8 ms·

I like the idea of a more open phone a lot but dispute the "Smartphones are shit" premise. I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Batter

I like the idea of a more open phone a lot but dispute the "Smartphones are shit" premise. I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago. The problem is that we don't want to pay what it really costs to have such a great system so we sell our souls and then endlessly gripe about it. Pinephone et al appeal to nerds and are a good reference case about those tradeoffs but I'm doubtful they'll tip the scale.

cromka 5y ago
> we don't want to pay what it really costs to have such a great system so we sell our souls and then endlessly gripe about it. Last time I checked, Apple does not subsidize their hardware and actually earns majority their money off of the hardware markup, not the services.
- mathgeek 5y ago
  Plenty of carriers subsidize Apple hardware. Apple also has https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
  - pwthornton 5y ago
    You are paying for it one way or the other. Either through a direct hardware purchase or a higher monthly fee.
- nicce 5y ago
  Still, while this might be true, you are decribing only 28% of the world, and the opposite situation might be on control elsewhere. Not to mention gaming devices such as PS, Nintendo or Xbox, while it is a bit different thing. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
atoav 5y ago
I have a fairphone and had mostly Samsung Galaxy devices before. I was blown away when a phone that I bought didn't actually contain all kinds of bloatware. That this is not just forbidden is beyond me.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
It is unclear whether the "Smartphones are shit" premise applies to the hardware or the software, or both. I think "smartphone" hardware is generally impressive. However regarding the situation with software I think there is ample reason to be unsatisified. Of course the owner not having full control over the software can (and does) negate benefits of the hardware to the owner, so I can see why someone might proclaim "Smartphones are shit." It is generally great to own a small, powerful computer, but if the owner only has partial control over it, and unwillingly/unknowingly cedes substantial control to others, it may be less great, maybe even troublesome considering we see the so-called "smartphone" is being heavily utilised by parties other than the owner as a means of surveillance.
usrn 5y ago
As someone who had a few pre-smartphone PDAs: Smartphones absolutely are high powered shit. On paper they're amazing but the ecosystem limits you to scrolling instagram and only a handfull of accepted IMs (iOS struggles with XMPP and IRC for example, something even my hacked DS could do fine with 4MB of ram and a 60Mhz ARM9.) Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a real bitch. Especially if you don't have an internet connection. It's almost as bad as a ti84+ honestly, just a nicer screen, a couple cameras, and the ability to send IM and email. In fact the TI84 could do things iOS can't, I had compilers on mine. EDIT: Somehow I missed that you mentioned the battery. Smartphones have some of the worst battery life among any PDA I've had. iPhones can stretch out a few days (maybe a week if it's just sitting in a drawer near a tower) if you use them sparingly but it's nothing like the Palm Pilot or the grayscale calculators that could easily last a month.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a real bitch. Especially if you don't have an internet connection. It's almost as bad as a ti84+ honestly. If you're on Android, I suggest looking at F-Droid; there exist decent text editors and file managers, and failing all else Termux manages to drag a decent amount of sanity in.
  - usrn 5y ago
    I had an Android. Every update made Termux less and less capable (IIRC exec is very complex or impossible in a recent one.) Now I have a Pinephone running a normal X11 DE and I don't have to tolerate an ounce of stupidity. Sure there are legitimate good faith defects in the software but nothing is intentionally broken just for the sake of it. ssh just works (the phone shipped with it preinstalled) vim just works scp just works All my X11 apps just work All the scripts and little tools I've built up over the years just work (no fighting with namespaces when you switch to root or other weird Android nonsense.) All my dev tools just work (and you might say "well why would I ever want that on a phone? Because when you find a bug in the OS or an app and you're sitting on transit you can fix it right then and there. No making mental notes, no filling out issues, just slow continuous improvement. Something these mobile OSes will never have.) Desktop Firefox just works (even without touchscreen mode it's usable. With xinput2 enabled it has nice gesture support.) Want something to run in the background? Just open an Xterm window, run it, and minimize it. Want it to start on boot? Add it to the default runlevel or your X session just like you would on any other computer. There's absolutely no reason for any of the mobile nonsense (there arguably never was) other than money for the mobile OS vendors.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago. From my quotes file: "It's amazing what we can build, it's baffling what we have built." (jrumbut, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25168187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25168187) Yes, the hardware is amazing, and the software is sometimes amazing in what it can do, but... If you have gobs of bandwidth (courtesy of modern WiFi and LTE) and loads of RAM and storage and CPUs that scream (seriously, for a while my phone had more cores than most of my laptops at a close clock speed) and a high-quality touch-sensitive screen and a solid OS that makes it easy to use the system even on that tiny screen, but you use it to let apps bloat like there's no tomorrow (Facebook comes to mind), show ads even more efficiently, spy on the user at will, and deliberately make things worse so people will pay more (ex. YouTube), what have you really gained?
gentleman11 5y ago
Yet my battery life mysteriously cut to 1/4th its old value (half a day, down from 2 days) after a recent Apple update. That is pretty “shit” if you ask me. It’s like a malware attack that is trying to extort $1200 out of me
- Hackbraten 5y ago
  I totally get that feeling. Note however that immediately after an update, iOS needs to repopulate caches such as the metadata store. That can take several hours and you don’t get any kind of feedback whether it’s done. So a direct before/after comparison may be skewed.
antisthenes 5y ago
> I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Smartphones are mostly toys, dark pattern traps for procrastination. They are not productive tools, because you're always going to be a fraction as productive as you are on a full-size screen and keyboard. The only exception is maybe photography, since the sensors are finally catching up to entry-level DSLRs (optics still aren't, and probably never will) Even most laptop users I know make use of several external monitors and a keyboard and a dock for other accessories. > The problem is that we don't want to pay Not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that end-consumers should be willing to pay developers to not work at corporations and instead focus on creating some kind of open-source dark-pattern free paradise ecosystem for smartphones and other portables?
- zwieback 5y ago
  No, not suggesting that. I don't actually think there's that much wrong with corporate-driven development. I think what most users, myself included, don't like is that our personal data is monetized in increasingly complex ways. There is no simple solution to this problem, though. "Accept all cookies yes/no" has only made things a bit more annoying without really fixing anything.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Normal people use smartphones and if there is anything nerds hate it is normal people hence smartphones are shit.
spacexsucks 5y ago
I ahve been using a long forgotten Lumia 830 and a BB on GSM for a year now. Short of maps and uber, modern smart phones are media consumption and attention draining devices for spying that have ahige impact on the environment. I use aseparate camera for photos. Side benfit? No tracking from big tech
cehrlich 5y ago
The fundamental problem seems to be that there is one group of people who believe that smartphones should be 'real computers', and another group that wants it to be something different, more limited. For my personal usage I'm in the second group. I have several 'real computers', and I just want my phone to do phone stuff, and do it without getting in my way. I have no interest in switching from my iPhone to a PinePhone or whatever. The big caveat here, which has me a bit worried in the long run, is that there is an entire new generation of people growing up using only devices that are not 'real computers'. That seems really bad, but at the same time I might just be old. Who knows. Disclaimer: I know the phrase 'real computer' is a bit of a trope, but I hope it's clear what I mean.
- hef19898 5y ago
  I'm with you. And the device vs. computer thing is not just about hardware, it is much more about software. Not everything encountered in real life will be as easy to use as an app, nor should it be. I see this at work right now, people are getting third party, external UI interfaces just to avoid working in the ERP system that contains all necessary information. And it sucks. That being said, I just had a deep look at the pinephone. And to be honest, I like it, hardware is decent enough, price is good and I like the idea of manual kill switches for various stuff. Thinking about what I use my de-googled, and shot, Pixel 2 for, so, I think the pinephone won't cut it. And the killer is actually banking apps. My banking app was hard enough to get running under CalyxOS and microG, I don't have the stomach to try to get it running under Linux... Something like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS on the pinephone would be great so! Well, I guess it will be a refurbished Pixel 3 or something when the time comes that my trusted Pixel 2 completely falls apart...
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "Not everything encountered in real life will be as easy to use as an app, nor should it be" Yes should it be. There's no value in "I suffered to learn this, so everyone should have to". There is a ton of value in "you can now pull data from five easy to use systems in the same time you used to spend on one hard to use system". That's not dumbing down, that's progress. It's raising the abstraction layer and hiding the minutiae. (This is not the same as apps forbidding you from getting to the lower levels. An easy to use UX and access to the lower levels are both desirable, and not in conflict. That apps have one and block the other is not a reason to reject easy UX.)
beckman466 5y ago
> The problem is that we don't want to pay what it really costs to have such a great system what does that even mean?

cromka 5y ago

> we don't want to pay what it really costs to have such a great system so we sell our souls and then endlessly gripe about it. Last time I checked, Apple does not subsidize their hardware and actually earns majority their money off of the hardware markup, not the services.

mathgeek 5y ago
Plenty of carriers subsidize Apple hardware. Apple also has https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
- pwthornton 5y ago
  You are paying for it one way or the other. Either through a direct hardware purchase or a higher monthly fee.
nicce 5y ago
Still, while this might be true, you are decribing only 28% of the world, and the opposite situation might be on control elsewhere. Not to mention gaming devices such as PS, Nintendo or Xbox, while it is a bit different thing. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

atoav 5y ago

I have a fairphone and had mostly Samsung Galaxy devices before. I was blown away when a phone that I bought didn't actually contain all kinds of bloatware. That this is not just forbidden is beyond me.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

It is unclear whether the "Smartphones are shit" premise applies to the hardware or the software, or both. I think "smartphone" hardware is generally impressive. However regarding the situation with software I think there is ample reason to be unsatisified. Of course the owner not having full control over the software can (and does) negate benefits of the hardware to the owner, so I can see why someone might proclaim "Smartphones are shit." It is generally great to own a small, powerful computer, but if the owner only has partial control over it, and unwillingly/unknowingly cedes substantial control to others, it may be less great, maybe even troublesome considering we see the so-called "smartphone" is being heavily utilised by parties other than the owner as a means of surveillance.

usrn 5y ago

As someone who had a few pre-smartphone PDAs: Smartphones absolutely are high powered shit. On paper they're amazing but the ecosystem limits you to scrolling instagram and only a handfull of accepted IMs (iOS struggles with XMPP and IRC for example, something even my hacked DS could do fine with 4MB of ram and a 60Mhz ARM9.) Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a real bitch. Especially if you don't have an internet connection. It's almost as bad as a ti84+ honestly, just a nicer screen, a couple cameras, and the ability to send IM and email. In fact the TI84 could do things iOS can't, I had compilers on mine. EDIT: Somehow I missed that you mentioned the battery. Smartphones have some of the worst battery life among any PDA I've had. iPhones can stretch out a few days (maybe a week if it's just sitting in a drawer near a tower) if you use them sparingly but it's nothing like the Palm Pilot or the grayscale calculators that could easily last a month.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a real bitch. Especially if you don't have an internet connection. It's almost as bad as a ti84+ honestly. If you're on Android, I suggest looking at F-Droid; there exist decent text editors and file managers, and failing all else Termux manages to drag a decent amount of sanity in.
- usrn 5y ago
  I had an Android. Every update made Termux less and less capable (IIRC exec is very complex or impossible in a recent one.) Now I have a Pinephone running a normal X11 DE and I don't have to tolerate an ounce of stupidity. Sure there are legitimate good faith defects in the software but nothing is intentionally broken just for the sake of it. ssh just works (the phone shipped with it preinstalled) vim just works scp just works All my X11 apps just work All the scripts and little tools I've built up over the years just work (no fighting with namespaces when you switch to root or other weird Android nonsense.) All my dev tools just work (and you might say "well why would I ever want that on a phone? Because when you find a bug in the OS or an app and you're sitting on transit you can fix it right then and there. No making mental notes, no filling out issues, just slow continuous improvement. Something these mobile OSes will never have.) Desktop Firefox just works (even without touchscreen mode it's usable. With xinput2 enabled it has nice gesture support.) Want something to run in the background? Just open an Xterm window, run it, and minimize it. Want it to start on boot? Add it to the default runlevel or your X session just like you would on any other computer. There's absolutely no reason for any of the mobile nonsense (there arguably never was) other than money for the mobile OS vendors.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Battery, display, wireless and processing power have advanced at such an unbelievable rate that we have something in our pockets that far exceeds predictions of 20, 30, 100 years ago. From my quotes file: "It's amazing what we can build, it's baffling what we have built." (jrumbut, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25168187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25168187) Yes, the hardware is amazing, and the software is sometimes amazing in what it can do, but... If you have gobs of bandwidth (courtesy of modern WiFi and LTE) and loads of RAM and storage and CPUs that scream (seriously, for a while my phone had more cores than most of my laptops at a close clock speed) and a high-quality touch-sensitive screen and a solid OS that makes it easy to use the system even on that tiny screen, but you use it to let apps bloat like there's no tomorrow (Facebook comes to mind), show ads even more efficiently, spy on the user at will, and deliberately make things worse so people will pay more (ex. YouTube), what have you really gained?

gentleman11 5y ago

Yet my battery life mysteriously cut to 1/4th its old value (half a day, down from 2 days) after a recent Apple update. That is pretty “shit” if you ask me. It’s like a malware attack that is trying to extort $1200 out of me

Hackbraten 5y ago
I totally get that feeling. Note however that immediately after an update, iOS needs to repopulate caches such as the metadata store. That can take several hours and you don’t get any kind of feedback whether it’s done. So a direct before/after comparison may be skewed.

antisthenes 5y ago

> I think modern smart phones are an unbelievably awesome value. Smartphones are mostly toys, dark pattern traps for procrastination. They are not productive tools, because you're always going to be a fraction as productive as you are on a full-size screen and keyboard. The only exception is maybe photography, since the sensors are finally catching up to entry-level DSLRs (optics still aren't, and probably never will) Even most laptop users I know make use of several external monitors and a keyboard and a dock for other accessories. > The problem is that we don't want to pay Not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that end-consumers should be willing to pay developers to not work at corporations and instead focus on creating some kind of open-source dark-pattern free paradise ecosystem for smartphones and other portables?

zwieback 5y ago
No, not suggesting that. I don't actually think there's that much wrong with corporate-driven development. I think what most users, myself included, don't like is that our personal data is monetized in increasingly complex ways. There is no simple solution to this problem, though. "Accept all cookies yes/no" has only made things a bit more annoying without really fixing anything.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Normal people use smartphones and if there is anything nerds hate it is normal people hence smartphones are shit.

spacexsucks 5y ago

I ahve been using a long forgotten Lumia 830 and a BB on GSM for a year now. Short of maps and uber, modern smart phones are media consumption and attention draining devices for spying that have ahige impact on the environment. I use aseparate camera for photos. Side benfit? No tracking from big tech

cehrlich 5y ago

The fundamental problem seems to be that there is one group of people who believe that smartphones should be 'real computers', and another group that wants it to be something different, more limited. For my personal usage I'm in the second group. I have several 'real computers', and I just want my phone to do phone stuff, and do it without getting in my way. I have no interest in switching from my iPhone to a PinePhone or whatever. The big caveat here, which has me a bit worried in the long run, is that there is an entire new generation of people growing up using only devices that are not 'real computers'. That seems really bad, but at the same time I might just be old. Who knows. Disclaimer: I know the phrase 'real computer' is a bit of a trope, but I hope it's clear what I mean.

hef19898 5y ago
I'm with you. And the device vs. computer thing is not just about hardware, it is much more about software. Not everything encountered in real life will be as easy to use as an app, nor should it be. I see this at work right now, people are getting third party, external UI interfaces just to avoid working in the ERP system that contains all necessary information. And it sucks. That being said, I just had a deep look at the pinephone. And to be honest, I like it, hardware is decent enough, price is good and I like the idea of manual kill switches for various stuff. Thinking about what I use my de-googled, and shot, Pixel 2 for, so, I think the pinephone won't cut it. And the killer is actually banking apps. My banking app was hard enough to get running under CalyxOS and microG, I don't have the stomach to try to get it running under Linux... Something like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS on the pinephone would be great so! Well, I guess it will be a refurbished Pixel 3 or something when the time comes that my trusted Pixel 2 completely falls apart...
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "Not everything encountered in real life will be as easy to use as an app, nor should it be" Yes should it be. There's no value in "I suffered to learn this, so everyone should have to". There is a ton of value in "you can now pull data from five easy to use systems in the same time you used to spend on one hard to use system". That's not dumbing down, that's progress. It's raising the abstraction layer and hiding the minutiae. (This is not the same as apps forbidding you from getting to the lower levels. An easy to use UX and access to the lower levels are both desirable, and not in conflict. That apps have one and block the other is not a reason to reject easy UX.)

beckman466 5y ago

> The problem is that we don't want to pay what it really costs to have such a great system what does that even mean?