memes

we ~~could watch stuff~~ could watch ads

The weight scale is misrepresented, though.

Porn, this meme used to say porn! Why do we keep self censoring?

Look at all that screen real estate. Utterly wasted on ads and super tall fonts.

Anyone remember when Steve Jobs said in response to adding video support to the iPod that "nobody wants to watch videos on a handheld?" And then just a few months later, iPods got support for images and videos?

I absolutely hate that phones got so darn big. Im stuck with iPhone 13 mini even though I hate iOS with no clear upgrade path

Would love a slightly thicker phone with a huge removable battery

By stuff you mean animated GIFs of big breasted horse hung transgender anthropomorphic lions being violated by giant alien tentacles, right?

Just say porn

I wish 2g and 3g weren't being dismantled. I want to go back to using my old razr

I have small hands and I hate how few small phones there are now

"we" = "they"

And what if I don't want to watch "stuff" on my phone? My phone is supposed to be a portable "swiss-army-knife" of digital tools.

They made tablets for the other "stuff"

I remember back in 1990ish, there was a guy involved in the local music scene who got interviewed on AM radio (Right before the rise of conservative talk radio, when there were still local hosts talking about local issues.). This guy wasn't a big shot and not a musician, just a guy passabout music. tmusic. He went by the moniker Jim Clevo, I had the fortune of meeting him once. Anyways, he had insight as to where the music industry was headed. In the interview, he told how in the future we would be listening to music through our phones. At the time high tech was a cordless landlines with an answering machine built in. He sounded crazy, i couldn't figure out why he thought we would all be holding phones up to our ears listening to music, I never had anything but a corded phone at the time. Not sure why I'm rambling about it other than this post reminded me of him.

i would kill for button based menu navigation to come back

From this graph we can say the Razr was peak

I think a lot of the reason phones are getting bigger is because of battery life. You can absolutely make a small phone with a big battery, but then it would be thicc and people (read plebs) don’t want little bricks, they want big slabs.

So for the few of us that want little bricks, we’re just entirely fucked. There are the Jelly phones, but they run Android, and I’d rather have a slab that spies on me a little less than a perfect brick filled to the brim with Google spyware.

I’m waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping that Linux phones get to the point where I can daily drive one.

We didn't "realise" we could watch stuff; we got touch screen technology, wifi and mobile data became cheaper as we got 3G, 4G and 5G. The we *could *watch stuff, and browse the internet - this was always the obvious course of phones even in the 90s when bricks were still around. Meanwhile battery tech hasn't moved forwards much, so these big screen, wifi, Bluetooth & 5G connected,video playing devices need bigger batteries to keep going all day. Ironically a bigger device - even with a bigger screen - will have a longer battery life because you can physically fit a bigger battery in.

Also this chart stops at 2015 - and thats still accurate. Mobile phone tech has plateaued. Time was, iPhone launches each year were a big deal because Apple was good at bringing previously out a of reach tech into the mass market. Now all the changes are minor and phone launches are dull. iPhones are now just popular because they're iPhones. Chips are getting a bit more energy efficient pushing the capabilities a bit; but cameras, screens, storage and connectivity are probably as good as they're going to get for now beyone incremental changes.

We're now probably in the enshittification phase where companies try to justify ever increasing prices but can't - iPhone prices have been largely static for 5 years because Apple can't find a compelling reason to increase them. Whether there are stupid notches in the phone display, or expensive accessories like wireless headphones or now trying to up-sell people on software / services - ultimately a phone is just a phone now. The manufacturers latest hope is that somehow AI will allow them to charge more but it's looking like AI in it's current form has little value to consumers. Apple has delayed it's changes to Siri because it's struggling to make something that isn't basically just another unreliable overhyped LLM.

Realistically the next real leap in phones will probably only come if and when battery tech improves; if smaller high energy density batteries come then that really will unlock a new revolution. The AI bubble doesn't look like it's going to deliver.

There’s an early Corner Gas episode where Brent and Davis get into a competition over who can get the smallest phone, it feels so odd watching it today.

This graphic is missing the (de)evolution in phones when manufacturers unnecessarily started putting holes and notches in the screens.

#StopPuttingCutoutsInMyFuckingDisplays #BringBackBezels

They got bigger so there was more room for ads.