I feel like a boomer in my 20s with the fact that I fucking despise having to pay 30-40 dollars a month just so some guy from work can reach me and tell me I need to work extra hours. Everything and everyone else I can contact online using my work’s PC or my personal laptop. It’s also dogshit-garbage because it’s getting to the point where most services entirely give up on their desktop/browser ports or websites because they just assume people are going to use their phone.
Instagram was like this for a long while. Indeed recently removed their “distance” feature and other filter features from their desktop version. Reddit is another example. Enshittification of the internet to put it all on a phone is awful.
I dislike them since I prefer pcs, but I don’t hate them per se. I do wish I could have instagram features on pc though.
imagine if your boss had to come to your place and knock on the door screaming “TALK TO ME NOW, TALK TO ME NOW, TALK TO ME NOW, TALK TO ME NOW” to get you to cover an extra shift lol
maybe the anti-civs are onto something (they aren’t)That more or less happened to one person I knew at previous a job. He tried to call off for transportation reasons and the manager told him they will come pick him up instead. He wasn’t very happy about it lol.
I like phones. But mini-handheld-computers, I’m not a fan of. I’m being a bit tongue in cheek putting it that way, but point is, where phones went wrong in my view is when they became about being basically everything else other than a phone (and of course, capitalism played a big part in why that went so wrong).
The irony is, cordless phones (including the older fliphones and now "smart"phones) are actually worse at phone calls. I remember, and have talked to someone older before who remembers probably better than I do, how corded phones had significantly better phone call clarity. Now it feels like I have to use bluetooth headphones to get anything close to the clarity of an old corded phone, though it’s probably more like the quality of an old cordless phone at that point (the kind that still had a good speaker close to your ear).
This isn’t the only area where “technological advancement” has actually lead to worse quality. IIRC, for example, audio on platforms such as youtube tends to be worse than what you’d find on a CD which is worse than what you’d find on a good record. I don’t know if this is still as true for the highest quality video upload/settings and if someone knows better, feel free to correct me. But I remember reading/hearing about it at some point.
Anyway, I digress. I also wanted to mention how one of the problems with "smart"phones is that they are much more obfuscated in design than PCs are. Even if you want to be technologically literate with them, it’s actually hard to do so, compared to a PC. Filesystems are opaque and much of what you interact with is some surface level settings you’re allowed to change and a bunch of apps that are doing god knows what with your personal info. There was a dark humor kind of quote about this I read in passing, went something like: “We raised exactly one generation of people who are literate in computers.” The generation that grew up with computers, quite a few gained some significant literacy in computers and end up helping the older generations that didn’t. The generation that is growing up with smartphones, they are… I guess literate in particular apps? But it’s more of a challenge for them to organically become literate with computers in the same way. This isn’t to say it’s a binary generational thing or that a quote like that is entirely factually accurate across the board, but it kind of gets at one of the problems with how “phones” have taken over.
CD audio is higher quality than you’d get on vinyl, but it lacks some imperfections that some people think makes it sound better. CD audio is lossless and high fidelity.
Ah, thanks for the clarification on that.
[extremely Yeonmi Park voice] one of the big drawbacks of charging your EV in america is you need like fifteen different proprietary apps and accounts on each one
my phone is an addiction i have to constantly manage that makes me miserable. “phones bad” was a bit of a joke for a while cause of boomers saying it, but i’ve come to believe it’s completely true lol
Phone bills are some of the highest here in Canada so I get the frustration. I also hate the fact that when I’m browsing the internet on my phone it almost always tries to force me to use the app for whatever website I’m using.
I pay about $20/no for my phone service with a small phone company Ting. It’s not unlimited data, but I don’t need that. Never had a problem with them. They use T-Mobile as the network.
I don’t really understand the devotion some people have to brands. Apple doesn’t care about you. Google certainly doesn’t.
I’m not on Ting anymore because I use too much mobile data but when I spent most of my time on wifi, I definitely loved it. Their customer service was always amazing and if you are the type who uses basically zero mobile data, or are willing to pay a premium for good customer service, I would highly recommend them! I don’t know if it’s still the case but when I was a customer, there wasn’t a phone tree, you called a number and got straight to a human, sometimes you’d spend a minute or two on hold but never that long.
throwing a phone, whether it’s an apple brand or a robot brand or even a linus brand, on a window will yield the same result. it’s a phone. it’s a fucking phone. why cause a war over it? the companies want money, not a verbal equivalent to an indentured servitude towards the fact that you used competitor’s product. you switched phones? ok cool, just don’t shove that “iphone better” down my throat i had that experience for too many times, especially with my inlaw
I’m old enough to remember when cell phones were a toy of the rich and were appropriately considered an embarrassing intrusion into life, and I remember later watching in horror as iOS consistently broke in the direction of infantilization, walled garden, and snitching. Up until then, the overwhelming tendency had been to expand the capabilities of computers (from the user’s perspective). It’s not as if portable miniature computer/tranceivers have to be done this badly.
El problema es el capitalismoalso i forgot to mention something in my main comment but this is pretty important: i hate phone wars almost as much as enforced “download our app” and maybe phones altogether.
i like phone when i can emulate funny game, i like phone when shattered pixel dungeon is a thing, but i hate people who call my phone shit because “not iphone” or “not samsung” or whatever phone brand people worship, i am not made of gold, my trees don’t grow money, shut the fuck up
i have this classmate who is so smug about “converting into an apple fan” and i told him “good for you, be in debt for all i care” and he also got the apple watch. i don’t understand smart watches for people that don’t do jogging, don’t those cause stress for showing you your heart rate? but i digress. he was like “you thought i wanted an iphone? no, but after seeing with my very eyes how it works and how it takes pictures i put my own money into them and i got a phone that i will have for at least 5 years, and iPhone 14 Pro comes with iOS 17 out of the box, so the years of updates are set for me”, like yea sure spend an entire minimum wage salary at a phone that cannot be repaired or fiddled with. see how an iphone works? that shit looks the same as 15 years ago or whatever. they’re the phone you get to look like you are the coolest of the cool on earth, they’re the phone that movies are obligated to sign a contract to use (and only for the good protagonists, never the antagonists! android evil ifone good ! buy more now best no fake real)
little me seeing minecraft pe free no virus on android: ok this is the one i want
this guy just makes me want to throw him out the window
If a refurb pixel with grapheneos is the phone of evil then I’m happy to be evil. I guess the only way I could get more evil is to use xiaomi or huawei
only good guys use ifone ! putin uses huawei mega evil moster ogm
jokes aside i’d get a xiaomi. i really want something to custom rom. sadly, pixels are not an option. i knew someone who said that iphones are superior because they’re called “smartphones” and android phones are just called “phones”. romanians call them phones regardless, fuck it, just fuck it, i can’t stand phone wars anymore, it’s all a wallet battle
My refurb pixel 7 was like 200 USD which isn’t too bad for me, but that’s the old Imperial Core Privelege at work. Ofc I’m not sure what the situation is in your country. I would never buy a phone new these days anyway. Not worth the price
my country has this culture where new is good, but also old is good. my family used to buy second hand but “new is always better and will work unlike second hand” smh
phone that movies are obligated to sign a contract to use (and only for the good protagonists, never the antagonists! android evil ifone good !
Is this real lol? I’m going to keep a lookout the next time I build up the tolerance for a movie made since the iPhone came out.
i heard it was real! it’s the apple “no villain clause” apparently and was shown by the director of “knives out” rian johnson
and james bond was known for using android phones at one point, but is that a villain or a protagonist? i don’t give a shit, the br*tish ew yucky barf sound effect 5
data is easier to obtain through a phone from what i know, that’s why important features are getting probed from the browser version and transferred to the mobile version (which is most likely a browser version due to the chromium craze), no way to do it in any other way other than through “the app”
browsers like firefox have some measures to keep data in or whatever, especially on phones (which is why some privacy advocates prefer using the browser for stuff that ask for phone programme apps or whatever they’re called. software.) and even companies that use this data junk go like “IT’S BETTER TO USE THE APP!” because they really want you in the grasp
I agree. On top of that manufacturers can decide when a device is “obsolete” since most smartphone’s bootloaders are locked and even if they aren’t flashing a different OS on them may be impossible due to a lack of drivers because all the information of how they work on a low level is proprietary. It just pisses me off when I see these pocket computers that are sometimes more capable than most office PCs getting thrown out simply because some capitalists decided “this is now obsolete, go buy the new thing” even though there is nothing wrong with the hardware.
Also I think all current mobile operating systems are terrible. Their UIs suck and they’re massively bloated. Not only are most “Apps” just nodejs/wasm bundled with the chromium browser, but every “App” is also running inside a container/sandbox (which is hilarious, because chromium is already running tabs in a sandbox afaik). Even if you have an App that isn’t just a webpage inside chromium it will still be anything but native. The whole “App” architecture is so abstract and inefficient it’s offensive.
The only “smartphone” I’d be OK with using would be one where I can boot my own custom Linux Kernel, install all the software that I’m already used to and copy over all my configs and shell scripts to achieve the same workflow I have on all my other machines.
hey fellow foss games enjoyer! thanks for the reply!
it’s not just the regular usage of a modern-day smartphone that sucks. for instance, playing on a phone (statistically one of the largest demographics in terms of video games, don’t let the pro g*mer propaganda get to you) is genuinely not fun at all. no tactile feedback unlike a keyboard or a controller and to get those you need intricate set ups that hold your phone and turn it into not-a-phone that not only is harder to carry but also defeats the purpose of a playable experience easily played from the magic slab in your pocket.
back when phones were little tiny bricks like the nokia or flippies like that one motorola i constantly played jewel quest on as a kid, you had physical buttons. a directional pad with a middle clicky button, standard stuff. not made for games, but it felt usable. now swipe, tap, swipe, tap, triple finger tap, whatever. touch controls are a mess!
my fingers are too large to accommodate stuff like “claw gripping” that actual players of mobile games do. it’s a weird place to be honest
for elderly family members that just require to send and receive phone calls, mobile phones are a total mess. i have to help my grandma constantly because it’s either “swipe up to answer” or “look at the top to press the green button to answer”, or even “press the right button to answer which is a bit green, the left one is a bit red and that declines the call, all of them are white so you can barely see which is which” or “same thing but you swipe instead”. there’s no rhyme or reason, it’s always different. my sister sometimes uses facebook messenger even if i moved most of my family members to signal, it’s always a different way to accept the call. on a “buttoned phone”, you press the greenish button that never moves to a different place. here, you do anything based on certain types of calls. like what the actual fuck
i can’t wait for linux phones to be viable enough, it’d be cool to run xonotic on a fone natively with no hiccups. i saw someone already run supertux on a pinephone or something, funnie :D
Yeah touch screens are one of the worst input methods that exist. Whenever I use them they never work reliably and there is also some noticeable input lag that makes everything feel more sluggish than it is. They’re tolerable with a stylus but still inferior in every way compared to physical buttons. Using a touch screen for any serious stuff sounds like purgatory to me lol. My parents are still using their “dumb” phones for basically the reasons you described.
I have a Pinebook Pro which has the same processor as the Pinephone Pro but slightly higher clocked and with a docking station it’s a pretty usable machine (aside from some buggy proprietary drivers that require a custom Kernel). Most FOSS games just work on it without issue but 3D games are a bit problematic since the libre graphics driver is the product of reverse engineering. I got OpenMW to compile and run on it once but it was barely playable due to lacking OpenGL features. Minetest runs a lot better but had random slow downs in large open areas when I tried it.
Unless chip makers start publishing low level documentation none of these machines will ever work 100%. I do have hope that China will change this sometime in the future.
i know people that use tablets and phones to type out entire essays and stuff… how?! the keyboard feels really bad no matter what i use, i’d rather use my laptop. i don’t care that i can use my actual keyboard, a computer feels smoother for that purpose alone
another example are kiosks. like in a fast food restaurant. i tried one of those and it didn’t feel responsive just as you said
how is the pinephone pro in general? i can’t afford it and i don’t know if it’d be viable sooner or later. currently i have an s9+ and i’d need to switch to a new one, hoping for a xiaomi or anything with support for custom roms. i won’t be able to get my hands on a pixel tho
i also hope china breaks new ground chip-wise to be honest
