Why I don't like smartphones

I fail to see how these scenarios are even remotely analogous. Closed systems are what the consumer has happily chosen for their phones, which they vote for with their dollars. Our system of government is what people have chosen -- and you will note that it is not "open". I can't walk up to the Senate floor and present a bill, nor can you. The system for doing that is closed. If you want to be a part of if, you have to be vetted by the people.

I have yet to have a customer bring me an Android or an iOS device that was ridden with browser toolbars, malware popups, or link re-directors. I probably get 4 or 5 customers a week with this problem in Windows 7, 8, or 10. Any random business or small town cop shop I walk into is guaranteed to have at least half of their computers infected with something or other. People practicing law who are totally oblivious that their search has been hijacked by Conduit or one of its clones. This is because Microsoft is much more open than iOS or typical Android installs. Everything most consumers get on smartphones comes from vetted stores owned by the OS developer. While there have been a few things that have snuck under the radar with both Google and Apple, for the most part if you submitted Conduit to the App Store, I'm pretty sure someone from Apple would drive to your place and punch you right in the face. And this is why people prefer the closed ecosystem. They want to get work done in their field and not hassle with doing work in another field they don't care about, like IT.

"Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption."

The vast majority of social media posts being written, photos and videos being taken and edited, and music being recorded and performed with these devices show this is wrong. Anyway, how did most people use their desktop and laptop computers 10-15 years ago at the peak of popularity of those devices?

"They are not real network clients."

This isn't even actually his complaint. His complaint is that smartphones have too-limited battery life. The smartphone battery life we have today would have been considered a miracle 10 years ago.

"They have led to massive centralization."

True enough. Unfortunately, that's how the money which funds the Internet gets made. That said, there's nothing stopping the author from using his smartphone in a distributed manner and helping to build the infrastructure to support the same.

"There are no secure smartphones."

There are no secure networked computers, period.

"They have ruined web design."

I'm not sure web design in general has ever been all that great. The people who practice the art are severely restricted between the demands of their employers and the limitations of the platform. Smartphones have driven the latest changes in fashion, sure. Fashion will change, and the older you get, the less you'll care for it.

"capabilities are all too often restricted by device manufacturers or carriers."

It's true. But I don't think the smartphone is the problem. Microsoft and Intel started talking up the locked-down hardware that only runs trusted code approach 15 years ago or more. Smartphones came along soon thereafter, and are designed along the same lines. It's frustrating, but for a certain class of device, one that you want to Just Work for handling the basics of human communication, I think it's a reasonable tradeoff.

There's still plenty of hardware that lets you do anything you want with it. It's critical that such devices remain available, but with the rise of DIY style hardware--Raspberry Pi and Arduino et alia--I'm very hopeful. The gap between these solutions and high-priced high-performance components will only narrow over the next decade.

Ultimately, though, unless you're manufacturing the hardware entirely by yourself, you have to trust someone. You don't want to trust Apple. But we have to trust the companies who make our wifi chips, our graphics chips, our CPUs, our USB chips. Even our cables soon may be sophisticated enough that they might include the hardware necessary to stream what we're displaying on our monitors directly to the NSA and the MPAA.

Good luck!

used a iphones for multiple years, but dont need it nowadays. dunno, just dont need it anymore.

Have you ever tried to compile it? With the current residential bandwidth caps in the US it's not even practical to download the (100GB) source.

A-Motherfucking-Men

Fucking Steve Jobs was a literal piece of controlling shit and all of his products deserve the dumpster.

Sheep get slaughtered.