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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

ditch your phone , go back to your desktop, problem solve. Mobile has been a regression in pretty much everything except corporate profits.

The focus of the article is wrong. PCs for example are not getting more specialized, they are getting new capabilities with the additional specialized gpus. As others have said the problem does not lie in processors, but on the software and UI, which has been steadily dumbing down since "smart"phones have been introduced. Phones have perfectly capable general computing processors but corporate decisions limit their usage.

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Amen to this, I absolutely hate what mobile phones and their attendant giant megacorps did to the internet and computing in general.

PinePhone has a lot software releases, postmarketOS has plenty of supported hardware.

"Dumbing down" is a necessity for extended demographics, that's trend from long ago.

Article explains reality, predicts proliferation of specialized hardware. For example was sound ever viable on CPU? GPUs were specialized, become more universal with compute, extended with video encoders, RTX, DLSS.

I agree -- this is exactly why when my current smartphone dies, I'm going to be switching to the dumbest phone I can find and start carrying a real pocket computer along with it.

and a camera; and a wallet with all the cards you use? maybe the landscape of featurephones is different now, but i only knew of 1 or two (kyocera) that allowed tethering, so now you also have to figure out how to get internet onto your pocket computer - another sim, another bill. Perhaps you need a GPS device too (my car has one built in, but my wife's doesn't, for example).

I was going to just post a link to a picture of my cellphone graveyard drawer; i've been saying this same sentiment for the 12 or so years i've owned a smartphone. I even bought two Nikon 1 cameras to obviate the need for a decent cellphone camera. I have a servicable netbook (eeePC), too.

The most expensive cellphone i ever bought was $300. In theory, i could carry a Nintendo Switch, Nikon 1, feature phone, GPS unit, and a netbook around with me... or this absolute garbage OnePlus that i hate using enough that i only use it when necessary, like to SMS/MMS or something as silly as making or receiving a telephone call.

I realize I'm unusual for the HN demographic, but...

I don't really use the camera on my smartphone, so see no need to replace it. I carry a wallet with the few cards I need daily anyway, so no change there (and even if I didn't need to carry cards, I still need somewhere to keep cash) I don't use my phone to pay for things or access services, so I'm not concerned about doing those things when mobile. I can do what I need to do online from my desktop machine at home.

I do need GPS, but it will be in my pocket computer, so that's fine. I don't need to have online access for this to be useful because I really only use GPS for specific planned activities anyway, so I can preload any maps I might need.

> i only knew of 1 or two (kyocera) that allowed tethering, so now you also have to figure out how to get internet onto your pocket computer - another sim, another bill.

I'm not particularly worried about having the pocket computer be always connected to the internet. I can easily get by without having a constant connection. The pocket computer will have Wifi, which will cover situations where I want to have the machine connect to the internet.

> and start carrying a real pocket computer along with it

So why wouldn't you buy Librem 5 or Pinephone, which are pocket computers running GNU/Linux which have a phone functionality?

Because I don't want the computer to have phone functionality. Also, I can get a better computer for the money if it isn't married to a phone.

Would you mind linking to a good pocket computer for buying?

I would if I could. There are a number of models available, but I have no real insight as to which are the best. I'm building my own for this endeavor.

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