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PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

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Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#301

Post by imwillofficial »

ddevault wrote: post #273
imwillofficial wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is politely refuting your point. “The commercial app store model does not work, at least not for the user.” I will be more direct for your benefit. Not only are you wrong. You’re wrong on a scale so large, 100 years ago the average person had never thought of numbers that high. Not only is the commercial App Store system working for users, it’s working for billions of them. Billions of humans are cool with it. You…

They might be "cool with it", but only out of ignorance that there are better models. Your argument boils down to "might makes right".

"They might be "cool with it", but only out of ignorance that there are better models." Way to speak for everyone bud. Including me, I never said "might makes right" or anything like it.

Perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension before trying to speak for others.

My argument boils down to "Perfect is the enemy of good"

Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#302

Post by wott »

jascii wrote: post #298
marcus_holmes wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me cynical, but most non-profits seem to be more interested in paying salaries and fundraising than in the actual thing they're supposed to be "about". And public institutions may serve a useful function, but again seem to be mostly about civil service powerbroking and providing extremely safe employment.

Fine, I'll call you cynical... ;P There are certainly (often larger) nonprofits with a tendency of overpaying their leadership and/or pushing policies favored by their corporate funders. I would in this context however not conflate "most visible" (ie largest advertising budgets) with "most". Most nonprofits I have worked with are ran and operated by hardworking people on minimal budgets.

Note that he didn't say overpaying, just paying. It is true that in all organisations (including those associations), as time passes, professionalisation progresses, headcount raises, administrative and secondary tasks develop; and self-preservation, self-replication become a goal of its own. There is a whole range of people (I don't mean leaders or managers, but bottom/middle people) who make a career in all those non-profits, para-public and semi-public associations (all of them living mostly from subsidies), hoping from one to another. At least it goes like that in my country, it has developed a lot in the last 30 years.

Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#303

Post by greyhair »

jascii wrote: post #175
viro wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>financial incentive ? ... financial incentives is the motivation for most labor.

Research has actually indicated that the link between financial incentives and motivation to work is actually very small: https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv Thus widespread availability of "labor of love" open source software, and the relative crappiness of a lot of commercial software.

Money has a huge affect, up to the point that your needs are met. Yes, if your needs are met, and you have time to pursue things you enjoy, you do that, but first, your needs must be met.

If I didn't require an income to cover a family of five, I would be retired, and doing whatever it is that I love at any moment. But instead, I work for a living, for money, to meet our needs.

Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#304

Post by troyvit »

sarabad2021 wrote: post #102
mindcrime wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is the single most important technology project I'm not 100% sure I'd rank this as #1 on my list, but if not, it'd probably be at least #2 or #3. Open source phones (and tablets) are something I've been dreaming about and looking forward to for a very long time, and I'm happy this is finally starting to come to fruition.

Not from a personal point of view but from a global humanitarian point of view, mobile phones are how most people interact with the internet, technology, and the rest of the world. That should make it #1 on everybody's list. Right now 99.9999% of smartphones are closed source and closed hardware that is controlled by mega corps that don't have your best interests at heart.

You really put this well. I want this for convenience and to flip the bird to "the man" but globally smartphones are so much more important as a way for people to be connected. It's the only choice they have for doing it.

Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#305

Post by troyvit »

simonh wrote: post #165
justapassenger wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You commit same error you accuse others off. DoorDash mostly solved problems for a small part of reasonably wealthy people, mostly without families, living in big cities, that don’t cook. You overestimate how your lifestyle isn’t representative of the world.

The only point was that DoorDash probably affected more lives in more positive ways than PinePhone ever will, however little that might be. That's probably accurate.

I disagree. DoorDash maybe affected 15 million lives? I dunno. And sure it made life more convenient for them and kept them from having to put on an oven mitt. An open phone that frees you from the largest surveillance network in human history? Might have a larger overall effect.

Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#306

Post by troyvit »

NationalPark wrote: post #189
wwarner wrote: post #20

I personally think that the effort to create open source phones is the single most important technology project going on out there. We have open source browsers, we have open source social apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of complaining and legal coercion, to one of choices and markets.

Hm, I'd say the mRNA COVID vaccines are probably a more important technology project at the moment. Realistically, most people don't actually care about the ideological purity of their phone, and the ones who do certainly don't have the time to personally audit the source of every dependency they install. So it's not exactly solving any practical problems, even more so since any internet connected device is at the me…

The fact that they made these vaccines so quickly and (apparently) so well is a testament to what humans can do when we put a ton of try-hard into something. That said, if we didn't have vaccines and people just kept on dying, it would definitely suck, but we would still have surveillance capitalism monitoring the most intimate aspects of our lives. Once we finally came out of the other side of Covid, even without a vaccine, we would still have google and apple and microsoft and facebook monitoring our every choice and monetizing it. Maybe there'd be a billion fewer people (and maybe that's not so bad) but we'd still have all the ills that these closed systems have brought on us.

Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#307

Post by clarge1120 »

CivBase wrote: post #269
clarge1120 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly does need to become mainstream, just like Linux did. The PinePhone, like its various alternatives, will have to find footing in the marketplace in the same way Linux did: with superior performance for the price. No mobile phone will sell enough to survive by offering low-performance hardware and off-the-shelf software no matter how open it is.

> just like Linux did I think you and I have very different ideas of what constitutes "mainstream". > No mobile phone will sell enough to survive by offering low-performance hardware and off-the-shelf software no matter how open it is. Why?

Two reasons:

1. The market for technology is driven by price/performance. It is why there is a 4K Vizio TV at $400 sitting next to a 4K Samsung at 10x the price, and both of them sell. Buyers purchase technology based on price and performance. Low performance, low price. High performance, high price.

2. The high end of the mobile phone is coveredeither tightly integrating the OS with the hardware (like Apple), or by building very powerful (and expensive) hardware for an off-the-shelf OS. The low end of the mobile phone market is covered by midrange performance Android phones. A low performance phone on an unsupported OS just will not cut it.

Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

#308

Post by CivBase »

clarge1120 wrote: post #307
CivBase wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just like Linux did I think you and I have very different ideas of what constitutes "mainstream". > No mobile phone will sell enough to survive by offering low-performance hardware and off-the-shelf software no matter how open it is. Why?

Two reasons: 1. The market for technology is driven by price/performance. It is why there is a 4K Vizio TV at $400 sitting next to a 4K Samsung at 10x the price, and both of them sell. Buyers purchase technology based on price and performance. Low performance, low price. High performance, high price. 2. The high end of the mobile phone is coveredeither tightly integrating the OS with the hardware (like Apple), or by…

Performance is not the only value consumers consider. System76 has already demonstrated there is a market for computing devices which charge a premium for better repairability, security, and privacy. Even in the smartphone market, Apple has demonstrated many times that you can sell phones with slower hardware if you provide a more appealing software experience.

Low-end Android phones still sell and I don't see any reason why PinePhone couldn't come out with a more high-performance model in the future. But releasing a $1k+ phone with beta hardware and software doesn't sound like a successful way to enter a market. The platform is still maturing and, for now, I'd still consider it a dev kit or an rpi-esque tinkering device.

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