They should also have a replaceable battery if you want them to work for 10 years. And an SD card slot to keep up with storage requirements. Not many decent phones like that in the last year:
You have to keep in mind that that removable battery has disappeared from devices for a reason: it’s inefficient. Even having a case around it and providing the connector and latch means you’re making the battery smaller and the device bigger.
That said, I do feel like there’s a reasonable middle ground to be had: not a swappable battery, but a very easily replaceable one. No special hex screws, etc. Sure you can’t carry around six of them, but if you can replace it once a year you probably won’t need to... and you can always carry a power bank with you instead to recharge it on the go.
I think the SD card requirement is short sighted. As often as storage (and cables, not to mention other things) change I think the added space requirements in something like a phone, even for something as small as an SD card (plus the adapter and the spring mechanism, housing, etc.) is a waste. In a decade you may not be able to even find the same kind of storage anymore. Even if you can it’s not like the latest game that rings in at a bazillion gigathings that would so totally easily fit on your new SD card is actually going to run on your 9.5 year old phone - the processor, memory, etc. simply wont be up to the job.
I guess the SD card thing depends on your requirements, but I like carrying my music library with me and a few movies, so I don't mind if the volume of my phone is a few cubic millimeters more.
I would be fine with an easily replaceable battery though... but again, I don't mind a little more volume.
Speaking of SD cards, phones really should begin implementing support for UHS-II and UHS-III MicroSD cards since right now the transfer speeds are lagging behind that of internal UFS storage
Their software is in a majority of PCs not due to pure market forces but because of active efforts in the 90's, through OEM contracts, to prevent operating systems other than Windows to be generally available to the public through non-technical channels.
This is such a tired argument. It's been 20 years. You don't think other OS's have had the opportunity?
The fact is, Windows is still king today because of backwards-compatibility and nothing else. No other OS has taken this as seriously. Certainly not Apple. And not Linux either.
You can still run DOS programs on Windows today. And companies do. I personally know of software originally written in the 80's and with many legacy components from that time still running on modern versions of Windows Server.
Companies don't take backwards-compatibility seriously. And if you're constantly breaking things, people are not going to trust your product for serious use to be relied on. It's really not that complicated.
Not to mention the developer tools are second to none. You may not like .Net, or you may have some problem with how Microsoft did business 20 years ago (get over it). But Visual Studio is hands down, without question, the best IDE on the market. And Visual Studio Code is the best text editor. And now, with their open source efforts, it just keeps getting better.
(Yes, I know that's not Apple's intended market, you don't have to tell me. The point still stands. Windows is popular today because of a herculean effort by Microsoft over the years to ensure backwards-compatibility. And yes, I know it's not perfect. You don't have to tell me that either. It's always the same tired arguments. And at the end of the day, the point still stands and no other OS has risen up to take Windows crown. And no, this year is not finally going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Next year either. Or the year after that. It's not going to happen. Get over it.)
> You don't think other OS's have had the opportunity?
For most non-technical people that didn't separate the concept of OS and hardware, there was no opportunity. Even if you were one of those technical people who bought a PC, wiped the hard drive and installed Linux, you still paid the Microsoft tax, which the OEM had to pass on to you in order to sell Windows at all.
It's not a tired argument because the ramifications of that action are still relevant today.
> Windows is still king today because of backwards-compatibility and nothing else.
IE11 is a perfect example of why this is a bad thing.
The fact that people were able to use Office at home and at work, and Office became a strong defacto standard for documents due to the substrate of Windows being ubiquitous, also had a lot to do with it.
> the point still stands and no other OS has risen up to take Windows crown.
The Windows crown is irrelevant in a mostly-mobile-and-server world. Why did Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 try so desperately to force mobile UI on a desktop experience? Why does Windows 10X look more like a Google Chrome UI than anything else?
i'm not saying they do it intentionally. i am saying that they should deal with the consequences and not let taxpayers take the downside while they take the upside
Programs like Airwave and Reaper can already be used to run Windows .DLL's on Linux without modification - or compilation. I've been using a few Windows-only VST Synth plugins on my Linux DAW for years ...
It would be more correct to say that they don't have access to money. If someone lives next door to a grocery store you wouldn't say they don't have access to food. Likewise if someone can't pay their water bill, they are in danger of not obtaining any neccesaties like food or heat.
The problem would be more clear to say they don't have access to any free water or don't have access to money or a source of income. Saying they don't have access to water implies the infrastructure isn't there, which is not the problem that needs to be solved in this case.
there is no material difference: if your water is cutoff, the reason does not matter.
it just seems incredibly shortsighted to put the entire population in danger because of a few dollars
Again, I don't know if anyone is actually critical of turning people's water back on and that isn't what is being talked about here.
All I said was that saying in a general sense that people don't have access to water implies infrastructure problems which isn't the case here.
When someone says 'infrastructure and access isn't the problem' and you say "I for one, think people deserve water" that's just nonsensical and self righteous.
