Seems like a good time to plug one of my favored youtoobers, famed former NBA player Drew Gooden:

Technology isn't fun anymore

Booo. Thought it was legit.

Drew is legit. No, he never actually played in the NBA. The name confusion is just one of his long-running jokes.

Edit: clarity

I like it boring. I get to customise a blank slate how I want. I really rather not have things in my life that are by someone else's interpretation of "good" design. Ending up with more shit like my Dyson, or a modem trying to be the centrepiece of the living area..

Boring is cheap. Look at the way houses and apartments are being built now. Soviet Bloc Block Housing. No need for architects if the preexisting plans are pre-approved.

Yay capitalism.

Edit: a lot of people are missing the nuance. Surprise.

Samsung Gleam. That was peak cellphone.

Ulefone's got your back for weird phones.

First of all, my modem sits on a pedestal in a glass case. Second, you're wrong. Third, if you can't get curls to stay with your Dyson air wrap that's a skill issue, it's definitely not inferior to a curling iron in every way. -s

shows crt with speakers and buttons

Now THIS was design

Idk I kinda like modern minimal / flexible, assuming it works. It's often easier to customize something in an app than with a bunch of dials. Stuff like hue has shown it possible to make physical buttons to control smart devices, if you want them

Meanwhile he glosses over the fact that Samsung has all the foldables now, and that's a pretty extreme industrial design in the modern era

Its good. Just how laptop has been solved so is smartphone right now. I like my tiny black bricks, keep your corporate style to yourself.

“Kirk to Enterprise…”

except at least the commie blocks were affordable lol

"cheap to build" meant "cheap to rent", not "our housing company is making record-breaking profits! "

Flagship stuff is just optimized.

You probally wouldn’t be surprised to find out a bunch of interesting designs of the past had durability and longevity issues.

My favorite of all the phones I have owned:

Rather Unihertz. They basically have just the unusual phones.

Currently I have Ulefone Armor 24, but I'd want something like Oukitel WP100 Titan. Even larger and crazier.

Look at that 33Ah thing:

Almost brick size now. It's so ridiculous I want it. After all, what I have now isn't far from if, it's just that this is even bigger.

3.6cm (1.4 inch) thick, 877g (1.93lbs) heavy.

But somehow it still can't fit a headphone jack and MicroSD card slot, so that's a no for me.

Except with supposed technological advancement and bigger efficiency it's supposed to become more affordable on a competitive market, yet it doesn't. It just becomes cheaper for the construction companies.

Soviet serial housing was better planned. There were intended green spaces and microdistricts (those didn't turn out very well, it became apparent that they are convenient to small crime).

It's not really "capitalism", it's an oligarchic system where everybody having power feels that it's very good for them. Ask Sergey Brin if he wants to change anything. It's the same in construction and everywhere, because why wouldn't it be - an oligarchization of one sphere of economy leads to the same in others.

At the same time the ideas of authority and law in the Soviet space were kinda similar to what your "land of the free" is developing now. Easy to forget that in USSR your boss knew all your history of past employment, and when you'd be leaving could write something so nasty there that you'd never work anything better than janitor after them. Or that a kid living with their family in one small room of a communal apartment in a Khruschev-era serial building could go as guest to a kid living with their family in a three-room apartment in a Stalin-era special building, both given by the state, see and eat something there that they would never at home, and that was the normal degree of inequality in the USSR.

BTW, yeah, I've gotten a taste of mentioning the Soviet elites the justice against whom still hasn't been restored in any way, - so my family lived in a two room apartment in a Stalin-era building (my grand-grandfather was a railways analog of an infantry general, and my grandmother is one of the architects of the Boguchan hydroelectric station), and judging from Wikipedia, Sergey Brin's family lived in a three room apartment in such (it's also there who his parents were). That's about who those immigrants were who could afford to be otkazniks for a few months\years before leaving for the USA. Jackson-Vanik was basically targeted at a small subset of the Soviet elite with Jewish ancestry. Soviet antisemitism was sort of a Soviet version of "first world problems". Again, my grandmother's sister's family also emigrated then.

And in western stereotypical portrayals of "how people live in (ex-)USSR" of late 80s and early 90s they too often show such living places. As if that were normal.

Yet the absolute majority didn't.

So, one of the reasons Putin could do what he did, - the absolute majority saw how people who didn't live too badly in the first place got an opportunity to be "liberated" and play "discount USA", while their own workplaces which would feed them somehow stopped doing that.

It's a very particular feeling of collective injustice when those who benefited most from a system dismantle it and blame it on those who benefited less.

So, getting back to Soviet bloc housing, interpeted as Khruschev-era. It wasn't so bad, considering the green around and the fact that people would move there from actual wooden barracks. And Stalin-era housing wasn't bad at all and still isn't.

There were not "affordable", they were allocated. One could somehow improve the chance of being "given" that via connections.

And if you changed a workplace, it could be taken back. It wasn't yours.

Those phones were really convenient, taking just as much place in your pocket as needed, screen covered from being scratched by keys and other items.

Actually convenient keyboards.

It's just that why make ergonomic, optimized for the task, price-efficient things when a piece of useless crap called iPhone makes you more.

I swear, for market economies to work you need to outlaw advertising.

flip phones were great as phones, but terrible as pdas. iPhone combined the two in a non-chunky way (competitors? Palm Treo? Windows Mobile phones?)