A while back there was a thread on Reddit recommending some cheap Chinese e-waste, and it was pushing this Bluetooth speaker: the Jambox mini. I’d honestly never heard of this Jambox mini thing. I just saw the thread hyping it up with “can’t lose at this price” and “beats stuff at the 500 yuan tier,” so since it was cheap I figured I’d buy one and mess around with it. This kind of thing always reminds me of back in the day when I’d read some idiot “poison-pen” post going on about how some earbuds only cost 49 or 99 and you can’t go wrong buying them, and in the end it turns out you really can’t go wrong — they just sit there gathering dust. This time I couldn’t hold back and ordered one. And the seller, who seemed to be some kind of official Foxconn outlet, took nearly a week and a half to ship. But it did eventually arrive. The speaker is bare-bones: just the unit and a charger, that’s it.

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.