad accidentally loses it. After looking around, I settled on the Sounder Honeycomb 2S+. It happened to be on special at JD, 299 - 100, and with a BaiTiao savings coupon it came to 169 in the end.

I bought this for my parents. Before this, my mother was using a Sony Xperia Z1 I’d handed down to her, and my father was on a first-gen Meizu M1 Note. I bought the Redmi Note 3 mainly for three reasons: New 全网通 processor, supposedly very solid. Massive 4000 mAh battery, supposedly very solid. For people my parents’ age, MIUI is an explosively user-friendly system.