Granted, I am a weird tech literate guy who wastes his time on hacker news, but what other capabilities does a phone require? I check my email, browse a few websites, use something for messaging, and call Uber/Lyft. How would superior phone specs improve my life? At this point, the next step is to slim down the software, the hardware is more than sufficient.
A cheap phone would work for that. But they are noticeably laggy and kind of grotty to use, especially once you’ve used something nicer. Kind of like going back to an ancient PC.
It's more like running Windows 11 on an ancient PC. If it ran Windows 3.1 when it came out, it's probably still pretty snappy if you run Windows 3.1 on it today.
The cheap phones we have now could totally blow away higher end phones from the past...
But security updates, and lack of support on old phones essentially means you can't do that. Because they're gonna bundle in a ton of bullshit with the security updates.
If all you use your phone for is browsing websites and checking email, you can get a cheap chinese android for half the price that does all of that just fine.
