Christmas Day has come and gone. The cards and presents have been opened, the dinners have been eaten, the trash has been hauled, and now we settle into that weird post-Christmas week where some folks are back at work and others are still lazing around on vacation until after New Year's. Which am I? Clearly, I'm here working—somebody's got to keep the lights on, after all.

Aside from Christmas, though, one other major holiday that has come and gone is Festivus, the secular parody holiday from the TV show Seinfeld. Traditionally celebrated on December 23, Festivus calls for (among other things) an airing of grievances—on the show, this usually just involves George's father yelling at everyone, but here at Ars we also have some stuff we want to get off our collective chest. Keeping our nose to the tech news all year long means we see and deal with a lot of trends in technology that annoy us—from stupid printers to dumb Android OEMs to just about anything else. Even though Festivus is passed, we asked the Ars staff to write down their grievances for airing anyway—because who doesn't love reading about someone else's angst?

Presented below, in alphabetical order, is the Ars Technica staff's 2016 airing of techno-grievances.

Ron Amadeo: Groupthink makes Android OEMs collectively dumb

My problem this Festivus is, as usual, with Android OEMs. With something like 1,300 companies selling Android devices, you'd think there would be a lot of truly different choices out there. You'd also think that, since they are pretty much all stuck shipping identical SoCs and displays, they'd be leaping at any differentiation they can create when it comes to the design and software. Unfortunately, the Android OEMs—especially the big ones—all seem to easily fall victim to groupthink.

A great example came this year when Apple dumped the headphone jack on the iPhone 7. The move was widely panned as anti-consumer, and Apple's justification for removing the jack, "courage," became an instant parody. The Android OEMs saw the outrage online and said "What a great idea!" Rather than using the presence of a headphone jack as a key marketing point, OEMs began stripping it from their product roadmaps to ape Apple.

Chinese OEM LeEco was one of the first to jump off the bridge because Apple was doing it, too, with the company releasing a line of phones sans-headphone jack. Motorola followed suit with the modular Moto Z; then we saw HTC do it with the HTC Bolt. Now the rumor mill is claiming Samsung will dump the headphone jack with the Galaxy S8. If any one of these companies talked to consumers or read an online forum, they'd realize this is a bad idea.

This thinking permeates the Android landscape. Everyone's "flagship" smartphone is the same ultra fast, ultra thin slab phone that has just enough battery life to maybe last a day of light usage. No one even attempts to make a high-end phone that values battery life over thinness and speed to any meaningful degree. Not everyone wants a "game console" smartphone that doubles as a VR headset, but that doesn't mean they want a bargain-bin midrange phone. Companies make high-end gaming laptops and high-end business laptops, so how about if high-end business smartphones with an extra long battery life become a regular thing? You'll never see it because of Android OEM groupthink.

And remember when phones came in different form factors? Would it kill anyone to offer a premium phone with a hardware keyboard anymore? Does every device have to be a symmetrical slab-style iPhone clone? One of the only companies to recently deviate from the "standard smartphone" formula was BlackBerry, which—as an outsider to the world of Android—released the Priv, a phone with a slide-out keyboard. Of course the device was also poorly made and overpriced, so when no one bought it, Blackberry quit the market after one try. The only company out there we feel is doing anything new lately is Xiaomi with the Mi Mix, which changed up the usual smartphone template with a more screen-centric design.

There isn't much difference in the software, either. Everyone takes Android and piles as much crap on top of it as possible, with no one attempting to promote a "clean, fast, optimized" software build. Is there really a meaningful difference between Samsung's TouchWiz, Huawei's Emotion UI, LG's LG UX, or Xiaomi's MIUI? You aren't differentiating with a heavy Android skin when everyone makes a heavy Android skin.

Even Google fell victim to the Android OEM groupthink. It risked a lot and potentially damaged its relationships with OEMs when it made a move into self-branded smartphone hardware and then didn't do anything special with that hardware. Why make hardware if you're just going to make the same hardware everyone else is making?

I've tried pretty much every high-end smartphone over the last few years, and while there are one or two exceptions to some of the groupthink, it's really a shame that I spend all my time writing about the 10 percent difference between smartphones. There is so much more space to explore when it comes to designing a smartphone, but most OEMs are only open to taking the established, safe option.

Jon Brodkin: Sign in with your TV provider... again and again

As an obsessive sports fan who follows many teams and leagues in both the US and Europe, I'm not giving up regular TV any time soon. But I do like streaming apps, and I often use the ones that give me full access to content when I sign in with my Verizon FiOS TV credentials. That's fine, of course—but what I hate is that nearly all of these apps force me to enter my username and password almost every time I open them.

Whenever I try to watch a game on the NBC Sports, Fox Sports Go, or NFL apps on my iPhone or iPad, it's almost a certainty that my Verizon username and password will have been forgotten by the app and I'll have to enter them again. As I write this, I just checked all three apps and all three want my Verizon username and password again, even though I have signed into each one many times before. 1Password helps here, but these apps don't integrate with it so I have to switch back and forth between my password manager and each video app a couple of times to get logged in. And the next time I want to use the app, probably a couple weeks from now, I'll almost certainly have to do it again.

I understand that the apps need to verify that I'm still subscribed to Verizon, but this seems like a problem that should be easily solved by each app remembering the password on the device. In my latest testing, it seems the ESPN app is able to do this, but NBC, FOX, and the NFL weren't able to. On the Apple TV, apps do a better job keeping me signed in for many weeks at a time. Why can't the phone work like this?

Recent OS updates for iPhones, iPads, and the Apple TV introduced single sign-on so you can log into all apps requiring TV provider credentials only once. Naturally, Verizon FiOS doesn't support the single sign-on yet, and most of the video apps I use don’t support it either. But there’s some progress: Single sign-on is supported by CenturyLink, DirecTV, Dish, Sling TV, and a few other lesser-known TV providers. If the major cable TV companies and programmers get on board, there’ll finally be significant progress on an annoyance that’s been allowed to fester for several years.

Andrew Cunningham: What's the deal with printers?

You can draw a direct line between a desktop or laptop in 1996 and a desktop or laptop in 2016, but the technology has improved immeasurably in the last 20 years. Computers are thinner and lighter and more power efficient, and generally speaking they’re both more powerful and easier to use.

Printers are a little different. That’s not just because a printer in 1996 doesn’t look all that different from a printer in 2016—the advent of small consumer all-in-ones and wireless printing aside—but also because a printer in 2016 can be expected to be just as inconsistent and infuriating as your old HP LaserJet 4P.

The setup process has generally been simplified—both Windows 10 and macOS will download and install the proper printer driver for you without user intervention at this point. But lord help you if something goes wrong—deleting and re-adding printers and visiting the Windows 95-looking print queue window are still your primary troubleshooting tools. Ink estimates from drivers are still inaccurate, and paying for ink still feels like participating in a grand scam. If anything, the modern era has made ink more irritating than before. The consumer-friendly wonder that is DRM came for our movies and music first, but now it has also come for our coffee pods and third-party ink cartridges. Wonderful.

If friends and family members have tech questions for me, I’m usually glad to take a crack at them. But if it’s a printer problem, I’m more inclined to find the nearest hole in the ground and jump head-first into it.