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TokenBoomer

"The role of smartphones in contemporary life feels increasingly stupid" (www.dezeen.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by TokenBoomer to c/progressivepolitics

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Ned Ludd may be long dead, he may never even have existed at all, but he was right – and it's time we started listening.

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[–] Blue_Morpho 26 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

His comments on ewaste and mining are relevant but the rest is old man shouting at clouds.

We had smaller phones. Apple even tried to reintroduce them a few years ago. Very few buy them. They are still around if you look but no one wants the compromise. A larger screen uses a little bit more power but provides room for a much larger battery. People use their phone instead of a compact digital camera so are willing to put up with camera bumps.

[–] egrets 16 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

I think the general criticism that new models fail to break ground like they used to, but have barely slowed down their release schedule or extended their support, is also a valid one.

But the author barely touches on that before getting distracted by "phones are too big," which they then come back to a further three times in unrelated paragraphs.

[–] then_three_more 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

or extended their support

But support has massively increased in the last few years. A year or two of software updates used to standare, now Samsung and Google are doing 7 years (I'm not sure if apple has done an announcement but it looks like iOS 18 will run on the 6 year old iPhone XR)

[–] egrets 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's fair, although I don't feel it's changed much for iPhone, past the first few models where the hardware improvements were most dramatic. 2011's iPhone 4S had five years of major updates supported. The 5S (2013) had six. The iPhone X (2017) is probably on its last major version at seven years. That's a slow improvement, which still deserves recognition I suppose.

[–] then_three_more 4 points 2 weeks ago

Apple was way ahead of android manufacturers for ages, they've just caught up now. That's where the biggest changes are

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