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Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

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Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#371

Post by kylebenzle »

fx1994 wrote: post #329
mihaaly wrote: post #267

Absolutely warranted, but there is no reason to worry, apps will keep up with the performance development and in a blink of an eye you will be forced (security, security security!!) to upgrade to the new versions of phone app or photo app dragging in 'free' and top notch AI assisted VR capabilities or whatnot that require power beyond current levels. Do you need that feature? Absolutely not. Nevertheless, you will ha…

I never understood why one app has to cover everything. Apps are bloatware today. Same goes for Windows. All I wanted worked on 98SE or XP. How did OS get from 1GB to 30GB for listening music, surfing, some office, watching pictures? Ah yes, teams, onedrive, defender, firewall (I have my own hardware why do I need this forced) and other cloud integration no one asked for and if they ever forced only online account, t…

Windows is not an OS any more, it's and advertising platform.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#372

Post by ghaff »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #348
coldtea wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, so still: it's not like kids ever wanted computers for schoolwork in general . Saying they wanted computers for schoolwork, is another matter.

Sure, that's true. Growing up without access to a proper computer still seems weird to me. How do we expect kids to build computing literacy?

Certainly I never developed any computer literacy growing up--and, indeed in college. And I worked in the computer industry most of my adult life.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#373

Post by Kirby64 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #328
david-gpu wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tiny minority of people who want this do not form a market large enough to bear the amortized engineering and manufacturing cost of adding those niche features. Imagine somebody asking for phones that have a built-in Swiss army knife because there is a (tiny) segment of the market who would benefit from it. Before it makes sense to integrate these features to the phone, you would expect to see a thriving ecosyste…

"The tiny minority of people who want this do not form a market large enough to bear the amortized engineering and manufacturing cost of adding those niche features" I beg to differ, Fairphone thinks it's economically viable to make phones that are upgradeable by changing modules. The company is doing it now! All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be…

> I beg to differ, Fairphone thinks it's economically viable to make phones that are upgradeable by changing modules. The company is doing it now!

Fairphones devices are, frankly, bad value and not particularly interesting. Being able to “upgrade” components is not very useful, if those components are already years behind. Also, fairphone doesn’t allow this! You just can replace components with the same kind… which just makes repairing easier.

> All I want is a spare slot inside one of these phones that I can insert a specialized module. There would be no problem in getting specialized manufacturers to make those modules, witness the fact that there are already thousands of small modular devices on the market already.

You have one. It’s called the USB-C port. Make whatever you want with it, it’s widely supported and compatible.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#374

Post by cootsnuck »

resource_waste wrote: post #291
gregjor wrote: post #134

I think you haven’t considered the luxury goods aspect of higher-end phones. The majority of people buying new phones every year or two don’t carefully study specs, and don’t need to use a PC or laptop at all, or only need a “real” computer for work or specific tasks. Already smartphones serve as the primary internet access device for a majority of internet users. Sales of new phone models have a lot more to do with…

I think lots of people here have little understanding how expensive $600 to a stay at home mom or teen is. Getting an iphone says you got middle class money(even if it was $12/mo for the next 5 years). There are upper-middle class equivalents of this. Cars come to mind. It is interesting explaining to a middle class person why I have a $100 crappy phone. "My old one broke, and I have 4 of these $100 phones for my wif…

I'm just glad I grew up in the era right before smart phones and have always purchased my own cell phones. I'm just too damn grumpy to pay more than like $250 for a phone. I prefer to be on my computer than my phone. But I can understand for people who seldom are on a computer it probably feels worth it to them to pay $500+ for a phone.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#375

Post by Kirby64 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #279
Kirby64 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement. I said approximately 0, when compared to smartphone sales… which it is. I don’t need a survey to know that, since the vast vast vast majority of people using phones don’t even know what an oscilloscope, a DAC, or an ADC is. If you think that’s untrue, I’d suggest widenin…

"Also, I’d think that you don’t work in test and measurement" I've worked in one of the prototype laboratories of one of the biggest electronics companies in the world where we actually developed communication equipment. Using bench type instrumentation has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm talking about. At no time did I ever say that my portable device was a substitute for professional test equipment. The idea…

> Using bench type instrumentation has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm talking about. At no time did I ever say that my portable device was a substitute for professional test equipment. The idea is preposterous.

>> Of course not everyone needs these features but the smartphone stands out as an ideal device for use in instrumentation and measurement and data collection (of the other kind).

Your words, not mine. Without more context (which you didn't provide) it's unreasonable to expect me to understand what you mean (you, in fact, advocate I don't 'read stuff' that isn't actually there) outside of replacing actual test and measurement equipment.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#376

Post by Kirby64 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #309
ianburrell wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, there is a small market for people who don't want a laptop. Or a Raspberry Pi. I bet a Pi with display would make a better if slightly larger. It is also strange to complain about multiple ports when can get a USB-C hub. It used to be they were all USB-C to USB-A but there are starting to USB-C only hubs.

"It is also strange to complain about multiple ports when can get a USB-C hub" First, a USB hub is bulky and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about, it needs to be integrated. Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 3…

> First, a USB hub is bulky and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about, it needs to be integrated.

First, multiple USB ports are bulky, and frankly a damn nuisance to carry about. I don't need an extra port for the majority of my uses.

> Second, USB-C/OTG on many phones is implemented in a way that makes it essentially useless. For instance, USB-2 (which is on most phones) is too slow by miles; access to external devices via OTG is often set deliberately to time out after say 30 mins or such, also on many devices permission to access OTG is awkward, and the vast majority of phones do not support NTFS for external drives or internal SD cards.

The timeouts are for idle time. If you have a long period of idle time, you aren't using the device... which consumes power from your tiny phone battery. It's very reasonable for the uses most people use them for. I'd agree it would be nice to have the ability to disable the timeout, but I can't speak to what every phone manufacturer is doing.

> More on NTFS, why doesn't Android support NTFS after all this length of time? After all, the Linux kernel now does and has done so for some time, so why has Google nuked it from the Android kernel?

What's wrong with exFAT? It's an external hard drive. Better compatibility with everything anyways.

> People here have been criticizing me and voting me down because I've had the hide to suggest features for specialized phones but no one seems to bother addressing the elephant in the room which is that the smartphone market has reached stagnation.

And what exactly is wrong with that? Laptops also haven't had "innovation" in the sense you're describing in years either. They serve their purpose, do what they do well, and get marginally better year over year. It's fine.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#377

Post by Tepix »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #339
Tepix wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me complete privacy is a must-have for an LLM that gets access to pretty much all my data (mails, calendar, location, browser history, chats, address book, health, app use, ...). But there are other benefits such as the availability, even when your phone is offline, latency and no cost per use.

But you are already giving Google, Apple, and/or Microsoft all that data anyway.

I'm not. Are you?

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#378

Post by tohnjitor »

mihaaly wrote: post #267

Absolutely warranted, but there is no reason to worry, apps will keep up with the performance development and in a blink of an eye you will be forced (security, security security!!) to upgrade to the new versions of phone app or photo app dragging in 'free' and top notch AI assisted VR capabilities or whatnot that require power beyond current levels. Do you need that feature? Absolutely not. Nevertheless, you will ha…

With all of the features and plug-ins being crammed into Teams, it may become TeamsOS before long

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#379

Post by maccard »

gitaarik wrote: post #369
maccard wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t agree more. The locked down nature of my iPhone is something I actively desire - the curation on the App Store isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the Wild West that is the play store. I _want_ an ecosystem where developers are forced to upgrade their apps to use the latest APIs to take advantage of the new device features.

I rather have more choice and possibilities and control with the added risk of breaking things and the necessity to take responsibility. And it's not necessarily easy to break things on Android, but yeah you have to be a bit more conscious of what you're doing. I guess for people that are not very tech savvy iOS is maybe easier and safer.

> I guess for people that are not very tech savvy iOS is maybe easier and safer.

This is dismissive. I'm tech savvy - I'm a programmer who has written kernel level code shipped to hundreds of thousands of people. It's not about it being "easier and safer", it's about not caring wanting to have to make every microdecision just so I can read an email.

Re: Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance

#380

Post by snakeyjake »

The main point of increased performance is not to do things faster so the user waits less or can get more done, it is to get the task done faster in order to turn the radios off and power down cores as soon as possible to save power.

And they already had phones that turned into PCs.

They failed because they are a stupid idea. You either need a mobile computing platform with a large screen and keyboard, or a pocketable mobile good-enough-computing/communications/payment platform. What you don't need is a stillborn defective fetus of a disaster where you plug into someone else's greasy keyboard and smeared monitor instead of pulling out a laptop.

Unless you're one of those weirdos who spends thousands of dollars to build a netbook-sized cyberdeck only to never use it except as a status symbol at hacker conferences.

The only thing dumber than carrying around a phone to use it as a PC is trying to use and change settings in a phone OS via a Linux terminal emulator.

Also, everyone in here saying the cameras are "good enough" is wrong.

Until a camera can take a photograph of an individual atom from across a pitch-black room while being shaken IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

People who want phones to be PCs remind me of the folks who went all-in on VR back in 2016 who now pretend to ignore the thousands of dollars of trash they have collecting dust in the corner.

They are solution-in-search-of-a-problemizing.

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