The moto G is or was $40 several years ago. In my cheapskate days I relied on it for a while. Slow but perfectly acceptable. Probably would have performed bette

The moto G is or was $40 several years ago. In my cheapskate days I relied on it for a while. Slow but perfectly acceptable. Probably would have performed better if I'd bothered with a custom ROM... I am confused as to what exactly the novelty of a $50 smartphone is at this point. Just another data point I suppose, to support the drumbeat that smartphones are very cheap now, and are the ubiquitous default computing device for most people by now. You can't even keep your kids off smartphones. Their friends will just give them last year's model they were gonna toss in the trash and they'll use it on wifi. Teachers don't even try to keep the kids off the phones in class. When I subbed in a classroom last spring, I once had a kid come up to me to ask me something, and then bury herself in phone distraction before I could even answer, and then act annoyed and surprised that I interrupted her to answer the question she herself had gone out of her way to pose. I was baffled. This was an extreme case but not by that much. The kids are downright addicted, for the benefit of big internet shareholders, as big tobacco once did. When I was that age I was often very bored. This inspired me to find ways to use my brain, to read, write, draw. That we is gone now. Private boredom has been co-opted and is now owned by big internet for their benefit. We had TV to plague us in the same way then of course. But at least TV was less engaging and less omnipresent. As soon as you left the home your mind was free. There are the sidewalk philosophers who say that "things always change, every generation complains of kids these days" but this is a facile and ignorant retort. For 10,000 years technological change has happened yes, but at a much slower rate. What changes today in half a generation, took several generations for most of human history. Parents had a fighting chance to hand down knowledge of how to navigate the world, and to figure out over several generations how best to adapt oneself to new technologies.