The bozo bit as described is how I thought about Sony for a long time.
I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer".
That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.
My favorite example of this with Sony: the WH-1000XM series noise cancelling headphones are absolutely great and they would be the only headphones I ever use if only there was a way to mute the microphone from the headphones themselves. There's even a touch-sensitive panel on the earpiece and several control options you can pick to have available through it, but mute is not one of the options.
IMO the whole physical interface on these makes no sense. The microphone seems to be garbage, so why even include it? The touch panel literally never does what I want it to do, I wish they'd just replace it with buttons. The ONE tactile button on the device (aside from power) can only be used to change the noise-canceling mode, which I never do.
What I would do frequently is pair to another device, so it would be great if that one button could be used to unpair-and-enter-pairing-mode. Instead, I "repair" by connecting it to one device over bluetooth, and another device with a cable. It's a silly, awkward thing to do with my wireless headphones, but it's 100% reliable. Oh well.
My example for a similar product is Sony NW-S703F, a noise-canceling MP3 player.
It was a thing of beauty, just terribly pleasurable to use. The noise canceling and audio quality was great.
But - it only supported a proprietary audio format, and everything had to be transcoded instead of just copied over. Took forever, and it couldn't successfully transcode every format.
And that's how Sony stays in business. It was such a good music player once the music was on there, I am tempted to buy another one as long as it's cheap.
This goes for their professional equipment as well. I worked with their cinema projectors a few years back. In theory they were better than most other solutions, but managing them were ... cumbersome. You could only access it using a special program that only ran on Windows. It was really picky with DCP's. And it was difficult to know what it was doing at all tiems. You had to say at least three hail mary's when attempting to upgrade them. At one point upgrade could only be done with a USB stick that you had to connect deep inside the projector.
But it was 4K before there were movies in 4K. They came with laser projectors early. They were ready for high frame rate from the beginning and almost never needed replacement parts fitted unlike certain other manufacturers.
I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer".
That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.