That doesn’t match my experience with phone hardware. Everyone i know has a bunch of old phones that’ve been handed down to kids and even more sitting in junk drawers, because they all still work. Yes a couple of them have cracked screens, but even with those the only reason why the screen wasn’t repaired is because people wanted or already had a newer phone.
Software is a totally different matter though. The OS and apps stop getting updates at some point even though the hardware is still totally capable of doing what most people want their phone to do. And even worse, many companies don’t allow a phone to revert to an older OS version, so the company pushes out an update that slows the phone down and then there’s no way to fix that.
The HARDWARE isn’t designed to fail, because the SOFTWARE is designed to let the company force the device to fail at whatever exact moment the company later decides on.
The hardware was certainly designed to be less repairable and phones less upgradable. Gone are the days with user-replaceable batteries and MicroSD card slots.
Just bought a Motorola 5g 2025 stylus. It has a micro SD slot, 1/4 " audio jack, and the battery is replacable
A 20 minute video on how to replace your battery with batteries that are glued down and you need a pry tool to remove them and hopefully not puncture them is not exactly what I would call user-replaceable batteries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFxS5wQ5Bhc
I’m talking about ones like the Samsung Galaxy S3, Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS, etc had where you could just open the cover, take the battery out, and then put the new one in.
My favourite argument for these things is always: but it has to be water tight. It has to be aesthetic and thin. Okay cool, then make phones for people who use them as a fashion statement or throw them into the water and make one that you can just crack open. I know it’s something completely different but my first phone was an alcatel where you could take out the battery and throw in 4 AA’s in case you ran out of juice.
Funny enough, my old Galaxy S3 is exactly as “thin” as the Oneplus 9 but has replaceable battery (even now) and a microSD slot.
Re: But it has to be watertight, so it can’t have any ports or buttons or doors or hatches or a replaceable battery!!!
Uh-huh. Sure.
Feel free to trot this one out the next time some glassy-eyed Apple apologist is making that argument at you. That one annoys the shit out of me, too. This has been a solved problem for thirty years. Probably longer.
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they’re not even selling thin products. you can’t call your phone thin when the camera is twice as thick as the rest of the body.
The main issue is the lack of software support. They keep making each new Android version more bloated so you can’t update more than once or maybe twice. If it wasn’t for that, you could keep using the same 5G phone until they shut down the 5G network as long as the battery is replaceable.
I wish Android was more like Debian where it’s lightweight, uses stable versions of software and runs well on old hardware.
The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.
When we get to the manufacturer’s custom Android skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer’s bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.
There are tons of rugged smartphones out there, also some brands that focus on easy to repair phones.
The fact that they’re not well known kind of shows that the majority of the market doesn’t really care about those things.
One big problem is that pretty much all of these devices have major downsides. For example, I don’t know a single repairable or rugged phone with an actually really good camera or a flagship SOC.
They also usually have a huge markup and are often produced by small boutique manufacturers with terrible support (like Fairphone) and/or really bad software (like Fairphone).
So if you have the choice to e.g. pay €600 for a Fairphone with its terrible camera, battery life problems, inexistent support, huge amount of bugs and frequent issues with network providers (e.g. VoLTE not working), or you pay €300 for a comparable Samsung with similar software support duration (6 vs 10 years) and it just works without issues.
If there was something like a Samsung A56 or even a Samsung S25 that’s nicely repairable and costs a maximum of €100 more than the regular version, that might be worth it.
But the way it is now, it’s much better to buy a regular phone and spend the €300 you saved on 1-2 professional battery replacements down the line.
Quite happy with my fairphone running /e/OS. So far I’ve not needed to replace anything, except for the battery which was getting weak. So I bought another battery, and I’m keeping the other one as a spare battery.
And there is me using a 2019 (dying) device which I heat up with a termux command to get it back in working state 😁
For the curious the device is a Poco F2 Pro, known for IMEI and charging flex issues, the termux command I use to bring alive my IMEI, Wifi and USB data transfers is:
for i in $(seq 1 32); do sh -c ‘while :; do a=$((a+1)); done’ & done; for i in $(seq 1 32); do yes > /dev/null & done
This paired with fast charge will heat the SOC and make it work like the 1st day without an issue lol.
What dies that do? Just do noops heating up the CPU? How does it help?
Yep, loops to heat up the CPU, in combination with fast charge to make it hot quicker.
CPU loses contact with the board or something like that making it not able to read modem, efs, and whatever is the responsible to transmit data through the USB port (charging works normally, even fast charge), it needs a reflow or reballing to fix this for good, but technicians nearby are… Simply put, thieves lmao.
So I’d rather keep doing this until the phone dies (the workaround makes it work for an undefined amount of time, which can be hours, days or almost a week) or change the motherboard myself.
I got the idea along with ChatGPT when a user in telegram told me that he got USB data transfers working again (in order to escape from MIUI once again) by heating up the SOC with a hairdryer, yes, that worked for me too to fix all above, thus I decided to create a software solution in the meantime 😅
I hope you already got all your data off the device. While this might work in the short term, this will very likely fail very soon.
I have been like this for a month with this workaround, and yeah, I backup with Google backups and rooted Swiftbackup nightly 👍🏻
That’s longer than I’d expect something like that to work.
Me too, sometimes I feel it is a software issue, but if that was it wouldn’t happen in all the ROMs I tried, on top of that a restore of efs and modem partitions should be enough (at least for IMEI and Wifi), but sadly it isn’t.
On some devices pretty much all custom roms are built on the same kernel published by the device manufacturer. So if there’s a bug in that (e.g. with power saving options) that could actually lead to symptoms like yours.
I mean phone durability has become a lot better. I use my iPhone 14 Pro without a case, and I have dropped it a few times and more than once it has flown across the room. Just last Saturday it fell on concrete from like 4 feet high. It’s good as new.
It is also the consumer who is mostly at fault anyways. There are many durable phones out there, none of them sell like the shiny sleek phone. Do people really want devices that are more durable? If so, why aren’t they buying them?
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It’s not a compromise, it’s a reflection of the fact that most people don’t care about these durable devices so they don’t sell well and thus they can’t be supported very well or for very long. This is just a reality of the market.
Still use my iPhoneX from 2017, and it still get updates 😊
Software side too: Linux’s deliberate choice to not have a stable driver interface is detrimental to atomic distros with the usually shitty proprietary vendor drivers. Causing you to get no updates after a few years or get a new device.
Which is why i think BSD would have been a better fit for Android.
BSD would have been a much better fit for many reasons. It was just started with Linux for mostly irrelevant reasons, and then it was too hard to switch away.
Licensing, among others. Google doesn’t like the GPL.
That’s probably the biggest reason why pretty much everyone else uses BSD.
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As in, desgined to fail early? I highly doubt that.
Even if it were true, lightbulbs still last longer and are way cheaper. Whether I have to replace them every six years or every five years doesn’t matter as much.
Light bulbs originally lasted basically forever, is my understanding. The wires were thick enough to not break with use, and also made of a more durable metal. Then they were made thinner and the metal used changed, so they’d wear out eventually and users would have to buy more.
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Modern LED bulbs tend to overdrive the LEDs to a point where they last about as long as incandescent bulbs in my experience. It also allows them to use fewer LEDs, driving cost down. They could last so much longer…
I do like to buy high power ones (100W equivalent ones), open them, and lower the drive current by increasing the driver shunt’s resistance. I haven’t had a single one of those fail. (Don’t do this unless you’re a professional, mains power stuff can be fatal!)
It’s why I buy budget phones. Expensive phones break easier so far. They have a nice design? I wouldn’t know, it doesn’t leave its case ever.
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I’ve almost always broken my phone before it getting out of date or laggy was any issue. I’m a bit clumsy.
That’s an awesome domain
Nothing special, that’s how urls with unicode, non ascii chatacters look like. It’s called punycode, more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
Emoji domains work the same, e.g. ❤️🍺.ws is the same as http://❤🍺.ws/
This is how it’s supposed to look, wish Lemmy/Voyager did a better job here:
I assume it’s done that way to prevent an IDN homograph attack.
For example if I sent you a link to “gооgle.com” you’d be like, sure. Except that isn’t a link to “google” it’s a link to “gооgle.com”.
While that’s a reasonable take, I think you could selectively render domains in non-latin scripts while blacklisting those greek/cyrillic letters that match latin ones, falling back to the “燋.com” formatting. Though I guess that would be a lot harder.
Though I guess that would be a lot harder.
From the devs’ perspective, the relevant question will be this: How hard is it to map out all the lookalikes, and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?"
…and just how important is it to render foreign domains properly?
This is such a western-centric take, and it makes me quite sad…
To clarify, I meant that from the devs’ perspective: The effort of individually vetting every single character for possible confusion is immense, and the end result would still be just as western-centric. Imagine having a domain name in Greek where some characters are replaced because they might be confused for Latin characters. Or, conversely, having a few characters replaced by similar Latin ones for an attack, which your solution wouldn’t catch.
The result would also still be unreliable even for Westerners. If some other character set you didn’t vet also contains similar looking characters, there’s a new surface for attack.
To properly close that security gap would be an immense arms race… or you could simply shut down the entire attack vector.
So when you consider the importance of protecting gullible people from insidious attacks and the complexity of trying to allow non-Latin characters without creating openings, the question “How widespread are non-Latin URLs in my target audience and is it critical that they be rendered in their native script?” becomes a calculation of cost and benefit.
It’s a shit compromise to deal with the shit fact that some people being assholes ruins good things for the rest of us who aren’t.
All of your points are quite valid. Personally, I would go for a whitelist over a blacklist.
