This sums up my frustration these past decades. Smartphones were originally limited due to lack of power and resources, I was ok with that. Working on the iPhone and having access to the internals, as an engineer it made sense they were limited until security was figured out. You want an always online pocket computer to be secure.
…but we figured it all out, and instead of the phone becoming more open like the Mac, the Mac started becoming more closed like the phone. Gave up on the platform, at least Android was open-source and open hardware, mostly…
…but then they copied Apple and started making closed source binaries to replace the open ones, now Google doesn’t know what they want to be when they grow up, after their “everything is free through ads” business model fell apart. Apple, Google, and Samsung now just copy each others’ stupid decisions and true innovation has mostly died in that space. (Especially right now with them all snorting the “AI” cocaine.)
…pretty much gave up on the dream of a pocket computer and started collecting watches, went back to a laptop. (Which I can’t get Debian to run on natively due to a glitch in how the mobo handles NVMe SSDs, disk randomly falls off while running. Didn’t have patience to troubleshoot after a few weeks work and a corrupted OS.)
Would like a nice early 00’s dumbphone with a decent camera now, but all the “dumbphones” today are terrible by comparison. They just shoehorn some mediocre linux or Android lite on an underpowered SOC and call it good. And carriers have rushed so hard to get to this 5G future, a future where many are stuck in non-standalone for the foreseeable future and selling home broadband is the only real use they’ve come up with, so real dumbphones no longer work on their networks.
This sums up my frustration these past decades. Smartphones were originally limited due to lack of power and resources, I was ok with that. Working on the iPhone and having access to the internals, as an engineer it made sense they were limited until security was figured out. You want an always online pocket computer to be secure.
…but we figured it all out, and instead of the phone becoming more open like the Mac, the Mac started becoming more closed like the phone. Gave up on the platform, at least Android was open-source and open hardware, mostly…
…but then they copied Apple and started making closed source binaries to replace the open ones, now Google doesn’t know what they want to be when they grow up, after their “everything is free through ads” business model fell apart. Apple, Google, and Samsung now just copy each others’ stupid decisions and true innovation has mostly died in that space. (Especially right now with them all snorting the “AI” cocaine.)
…pretty much gave up on the dream of a pocket computer and started collecting watches, went back to a laptop. (Which I can’t get Debian to run on natively due to a glitch in how the mobo handles NVMe SSDs, disk randomly falls off while running. Didn’t have patience to troubleshoot after a few weeks work and a corrupted OS.)
Would like a nice early 00’s dumbphone with a decent camera now, but all the “dumbphones” today are terrible by comparison. They just shoehorn some mediocre linux or Android lite on an underpowered SOC and call it good. And carriers have rushed so hard to get to this 5G future, a future where many are stuck in non-standalone for the foreseeable future and selling home broadband is the only real use they’ve come up with, so real dumbphones no longer work on their networks.