It's a big whinge. I sound like a very old person in this I'm afraid, but I really do feel like everyone else has just accepted how shitty they are and I'm one of the few that has not.

You've been warned.

I Fucking Hate Phones.

Smartphones obviously, that's what we call "phones" now. I fucking hate them. At their core they're shitty data collection devices and I fucking hate that we're all expected to have one now. Every four or five years I need to buy a new one and I loath every moment of it because every option sucks.

First of all, they're fucking disposable. Most still use eMMC storage and when that wears out, they get unusably slow. Wanna fix it? Hope you know someone that can do BGA work. And know how to flash the firmware onto the new storage. And hope the phone doesn't just, reject the new blood. I hate the fact that it's almost impossible to use any phone for more than five years and I hate the fact that companies expect you to spend big dick money on phones now.

When the fuck did we start accepting $1000 for a phone as being ok? Who did that? $600 is already some luxury bullshit but I guess that's not enough status, gotta dump more into it. I feel bad spending $300 on a new phone given all of the above. It's landfill that needs conditioning first.

And hell, even if I did spend money, there's MORE bullshit I hate. I require a headphone jack, period. You can take my wired headphones out of my cold, dead hands. I'm not buying your bluetooth bullshit and I never will. Yes I know this makes me sound like some cranky old boomer, this is one of the many hills that I die a thousand deaths.

Thanks to the economies of scale, you CAN get phones for cheap. No reason why you shouldn't be able to, if you're some cranky bastard that only uses a phone with great reluctance. But, phones also are the entire low end camera market now. Even if you can find a good, pocketable, point and shoot camera, and remember to have it charged and with you, you still have to move the picture (or video) over to your phone to send it. I might go down this route if I get pissed off enough, but my life would be much easier if my phone camera was decent.

Two things about this suck. First, is they stopped putting better cameras in phones. They started putting more cameras in phones, and adding more software fuckery instead of just making a bigger sensor work. Nokia/microsoft tried the other way once, and everyone is afraid of summoning that stank again. Second, if you're like me and you're eyeing up >$200 new phones just to be done with it, you'll be amazed to find out they will happily sell you phones that can not record 1080p60. This is just egregious artificial limitations to upsell and nothing more. It's not like these phones are using 5 year old CPUs inside, they're all using 2-3 year old SOCs at worst.

And you know I fucking hate the OS situation. Per the headphone jack thing above, apple phones don't exist to me. Android is all kinds of fuck, but what pisses me off the most is they started taking the smug, apple "we know best" approach years back. Things like "now the app switcher mode is swipe one way to change app and the other to cancel, reversed from the last version" and "we now tint your lockscreen a color based on your wallpaper and you can't disable it" are very small things that make me exceptionally angry. Maybe I'm spoiled from using a real operating system on my computers that lets me go in and change shit, or NOT change it when it's already how I like it or have at least learned it. But I fucking can't with this kind of crap. And they roll out a new one every year with a ton of new fluff because if they don't cram features in for no reason, everyone will realize it's all a gigantic fucking grift so the features MUST flow. Change something, anything, just keep fucking changing it! Built in NFTs! Crypto payments if you slap the phone on your dick! Swap out the moon for a picture of the moon in your photos to impress your friends! The soul of a fake lady you can ask to tell you a joke! Whatever!

And of course the blatant info slurping. That's bad enough everywhere else but phones are built from the ground up to just collect as much data as possible and siphon it off to wherever.

And all of the cruft that phone makers will put on top of the OS to make you think they matter. Just more space to shove features in like trying to pack spices under the skin of one of those nasty wet fake btterball turkeys trying to make it taste like anything, until it's a big lumpy mess.

Oh, glass phones are dumb. Yeah the front has to be glass that's fine but glass backs are just asking to break. How many times have you seen one with a shattered back? What's the point of making a phone so small when you have to put it in a case anyway lest it get destroyed? I don't use a case but I also live in a house with carpet and buy plastic backed phones.

The battery on my current phone is starting to go spicy and has actually cracked the rear plastic with the bulge. I have to buy a new one soon and I fucking hate it, all of the options suck.

EDIT: HOLY FUCK THEY STILL MAKE TONS OF PHONES THAT ONLY HAVE USB 2.0 ON THE PORT WHAT IN THE FUCK