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by lmm 2955 days ago
The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.
2 comments

I use a 6 year old phone. It has a third party extra thick battery and a microSD card slot. It does the core functions of a phone just as well as a modern one (voice call, SMS, clock, calculator, flashlight, music player). The camera is worse, but if I cared about quality I'd use a standalone camera. As for apps/Internet, it's roughly the same as modern phones: a whole lot of barely usable garbage only suitable for emergency use when you don't have access to a desktop. It seems to me that any modern phone would be a downgrade.
I saw a funny cloud today, I took a picture of it. I usually don't carry an extra standalone camera with me all day just for moments like that.

I can also google up information about light-bulbs when I'm standing at the store wondering if I should get X or Y. Or if some product doesn't specify if it's gluten free or not and the ingredients look a little iffy.

There are plenty of tiny improvements. It doesn't revolutionize my life, but having my old Nokia would definitely be a downgrade.

A 6 year old phone is still capable of doing that I think Samsung Galaxy was at version 3 or 4 around 2012, Nokia was big before 2007, 11 years ago.
If the case being made is just that we don't need the absolutely latest smartphone, I'm totally onboard.

But there is also a lot of offhand grumpiness about how we don't need all this technology, which I disagree with. Technology improves our lives, but it's not always apparent right away.

Five years ago I had a phone with buttons and rarely had to stop the impulse of trowing it into a wall because google kept installing updates to apps I don't want and can't do more than factory reset.

Sure, I didn't have a fancy app to look at the timetable for the bus, but there was a wap-page I could use and frankly the apps are about as frustrating but now because touch interactions so often go wrong without real buttons.

And I use both vim and ssh daily, rarely wishing I had an new app to replace them with.

Swap out the stock distribution - I'm assuming Android here - for something like AOSP, leave off the Google-specific bits (i.e. do not install 'gapps' or anything which depends on it, install the mock-google-bits instead if you want to run something which depends on Google play services. Use F-Droid instead of the Google play store. Voila, a phone which does not do silly updates behind your back, does not install apps you do not want and which should last for years and years - mine is about 7.5 years old now.