They are very busy charging an arm and a leg for crappy software with shit support.

According to this article, an average smartphone uses 2W when in use. That number will largely be dependent on the screen and SOC, which can be turned off or be placed in a lower power state when the phone isn’t actively being used. (The 5W - 20W figure is for charging a phone.)

With 8 of these cells, you’ll have 800μW, or 0.0008W, and you need 2W. You will need to add a few more batteries… About 19,992 more. If 8 of these batteries are about the same size as a regular smartphone battery, you will need the equivalent of 2,500 smartphone batteries to power just one phone.

Too bad they don’t say how much the new batteries weigh! It would have been fun to see…

If we ballpark it and assume something the size of a regular smartphone battery is 50g (1.7 oz), then our stack of 20,000 of these new batteries could be about 125kg (275 lbs).

I won’t be replacing any of my batteries just yet.

That may be true for the exact hardware you used, and the exact tests you have done. For Microsoft the problem would be that they need to actively continue supporting older and older devices. At some point it makes sense to drop active support. If it works, that’s fine, but they won’t continue testing and fixing for unsupported configurations.

Phrased differently: Microsoft announces the end of support for a product. If you want to pay for it, they will make an exception and continue to support it just for you.

I understand people dislike Windows 11, but complaining about life cycle management isn’t going to help that.

One of the arguments that gets used is that the employees should look neutral. For example, if you want to get your gender changed you might not be comfortable with someone who is visibly associated with a religion that disproves of gender changes.

I manage a team of about 30 people in IT. Your job is not valued enough, and I know the importance of what you do. Thank you for your work!

You’re absolutely right! USB storage devices are blocked and we don’t have the right to execute arbitrary executables anyway. It is a pretty secure environment.

For me it’s Chrome for work, because we’re not allowed to install anything on our machines :(

Cars are not weapons. They are dangerous, but they haven’t been invented to kill. You also need to do an exam before you’re allowed to drive a car.

With my professional experience in COBOL, I can honestly say I’m not surprised at all!

Are sd card slots cheaper than 128 GB of flash storage chips? I’m not sure, but yes, probably. You would also need to factor in the additional complexity of allowing physical access to the slot, which would take some additional designing and a few more components. The sd card itself will probably be a more expensive and slower than integrated flash storage. By contrast, it is probably extremely easy to just shove some flash storage chips in a phone. Still, I agree that it sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff for me.

premium phones that have SD cards, but there aren’t many options. The only one is a $1400 Xperia I V

There are other options too, like the fairphone or Galaxy A-series mentioned by others in this thread. They never disappeared, they just became less common because there is less customer demand.

If you need a phone with a lot of storage or extensible storage, you can get one. There will be a cost associated with that need, but it is not necessary to pay $1400 either. It is hardly anti-consumer to say that a lot of people don’t need this option.

What you do with your phone is your choice, and if you want to store 1 TB of pictures, audiobooks, or even porn, you should go ahead and do that. All I’m saying is that this is not a typical use case, and you can’t expect any random phone to support it. But there are phones that do, and you should get one.

It sounds like you have a very specific set of requirements that requires a specific type of premium phone. Not everybody needs 128 GB of storage eon their phone (mine only has 64). I agree that a lot of storage and SD-card slots are good features to have on phones, but the truth is that not everyone needs those. Each feature will add cost and require more resources to build, and for a lot of people not having them will work just fine.

This is great! My phone doesn’t get updates very often, but this feature is already available and was turned on by default. (Moto G31)