and a call for manufacturers and users alike to prioritize function over aesthetics.
People didn’t even want “thinner” products. They were told they wanted thinner products so that businesses can sell them shit that breaks easier.
I hate my generation so much it’s not even funny.
they’re not even selling thin products. you can’t call your phone thin when the camera is twice as thick as the rest of the body.
Agreed. All of marketing is so imaginary and stupid. No one is asking for this.
Quite happy with my fairphone running /e/OS. So far I’ve not needed to replace anything, except for the battery which was getting weak. So I bought another battery, and I’m keeping the other one as a spare battery.
And there is me using a 2019 (dying) device which I heat up with a termux command to get it back in working state 😁
For the curious the device is a Poco F2 Pro, known for IMEI and charging flex issues, the termux command I use to bring alive my IMEI, Wifi and USB data transfers is:
for i in $(seq 1 32); do sh -c ‘while :; do a=$((a+1)); done’ & done; for i in $(seq 1 32); do yes > /dev/null & done
This paired with fast charge will heat the SOC and make it work like the 1st day without an issue lol.
That doesn’t match my experience with phone hardware. Everyone i know has a bunch of old phones that’ve been handed down to kids and even more sitting in junk drawers, because they all still work. Yes a couple of them have cracked screens, but even with those the only reason why the screen wasn’t repaired is because people wanted or already had a newer phone.
Software is a totally different matter though. The OS and apps stop getting updates at some point even though the hardware is still totally capable of doing what most people want their phone to do. And even worse, many companies don’t allow a phone to revert to an older OS version, so the company pushes out an update that slows the phone down and then there’s no way to fix that.
The HARDWARE isn’t designed to fail, because the SOFTWARE is designed to let the company force the device to fail at whatever exact moment the company later decides on.
The hardware was certainly designed to be less repairable and phones less upgradable. Gone are the days with user-replaceable batteries and MicroSD card slots.
Just bought a Motorola 5g 2025 stylus. It has a micro SD slot, 1/4 " audio jack, and the battery is replacable
A 20 minute video on how to replace your battery with batteries that are glued down and you need a pry tool to remove them and hopefully not puncture them is not exactly what I would call user-replaceable batteries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFxS5wQ5Bhc
I’m talking about ones like the Samsung Galaxy S3, Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS, etc had where you could just open the cover, take the battery out, and then put the new one in.
My favourite argument for these things is always: but it has to be water tight. It has to be aesthetic and thin. Okay cool, then make phones for people who use them as a fashion statement or throw them into the water and make one that you can just crack open. I know it’s something completely different but my first phone was an alcatel where you could take out the battery and throw in 4 AA’s in case you ran out of juice.
Re: But it has to be watertight, so it can’t have any ports or buttons or doors or hatches or a replaceable battery!!!
Uh-huh. Sure.
Feel free to trot this one out the next time some glassy-eyed Apple apologist is making that argument at you. That one annoys the shit out of me, too. This has been a solved problem for thirty years. Probably longer.
Funny enough, my old Galaxy S3 is exactly as “thin” as the Oneplus 9 but has replaceable battery (even now) and a microSD slot.
I’ve recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.
I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you’ll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).
The reason you don’t choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That’s a knowledge of how casinos work.
The reason you don’t choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That’s also a knowledge of how brothels work.
This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.
So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There’s no way they don’t get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.
So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn’t bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it’s simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.
From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.
With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.
If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.
There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).
Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.
Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.
Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.
So you’d request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don’t have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn’t matter much which ones you’d hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.
It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it’s present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.
Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.
OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there’s no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.
Fucking lights bulbs are designed to fail and we are okay with it. Why would anything change with phones.
As in, desgined to fail early? I highly doubt that.
Even if it were true, lightbulbs still last longer and are way cheaper. Whether I have to replace them every six years or every five years doesn’t matter as much.
Light bulbs originally lasted basically forever, is my understanding. The wires were thick enough to not break with use, and also made of a more durable metal. Then they were made thinner and the metal used changed, so they’d wear out eventually and users would have to buy more.
Because it’s not right?
Because it’s fraud?
Because fuck these asshole companies?
Take a pick why
Are light bulbs still designed to fail?
I’m pretty sure the Veritasium video mentioned a historical cartel for light bulbs, but I thought it was something that didn’t exist any more.
Modern LED bulbs tend to overdrive the LEDs to a point where they last about as long as incandescent bulbs in my experience. It also allows them to use fewer LEDs, driving cost down. They could last so much longer…
I do like to buy high power ones (100W equivalent ones), open them, and lower the drive current by increasing the driver shunt’s resistance. I haven’t had a single one of those fail. (Don’t do this unless you’re a professional, mains power stuff can be fatal!)
That’s an awesome domain
This is how it’s supposed to look, wish Lemmy/Voyager did a better job here:
I assume it’s done that way to prevent an IDN homograph attack.
For example if I sent you a link to “gооgle.com” you’d be like, sure. Except that isn’t a link to “google” it’s a link to “gооgle.com”.
While that’s a reasonable take, I think you could selectively render domains in non-latin scripts while blacklisting those greek/cyrillic letters that match latin ones, falling back to the “燋.com” formatting. Though I guess that would be a lot harder.
Though I guess that would be a lot harder.
From the devs’ perspective, the relevant question will be this: How hard is it to map out all the lookalikes, and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?"
…and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?
This is such a western-centric take, and it makes me quite sad…
Nothing special, that’s how urls with unicode, non ascii chatacters look like. It’s called punycode, more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
Emoji domains work the same, e.g. ❤️🍺.ws is the same as http://❤🍺.ws/
They have such a custom site. In a good way. Works well with RSS :)
The first step toward meaningful change begins with us. We must abandon our craving for glossy (and therefore glassy) devices, and instead embrace hardware that may not be as immediately pleasing to the eye (as it is the case with e.g. Fairphones or the PinePhone), but is built to be slightly more durable, somewhat repairable, and capable of outlasting even today’s limited commitments to software updates.
Fairphone and PinePhone being only mentioned anecdotally for being too pretty, and I guess not as sturdy as the author wants, is quite weird for an article about reducing fragility and improving repairability.
Kinda funny that they end up full of glass when for the most part everyone just bangs it in a case of some kind.
The main issue is the lack of software support. They keep making each new Android version more bloated so you can’t update more than once or maybe twice. If it wasn’t for that, you could keep using the same 5G phone until they shut down the 5G network as long as the battery is replaceable.
I wish Android was more like Debian where it’s lightweight, uses stable versions of software and runs well on old hardware.
The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.
When we get to the manufacturer’s custom Android skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer’s bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.
Still use my iPhoneX from 2017, and it still get updates 😊
It’s stuck on iOS 16. Once iOS 26 releases, companies will quickly pivot to iOS 17 as the minimum supported version and slowly you will find important apps no longer work on the phone.
There are tons of rugged smartphones out there, also some brands that focus on easy to repair phones.
The fact that they’re not well known kind of shows that the majority of the market doesn’t really care about those things.
It’s why I buy budget phones. Expensive phones break easier so far. They have a nice design? I wouldn’t know, it doesn’t leave its case ever.
I prefer midrange phones. Budget phones are gonna either:
1: Be out of date and insecure
or
2: If you keep them up to date, the new OS is gonna drag it down and it’ll be laggy.
Mid range phones are just good enough it won’t lag due to an update, but also not too expensive like a flagship
I’ve almost always broken my phone before it getting out of date or laggy was any issue. I’m a bit clumsy.
Software side too: Linux’s deliberate choice to not have a stable driver interface is detrimental to atomic distros with the usually shitty proprietary vendor drivers. Causing you to get no updates after a few years or get a new device.
Which is why i think BSD would have been a better fit for Android.
I’m honestly quite happy with my Samsung XCover 6 pro:
- physical headphone jack
- notification LED
- removable and replaceable battery
- rugged and without a screen that bends around the edge of the phone
- relatively recent and quite powerful imo
- some samsung’s default apps are surprisingly good
- two extra freely mappable physical buttons
- gps and all the other stuff
- dual sim
- good battery life
- it’s an enterprise device
- you can get it new for 350€, if not less
Only drawback: utterly dogshit camera. It looks to be interpolated. 50MP never looked that much like 8MP
Can’t wait for this to get LOS/EOS support
Most “50 MP” cameras are actually quad Bayer sensors (effectively worse resolution) and are usually binned 2x to approx 12 MP.
The lens on your phone likely isn’t sharp enough to capture 50 MP of detail on a small sensor anyway, so the megapixel number ends up being more of a gimmick than anything.
Now, if the camera isn’t the reason anymore, why would you still pay $1200 for a flagship if you get essentially the same for $300?
The global smartphone screen protectors market size was estimated at $49.73 billion in 2022and the global protective cover market was anticipated to reach $21.89 billion in that same year.
That’s insane, are screen protectors really twice the market size of phone cases??
It makes total sense to me. A phone case is just a cheap piece of plastic that’s made using cheap mold-manufacturing, and cases last for the entire life of the phone, sometimes even living on through a couple of phone lifetimes.
But screen protectors have to be more rigorously designed, - making sure that the material works well between finger and each particular touchscreen, and it’s made using relatively much more expensive manufacturing processes like curved glass cutting, and people have to replace them every once in awhile because the purpose of a screen protector is to take all the damage that otherwise would’ve happened to your screen.
Screen protectors need to be changed way more often than a good case and they are usually similar is prices so this makes sense to me.
You only need 1 case, but screen protectors can crack if you can believe that.
