Heard of Elephants?

A PLETHORA OF KNOBS

This is a great example of how iOS has drastically improved usability by simplifying the UI.

When I queue up a video on my (work) desktop, I routinely have my ears blown to bloody shreds. There’s a moment where all three of my hands reach out and fumble with buttons on my keyboard, the knob on my speakers, and my mouse to grab the slider in the video wrapper. Some combination of the three is perfect, but it’s seemingly never the same setpoints for any two videos.

The same video on my laptop (or presumably any computer with internal speakers), whether it’s my windows work laptop or our macbook at home, cuts it down to 2 adjustments. The macbook has a slight edge since it has dedicated volume keys; my HP laptop requires fn+F6 or fn+F7 for system volume adjustments.

On iOS, though, the h.264 video decoder strips out the volume controls and instead relies only on system volume for everything. Sure, there are up to 3 different places to control this volume: hardware buttons, in-line control on the headphones, and an on-screen slider, but they all adjust the same thing. Whichever one I reach for adjusts the noise entering my head in a way that I expect, and I really appreciate that.

Note: I understand that sometimes there is a need for granular adjustment between desktop apps while iOS devices limit you to one (sometimes two) apps producing sound at once. Most iOS games that let you BYOM also give you that granular control within their settings, complicating the volume control a bit. I don’t have the answer to how volume control can be improved on non-mobile devices - just my observation that perhaps it could be.