but smartphones are fine, actually. midrange, last year's model, two years ago's model? fine. the web gets more and more cruddy, the OS gets more and more heavy, but the phones? they're fine.
they permanently hurt your hand if they're badly designed, which most are, but only recently have smartphones been both so heavy and so large that you have to stabilize them on your pinky every time you want to reach the opposite corner of the screen.
but they were not always that way.
the droid 2 was tiny, probably smaller than the smallest iphone you can find now. It had a sliding keyboard and a removable battery, though suffered a bit in thickness for it.
but instead of practical designs, we got... chocolate bars for everyone. an ergonomic and technological race to the bottom. your phone is now less durable than the aformentioned droid, and to make it durable, you have to make it as thick as the droid 2, without a case.
that's been the case since 2016.
whats the point of thin, impractical and large phones, if we need to bulk them up to make them not shatter the one time we put it down wrong on the table? Or when it slips out of your pocket/bag when you're putting them on in the tile-floored restroom?
especially as people push more and more tablets. If I could get a 6" tablet again, and a phone with a small screen, I'd be set. The screen can go even smaller if you bundle it with a slide out landscape-mode hardware keyboard. If I need extra display, let me use my tablet for that.
Instead, we get the worst of all worlds: your tablet can be an external monitor for only your mac, and only if it's an ipad. no iphone to ipad.
no portable 5" monitors as durable as a phone, either.
it just feels like we've given up on everything that actually is a tool, lately.
even in open source, the tools that get made the most useable are the ones that have attention and capital behind them. I hope you don't mind needing a devops team's worth of knowledge to use the things you want to use for your hobby!
I know some of this is just me getting old, but wow. every time I think about this I just boggle at how much tech puts every other company and person through just so they can sell new hardware you don't need.
relatedly it's pretty fucked up and anti-competitive that the same companies that sell you phones are also the same companies that make phones slower and slower every year through self-inflicted and otherwise optional¹ bloat.
[1]: optional inasmuch as if they did not rush things out the door and then move onto something else, there would be less of this. But, alas, Business.
I miss my Sony Ericsson Xperia pro, which would probably still be perfectly fine for daily usage, if it wasn't for the ancient OS (mostly for reasons of "well the fucking web won't run - or won't run safely on this") and lack of space
but also 