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.
Funny enough, my old Galaxy S3 is exactly as “thin” as the Oneplus 9 but has replaceable battery (even now) and a microSD slot.
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.
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…
To clarify, I meant that from the devs’ perspective: The effort of individually vetting every single character for possible confusion is immense, and the end result would still be just as western-centric. Imagine having a domain name in Greek where some characters are replaced because they might be confused for Latin characters. Or, conversely, having a few characters replaced by similar Latin ones for an attack, which your solution wouldn’t catch.
The result would also still be unreliable even for Westerners. If some other character set you didn’t vet also contains similar looking characters, there’s a new surface for attack.
To properly close that security gap would be an immense arms race… or you could simply shut down the entire attack vector.
So when you consider the importance of protecting gullible people from insidious attacks and the complexity of trying to allow non-Latin characters without creating openings, the question “How widespread are non-Latin URLs in my target audience and is it critical that they be rendered in their native script?” becomes a calculation of cost and benefit.
It’s a shit compromise to deal with the shit fact that some people being assholes ruins good things for the rest of us who aren’t.
All of your points are quite valid. Personally, I would go for a whitelist over a blacklist.
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.
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.
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.
One big problem is that pretty much all of these devices have major downsides. For example, I don’t know a single repairable or rugged phone with an actually really good camera or a flagship SOC.
They also usually have a huge markup and are often produced by small boutique manufacturers with terrible support (like Fairphone) and/or really bad software (like Fairphone).
So if you have the choice to e.g. pay €600 for a Fairphone with its terrible camera, battery life problems, inexistent support, huge amount of bugs and frequent issues with network providers (e.g. VoLTE not working), or you pay €300 for a comparable Samsung with similar software support duration (6 vs 10 years) and it just works without issues.
If there was something like a Samsung A56 or even a Samsung S25 that’s nicely repairable and costs a maximum of €100 more than the regular version, that might be worth it.
But the way it is now, it’s much better to buy a regular phone and spend the €300 you saved on 1-2 professional battery replacements down the line.
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.
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.
What dies that do? Just do noops heating up the CPU? How does it help?
Yep, loops to heat up the CPU, in combination with fast charge to make it hot quicker.
CPU loses contact with the board or something like that making it not able to read modem, efs, and whatever is the responsible to transmit data through the USB port (charging works normally, even fast charge), it needs a reflow or reballing to fix this for good, but technicians nearby are… Simply put, thieves lmao.
So I’d rather keep doing this until the phone dies (the workaround makes it work for an undefined amount of time, which can be hours, days or almost a week) or change the motherboard myself.
I got the idea along with ChatGPT when a user in telegram told me that he got USB data transfers working again (in order to escape from MIUI once again) by heating up the SOC with a hairdryer, yes, that worked for me too to fix all above, thus I decided to create a software solution in the meantime 😅
I hope you already got all your data off the device. While this might work in the short term, this will very likely fail very soon.
I have been like this for a month with this workaround, and yeah, I backup with Google backups and rooted Swiftbackup nightly 👍🏻
That’s longer than I’d expect something like that to work.
Me too, sometimes I feel it is a software issue, but if that was it wouldn’t happen in all the ROMs I tried, on top of that a restore of efs and modem partitions should be enough (at least for IMEI and Wifi), but sadly it isn’t.
On some devices pretty much all custom roms are built on the same kernel published by the device manufacturer. So if there’s a bug in that (e.g. with power saving options) that could actually lead to symptoms like yours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean phone durability has become a lot better. I use my iPhone 14 Pro without a case, and I have dropped it a few times and more than once it has flown across the room. Just last Saturday it fell on concrete from like 4 feet high. It’s good as new.
It is also the consumer who is mostly at fault anyways. There are many durable phones out there, none of them sell like the shiny sleek phone. Do people really want devices that are more durable? If so, why aren’t they buying them?
Do people really want devices that are more durable? If so, why aren’t they buying them?
Because the compromise is either:
- Bad updates, and buggy software, possibly unpatched vulnerbilities. Usually only 1-2 years of security updates (Blackview, Ulephone, Dogee)
Or
- Bad Specs. (Samsung Galaxy XCover)
It’s not a compromise, it’s a reflection of the fact that most people don’t care about these durable devices so they don’t sell well and thus they can’t be supported very well or for very long. This is just a reality of the market.
So there goes the feedback loop.
Nobody wants them because of the downsides, manufacturers then interpret those data as “rugged devices are not popular”, repeat…
Samsung used to have rugged mainline Galaxy phones. Guess what? They didn’t sell well so they don’t make them anymore.
Mass market doesn’t want this, is that simple. The people who want it are over represented online. It’s a similar case with people who want small phones, why do you think they don’t make them anymore? Because hardly anyone buys them.
How much money would you pay for this dream rugged smartphone of yours?
I’d say like a $100-200 (USD) Premium, at most. Basically, if a phone is $500, I’d at most pay $700 for a ruggedized version of it with all the same specs, features, and updates. I don’t mind the thickness as long as its not too thick like a brick. Any more expensive and nah, that aint for me.
I think this highlight the problem with this approach. $500 MSRP would likely not be cost effective for a phone manufacturer to invest in the design, construction, inventory of replacement parts, and multi-year long support of the rugged and long lasting phone. An important part of the premise of the author is that the phone lasts a long time, and your stated desire for long software support.
This is likely a money loser for a phone manufacturer from day one. My guess is that this phone would likely have to cost $2000 to $3000 for a chance to be economically viable. The biggest expenses are going to be on the human labor parts of a staff to provide the regular software updates, maintaining humans that run the manufacturing lines for the replacement parts, and the repair staff to effect the repairs over time for customers. Considering the only time the phone manufacturer gets money is from the initial sale of the phone, they have to price it high enough to cover many years of these support operations.
At the higher, more realistic, phone sale price it likely drops the number of potential customers so low to not even pay for the initial design and tooling to be created.
This is likely why no manufacturer makes this theoretical phone.
The article is disappointing. It appears author of that article only has one narrow view and assumes the rest of the world has the same.
They buy the most fragile and aesthetically pleasing phones, and complain they are fragile. They advocate for manufacturers to stop making fragile aesthetically pleasing phones, and only make rugged or repairable phones instead. They make an inference that phones should be repairable like cars with accessible parts and non-proprietary tools, but they appear to not know that today’s cars have difficulty getting replacement parts and absolutely contain mechanical and electronic proprietary tools to repair the cars.
Mr/Ms author, if you want a phone that doesn’t break so easily when dropped, you can buy such a thing right now. Something like CAT phones:
… or other ruggedized Android phones.
I think the last time I dropped a phone an broke the screen on it was maybe 2007. I don’t even use phone cases. If your particular use case has you dropping your phone more, buy one that exists and is designed to take those kind of conditions. There’s no shame in that, but don’t advocate for an entire industry shift because of just your own use case.
Smartphones/technology are still incredibly young in the grand scheme of things. Each of the new generation of devices that comes out adds more functionality for features that people want. Until that stops, it doesn’t make sense to try to switch everyone to a “buy it for life” approach. My Commodore 64 computer still works, and is very easy to service, however I wouldn’t have wanted technology to stop back then just because its a sturdy built machine. Today I have the paper thin laptops with 8 hours of battery and high speed CPUs are not as rugged or repairable as my venerable C64, but I’m quite glad to have the fragile laptop instead.
Theres this pervasive mentality in online spaces that completely disregards the consumer’s role in all of the design choices of products. They completely ignore that it is the consumer who signaled they wanted this and continue to signal they want this by buying more of the same. Corporations cannot create desires, they only fulfill them. Consumers have demonstrated they want sleek devices that are easy to operate and last only as long as they are not outclassed by next thing. The alternative of course is coming to the realization that consumers prefer convenience and novelty than durability above anything else but once you realize that you become elitist and that’s a big no no. So it must be the corporations fault!
You also ignore the role marketing has to play in convincing people that they need those things. Most people don’t need an SUV, let alone a truck, yet I see plenty of people driving these, and even thinking they’re safer than sedans. But they cost more money, which means more profit, and why would it be surprising that people who sell something with a relatively inelastic market want to maximize profit dollars per sale?
Is the marketing department putting a gun to your head to force you to buy anything?
I have worked in marketing, and I have a very good, almost academic understanding of it. One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that you cannot create a desire for a product, you can only create products that satisfy a desire. The big trucks are not there because the corporations forced the people to buy them, they are there because the people wanted to buy them and monkeys that we are as soon as we see many big trucks we also want one. There are small trucks in the market. They don’t sell as well as the big trucks. It’s simple free market dynamics and I really hate this pov because it makes it seem as though the corporations dictate what people want when it has always been the other way around.
The real disconnect is that you as an individual are alienated from the wants of the mass market, and this is all too common in online communities because guess what? People who spend time on discussion boards online do not think like the average person. Thankfully as barriers to entry dissolve even in markets like car manufacturing which used to be huge, we start getting more diversity of products, some of them tailored to niche buyers like yourself. But you cannot ask that these products be supported at the same level as the product that 80% of the people want, you have to live with the tradeoffs.
So what you’re saying is that marketing provides a sober, unbiased presentatiin of the benefits and drawbacks of the products they’re trying to sell, and people make rational, informed decisions? No, like you said, most people behave little better than monkeys, and marketing caters to that, further skewing the norms and pushing people to buy things based on perceived benefits while ignoring the real drawbacks. Next you’ll tell me the prescription opioid epidemic wasn’t exacerbated by the claims that the new opioids were less addictive and pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to prescribe them more than necessary, a lot of words that boil down to ‘marketing’.
Comparing opioids to a truck or a phone is wild. I guess if opioids was something you could just walk into a store and buy without a prescription you would be somewhat right but that hasn’t been the case in a long time. The situation you describe is more about physical availability than mental availability which I think is more to the point of what we are discussing here but sure I can concede that rugged phones being less visible than the sleeker phones leads to them being purchased less often. But again, Samsung once had a mainline galaxy phone that was rugged and it didn’t do well, so maybe people really don’t want an ugly brick of a phone and want what is more aesthetically pleasant.
Let me put it this way, if you do not trust that people can make good purchase decisions. Why do we allow people to make any decisions at all? Much less participate in things so important like democracy?
Your line of thinking, that of removing completely the responsibility of the individual in a free market dynamic will necessarily take you to one or two conclusions depending on what you value more: we accept that the masses will not necessarily make the best choices available but they are absolutely free to make said choices, or that we should divide society between enlightened and non enlightened and the enlightened will dictate how the non enlightened will live because obviously these monkeys need guidance in order to make good decisions.
I flip flop between one or the other, but I always settle in the former because I can’t guarantee that I won’t be lumped with the monkeys.
I don’t remove responsibility from the people, but don’t pretend that companies don’t spend piles of cash on marketing when it has absolutely no influence on their customers’ purchasing decisions. Also, don’t pretend that marketing isn’t pandering to appeal and not function.
I’m not pretending anything, I never stated that marketing pretends to present products as they factually are. Look selling a product that no one wants is really fricking hard, no matter how much budget you have. So in order for something to sell well, people most have already wanted it. It must solve a problem, increase productivity or just fill the daddy shaped holes in their hearts, but they must want it and they cannot be truly manipulated into buying it unless you flat out lie, which is not really a good model on which to build a long term company on.
All I’m saying is that if marketing convinces people to buy a shiny poop they are in all the freedom to do so. But marketing never had the ability to manipulate people into buying something for which there is no desire. The shiny poop might fulfill some inner desire of the masses, who cares? They wanted it, they got it.
