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Comment by _5659 | Hacker News Reader

I had to disable Adblock Plus for some reason to get the entire page to load.

Ditto on the point where Japan is stuck in the 1980s future. Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text. If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow, and many people lacked a desktop to provide updates. I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. If people want a desktop, they go to a cafe. If they want a mobile connection, it's faster to just use your telecom plan.

That seems to have changed under COVID.

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I believe the reason for slow iPhone adoption was that they already had i-mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

The most incredible thing is they are still supporting the service till 2026 despite its usage being in decline since 2008

The primary reason for slow iPhone adoption in Japan was that both NTT Docomo and au/KDDI, the largest carriers, initially refused to stock it. (Japan has a strange model where the telcos basically control what handsets can be sold.) SoftBank was the first to start selling it, and this propelled them from being a bit player into a top-tier telco.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N2cMeNoQcjk/XGGrX-OBnbI/AAAAAAAAW...

> If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow

No way. It's hard to exaggerate what a smash hit the iPhone was in Japan. It immediately changed the mobile landscape, and continues to have an outsized market share: ~57% compared to 45% in the US

Yes, once it was available, but dominant players NTT Docomo and KDDI refused to sell it for years. It was SoftBank who took a punt, and it paid off big time.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15892640/iphone-anniversa...

> I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo.

Train stations, 7-11, Family Mart, Starbucks, Gasuto, McD's.

Plus all of the locations in the Japan Connected-free wifi app.

Wifi WAS extremely scarce in Japan. When I lived there a few years ago the phone plans were great for me but it was very difficult for friends visiting to have internet even in Tokyo. When I was there last year there seemed to have been a pretty big push in preparation for the Olympics, most stations did not have WiFi in 2015 when I moved away as an example

It is still very scarce outside of the Tokyo bubble. Japan is not Tokyo.

If by “a few” you mean more than 5 then maybe. Free WiFi in all convenience stores, most train stations (almost all in bigger cities Tokyo, around half in bumfuck countryside where I live), many major public spots and department stores, expressway buses, and many cafes and restaurants all have free WiFi.

I was without a SIM card for several months recently and rarely had to go far finding connectivity.

I put the exact year I moved away.

> Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text.

That sounds great tbh. Not everything needs to be a 4MB bootstrap.js webshit that doesn't even load with adblockers enabled.

Fanboy’s Annoyance list contains a filter ##.headersocial, which is triggered by the headersocial class on the body element, and so it nukes the whole page. I’ve reported this upstream; I believe changing it to ##:not(body).headersocial should fix this site, or maybe they’ll make an exception for this domain instead.

Edit: that was quick! Fixed in https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/4bf4c04186f4a7d9....

I've seen a lot of pocket wifi routers also for locals, which is really neat when you travel and your accomodation comes with one of these since you can carry it around all day for wifi and don't need a simcard.

The bit about scarce WiFi is surprising. Back in 2005, I did a lot of warbiking in Tokyo, and signals were easy to find.

That was 15 years ago, everyone has high speed mobile plans now so there's no demand for public Wi-Fi.

for me, wp.com was being blocked.

FYI: "ublock original" is the better and independend ad-blocker.

uBlock Origin*

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

I had to disable uBlock Origin to get the entire page to load, so in this case it has more to do with some filter.

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