Phones are surprisingly hard to get into these days under normal conditions. Used to be able to ask a lost phone to call mom to find the owner. Now the voice profile doesn’t match.

No, the wireless chipset is most frequently on a card or sometimes soldered somewhere else on the board.

So is typing in your passphrase while out in public around cameras. Might as well just not use the phone.

Just familiarize yourself with your phone’s lockdown mode so it’s muscle memory.

Hey, it has a barometric pressure sensor, that’s cool. OG Galaxy Watch had one, then the WearOS replacements got rid of it.

Galaxy isn’t very good on updates either. Haven’t seen one on the Watch 5 Pro in a year.

Over the years I’ve found, in the grand scheme, unless the CEO murdered your family, who cares? I didn’t buy Sony products for a couple of decades, right now I don’t even remember why I stopped. I think it was around shit warranty handling. Meanwhile, I was removing viable options from my purchase pool.

More recently, I’m just trying to make my purchase decisions like I’m a business. Does the item at a given price fill the needs of the role? Does buying the year-old model at heavy discount fit the need? Avoid the top-tier release-day buzz, buy at a discount, use the tool as long as possible. These techniques collectively will stifle all the “economy” they’re trying to make a profit from.

Vendors that are truly terrible will lose customers. One person’s soapbox won’t affect them, however, despite best efforts.

Everything mobile manufacturers have done since smartphones finally became popular in 2007 seemed like temporary solutions due to moving so fast. It’s clear now that it was all an attempt to paradigm-shift compute into leased property.

It really needs to end, along with the terrible disposable hardware designs. Even if we were not in a climate crisis, it is about as bad as the US was in the 1950s throwing trash everywhere.

On some level, especially now, want to find an alarm clock or an mp3 player or even a camera? It’s getting harder and harder. Old phones with their battery removed or replaced are perfect for those roles.

Qualcomm product toolchains have been a right mess. Oddly less malicious and more, “we move too fast and branch too many platforms,” historically making long-term maintenance a nightmare.

Good to see them improving that, finally.

No, and Google closed the SMS API from future growth so RCS can’t be added to third-party SMS apps.

It started with requiring larger antennas, then larger batteries. LTE was super inefficient, and low frequency bands need large antennas.

Then the industry tried to push tablets and smartphones to sell more devices. Most people settled on a single device, the large smartphone that already exists and forego the tablet. In a lot of cases forego the computer as well.

Somewhere in the middle, the industry self-proclaimed that people obviously prefer large smartphones, when there were no small ones available anymore.

…and here we are.

Narrator: it is not.

That’s great until you get hit by a car and can’t remember shit, or your family has to deal with handling your end of life and the only password record was in a blob of tissue in your skull.

Passwords in general are dumb and should cease to exist, though.

Sometimes the future is really, really, really really…dumb.

Most of the software updates you see are a result of CI/CD processes. The industry claims it makes good design patterns to get features our faster and more reliably. In reality it is just a rushed shitstorm that results in half-assed Friday releases that aren’t fixed until the following week.

I’ve long turned off auto update of my apps. Too many times I’m on a trip or other scenario where my tool is meant to be a tool and not some tech bro’s rented wet dream, and the tool is broken.

But here’s the kicker. CI/CD exists for another reasons or so:

• Frequent updates tend to reset review rankings in app stores. Not only does it offer plausible deniability to the app company, but it also screws with the review scores in their favor, as well as other rankings.
• Great way to help nudge along planned obsolescence. All that pointless rewriting of flash storage on a daily basis.
• Psychological manipulation, it gets notifications in your face to try and increase app engagement, which ensures it is fresh and running gathering user telemetry to sell as a side-hustle, as well as direct-interaction telemetry and getting more ads in your face.

It’d be better if we all just went back to landline phones some days. Modern tech is too noisy, abusive, and intrusive.

They are blind and lost. Nest hasn’t had a feature update since they acquired them 10 years ago. Their thermostats don’t even have a “its freezing outside and the air conditioner shouldn’t run” feature. Fi rots on the vine. Their camera service is terrible and they just raised the rates. Garbage company anymore.

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That’s good to hear. I’ve been waiting to see some in-depth testing reports from people that know how to put them through their paces.

Hey now, Windows 11 is becoming the biggest piece of garbage operating system to ever exist. It obviously worked! /s

And, drumroll please, Apple and Facebook/Meta (and Google) share information back and forth about users due to long-standing agreements. Huzzah!

As much as Qualcomm modems rule, it’d be nice to have some competition in this space at all.