your writing style in particular fits with a lot of autistic people I've seen, FWIW. but I don't support using "autistic" as an insult (it's honestly the opposite, IMO)
Is Temporal even in though? Last I checked (last year or so), I had to use some bleeding edge version of Firefox to get it, and absolutely nothing else had it. I do agree though it's lovely, and I'd love to see native support for it.
Nope. Only Firefox and Chrome have it, in their latest versions. No Safari or Edge support yet. So this article is a bit premature (unless you use the polyfill.)
Got to say, I like the current Android versions.
In the early days I flashed my Motorola Defy every second month with some cool new ROM.
Always rooted and Xposed, always enabling something new.
Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need.
OneUI 8.0 and Android 16.
For work (app de) I also have a Pixel 7a, always with the newest Android Beta.
Also works well.
Even the entry level phones work OK to pretty good now.
My Samsung A16 5G (also for work) functions surprisingly well for 150€.
> Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need.
Maybe, but it is fully under Google and Samsung's control, and is choke full of spyware. You couldn't pay me to use a stock (Googled) Android phone for this reason alone.
Back when I used Android phones, tweaking was pretty important to me too. I still remember when I installed CyanogenMod on a Motorola XT1565, those were the days... Eventually, LineageOS, and then some new phones happened, not all of which were rootable, though I eventually ended up with a OnePlus 7 Pro which was pretty tweakable and even opened the possibility of bootloader re-locking, until a TWRP bug wiped my device and I pretty much stopped tweaking. Was never quite able to get EdXposed working right again...
How well is rooting supported on these newer Android versions/devices? If I install LineageOS on my device, for example, I can be reasonably sure that Magisk will work fine. But how well does it work on a stock, locked-down ROM?
Most devices doesn't have unlockable bootloaders now thus you can't even root them unless it was a popular device and a temporary /finicky hack was found.
I am asking out of curiosity and nothing else: what use cases do you have that motivate you to get a new phone every year? Do iPhones get notably better with every release? I'm guessing camera or storage would be big ones?
Well, with this last one they finally made the telephoto 48MP. Also, vapor chamber is nice. I don't know if the 18 will have enough for me to upgrade, and it might even have a reason for me not to upgrade (removing gestures from Camera Control). But so far it's been every year, because I've only been using iPhone for a couple years, and my first was a refurbished 15 Pro Max.
The 17 Pro (non-Max) only comes with up to 1TB of storage, but that's still more than my 15 of before.
I'm not parent but a counter perspective - the only three motivations I have are:
phone dies
camera vastly improves (imo it's been on a decline since the Nexus 6)
phone is too slow to use
I'm on year 5 of my Samsung s21u that I can replace the Samsung ux slop with asop ports
It is not for anyone but Apple, because they control the source code and full remote code execution access to your device at a higher privilege level than you as the supposed owner have.
So you believe dictatorships are a good idea when it comes to technology control.
My question is then the same of anyone who prefer to give up freedoms to centralized seemingly benevolent dictators: What happens when you are told you can no longer do something you were previously allowed to do, that is only in the interest of the centralized power?
The linux ecosystem is a peaceful and effective system of anarchy with no central authority. Pretty much the exact opposite of the Apple dictatorship.
I am a Linux distro maintainer and my team and I do whatever we think is best in our distro, even including patches and defaults Torvalds did not approve of, because our goal is security first and his is compatibility first. That is what we mean when we say "free" in free open source software. Torvalds can do whatever he wants in his branch, and we can do whatever we want in ours, selectively taking the bits we want.
Want to modify the operating system on your iPhone? Want to use Tor globally for privacy? Want to use an external NFC/USB smartcard for secret management or authentication? Want to use a browser with an engine other than last gen crippled webkit? Good luck. Apple did not extend those freedoms to you.
You have no freedom on that device but to install binaries Apple blesses and use it the way they intend. Apple does not produce free software or give their users freedom over their devices because they want maximum profit and control.
Including custom ROM devs like the GrapheneOS team or the LineageOS team? That's a lot of trust you're putting in a company that only has their own profit at heart.
After Trump's re-election, I figured that there's not much difference between using a cheap Android from Chinese OEM, or an iPhone. Both will give away my information if the totalitarian government (Chinese or American) requests so. I don't really have particular preference on whether it's the Chinese or Americans spying on me, so in the end it all boils down to price. Chinese Android devices deliver same level of performance and features as Apple for 1/4 of the price.
Of course if I really cared about privacy, I would just install GrapheneOS or LineageOS on supported Android device, so no Apple in that case either.
It's so hard to find OLEDs with a sensible subpixel layout these days. I wish this stuff were documented and that you could find traditional horizontal subpixel layouts in the OLED mass market.
I have at least one friend who wants individually-addressible bayer layouts, but that likely won't happen.
The problem is mostly that normal people can't be trusted with system-level access but some people can. And it's literally, provably not possible to tell them apart.
For the masses, lack of system-level access is a benefit because they won't be able to ruin their device. For hackers and hobbyists, lack of system-level access is a hindrance because they won't be able to control their device.
Well, normal people generally can’t be trusted with cars: in one country of only 3.5% of the humans we kill two jumbo jets worth of people with them every day.
Tylenol is another example. Building materials is a third (building and fire codes are a relatively recent invention). Hell, even penicillin is by prescription only.
Letting the circumstance happen where median people can easily cause externalities through ignorance or carelessness is how we incinerated the planet and destroyed the biosphere as we know it with fossil fuel emissions, because it’s nbd (still even now in 2026, when we know about runaway polar greenhouse curves) to get in your ICE car and drive to the corner store.
When normal people had GP computers, we got botnets millions strong and DDoS in the Tbit/sec range and keyloggers on every hotel lobby computer hooked up to the boarding pass printer. Median people are way safer on the internet now than before.
> Well, normal people generally can’t be trusted with cars: in one country of only 3.5% of the humans we kill two jumbo jets worth of people with them every day.
If you mean Indonesia (the county closest to 3.5% of the human population) or the US (the nearest above 3.5% at 4.1%+) then you are high by an order of magnitude. Two jumbo jets are around 1000 people. US car deaths are around 100 a day and Indonesia is a little lower.
If you mean Pakistan (the next country after Indonesia at 2.9%) you are high by close to two orders of magnitude. They have around 15 deaths a day.
That seems like an untenable stance. Most people don't pick healthy foods to eat or exercise as much as they should. Should we dictate what they can and cannot eat etc?
In other areas of life, people self-select at their own risk. You can diagnose medical issues yourself, buy power tools you don't know how to use safely, and invest in assets that you don't understand.
All other things being equal, we should try to protect people. But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.
Have you ever seen government officials talk about tech? I think you'd have to be naive to buy the narrative that they're making such a large policy decision for our security.
Of the few people using rooted phones to begin with, there's even fewer that don't know what they're doing.
Much more likely is this is a decision to get in line with the well documented and rapidly spreading surveillance laws of the past few years.
> But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.
You are acting like it's easy to accidentally root your phone
You can’t freely sell devices to let others self-diagnose medical issues, so this part of your analogy doesn’t hold up in the case of phone sales.
We also limit investing in certain types of investments to so-called “accredited investors” which is just legal jargon for “millionaires”.
I don’t think the point you are trying to make about letting people own-goal is as strong as you think it is. (I would have gone with “roulette is legal”, which is a better one that the investment one, as the accredited investor rule is in all 50 states.)
If you are interested in the public good, I think it is pretty clear that we should ban roulette overnight since it has a negative expected value for everyone but the casino. On the other hand (still presuming you're interested in the public good), I think you have to consider very carefully whether it's good or bad to lock people out of investments or to restrict people's access to health care.
Because enough people losing their own money in the same way becomes a social ill.
Much in the same way we try to limit physical addiction, which hypothetically only affects the person taking the substance, and gambling (though we're moving backwards on sports betting).
Some hypothetical social ills:
1 If it's a good source of money, it becomes more ubiquitous. This leads to entire illegal markets, which will typically lead to additional crimes, up to and including human trafficking, slavery, organ harvesting, and murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam_center.
2. The victims of scams will often feed shared or even stolen assets into the scam, desperately relying on an eventual return that will never come. This mirrors one of the better known social ills of gambling and addiction.
3. Even for people that never fall victim, defending against scams is tiring, irritating, and damages social fabric. An easy example is how spam cuts down on the utility of phone calls. In general, to be safe you have to be almost irrationally suspicious of anyone being surprisingly friendly, which makes non in-person connections -one of the greatest benefits of the internet - much harder and more dangerous to forge.
For sake of completeness, another important reason:
4. These kinds of "social ills" hypothetically affecting only individuals, actually spill over to affect their families, and, at scale, communities.
That being said, in most cases it still doesn't justify this level of drastic intervention. Otherwise, cigarettes and alcohol and even Lotto would've been banned out of existence by fiat.
So let's advance the much bigger societal ill of smartphone addiction by making people more reliant on them.
No, your reasons are laughably bad, because the societal damage caused by these scams isn't even 5% of the societal damage caused by smartphone addiction in general, and not even 1% of "general smartphone addiction" + "tiktok/instagram/infinite scroll video feed addiction" + "gacha game addiction". Let alone "(sports) betting app addiction" for the many countries where this is a thing.
> i doubt most people could name the underlying bank for the Apple Card. Only place the bank is mentioned is the fine print at the bottom of the card details.
And in the bottom-right corner of the titanium card and in the picture in Wallet. And it's advertised practically everywhere they mention the titanium card. And if you have Apple Savings it's also specified to be from GS everywhere.
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