Let’s take apart your phone | Hacker News Reader

Let’s take apart your phone

everythingmachine.io

39 pointsbookofjoe30 comments

What an odd website. It explains everything in incredibly childish terms ("The display you’re reading this on is an absurd grid of exactly [wrong number] tiny, multicoloured light bulbs, known as pixels."), has lots of needless word-salad LLMisms ("Electricity made light effortless. The torch in your phone made darkness optional."), and all in all, feels like a wasted concept because it doesn't really say anything that isn't patently obvious: a phone has a screen and a camera and a CPU... okay? Not exactly mind-blowing.

It doesn't really even do anything to support its thesis that it's the "most intricate machine you've ever held". I don't know, I'm holding a Thinkpad laptop right now and I'm pretty sure it's a superset of what's inside a phone.

You're absolutely right.

I guess this website isn't ready for primetime yet.

Let me rewrite it all only to still have most of the same issues it used to have, and a few extra ones too.

I think a phone does beat a thinkpad, but not by much.

How so? They have the same radios, the laptop has more human input devices (touchpad, trackpad, keyboard, pen), quantitively better almost everything (more RAM, much better CPU / GPU, much higher pixel count, faster and higher-capacity SSD, better audio, etc)... laptop cameras are the only thing that's obviously worse.

The density of components on a phone logic board is significantly higher, which is how I define intricacy.

Fair dos on the LLMisms. I'm still working on keeping my human voice despite being able to plug any words in to get a smooth AI version.

I'd push back on the childish terms. It is firmly pitched to a general audience, but I think it stands up in both depth and breadth. If you have better examples I'd love to see them.

I'd also square up on the thinkpad. It has larger and more powerful versions of some of the components, but it's also missing a lot of phones ones: the accelerometer, gyroscope, linear resonant actuator, magnetometer, barometer, multiple cameras, probably one with OIS; all in a much smaller device. Very keen to debate, tell me about your laptop!

> I'd push back on the childish terms

Are you Claude?

Why won't you respect your audience enough to write with your own voice?

The most intricate machine I've ever held was an inertial guidance system, back when they were hugely complex. My phone isn't even close.

I was thinking earlier that a traditional spring-based pocket watch seems far more intricate to me than a wodge of glass and silicon. I know the phone is far more complex, but intricate? Nah.

I came here hoping to hear stories of the more intricate machines people have held.

I held a baby. Does that beat a phone?

Beats it for sure, humans are by far the most complex machines, a true marvel of the world. By comparisons, humans make phones look like simple toys.

I don't know, it's different. Humans are analog wonders, phones are digital wonders, both impressive in one of those categories.

Humans have a bunch of digital components at their core: DNA, RNA, and peptides. It's not all analog.

Likewise, phones have numerous analog components: microphone, speaker, camera, screen, radio modem, power regulation.

Please don't equate the word "digital" to the notions of being electronic, man-made, or modern. Digital is simply an agreement between a sender and receiver that information is finite and perfectly copyable. (By contrast, analog information is infinite and cannot be copied perfectly.)

Spectrum analyzer might not be baby-tier but it probably is more intricate than a phone. Not that I've held one.

Puts a new spin on designed in California, built in China

Any animal beats an engineered machine. Heck, the bacteria in your hand are probably more intricate than a phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War Battle tested too!

I put a lot of thought into that problem:

So a baby, a seed, any living thing (or even a chunk of something that was once living I suppose) is more complex, which I why I went with 'machine' to exclude those.

I also toyed with saying 'own' rather than 'held', but a modern electric car is basically a beefed up phone with a bunch of driving stuff too, so they wouldn't pass that test.

There are some edge cases: someone upthread held a classic inertial guidance system, and a modern GPU is arguably more intricate, though much more single-function, and good luck getting your hands on one of those anyway!

>Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely unskilled labor?

—Scott Crossfield, 1954 <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/01/computer/>

Given the context, most people would consider a machine as something designed and built by people. With respect to babies: we cannot do the former (yet) and I think most people would consider the latter to be a bit of a stretch (growth and development is a bit different from the common notion of building, even if it is a biological process occurring within a person).

While someone can probably cite a more intricate machine that can reasonably be held within a hand, the assemblage of features in a phone certainly makes it one of the more complex machines of its size. Especially when you consider how many fields it draws upon. Digital electronics is sufficiently different from RF electronics, the RF spectrum behaves differently (from an engineering standpoint) from the optical spectrum. That accelerometer may be packaged like an IC but MEMS are quite different from a CPU or solid state memory. The list could go on.

I once had an interview where the interviewer asked me, if you had to be alone on a remote and uninhabited island that somehow had food and water, what would you bring. I answered the phone and began to explain how it was an intricate machine that showed the technical prowess of humankind and tethered me back to the ingenuity of humans. I saw the interviewer roll her eyes and glaze over my explanations. Apparently some people don’t appreciate the fact that anything mass-produced could be interesting enough.

I have seen babies do that, yes.

> Petrol stores 50 times more energy by weight, but it needs to be exploded. A doughnut stores around 15 times, but it needs to be digested.

You left out a very important fact: Combustion requires external oxygen, which is not counted in the denominator when energy-by-mass is typically considered.

Ah that's a really good point, so it reduces the x times for both petrol and doughnuts. I'll recalculate thank you!

Not enough tokens for some diagrams/illustrations, too?

We're both rubbish at drawing unfortunately

This is essentially just LLM output listing common smartphone components and various vaguely related trivia. Most of the "navigation" section isn't even about machine navigation for crying out loud, and the 10 second/week drift figure seems completely hallucinated.

Been expecting this. An AI slop equivalent of the likes of https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ etc. A similar style or approach in theory, but without any of the care or attention to detail or humanity as what they’re mimicking. No interest in teaching, or accuracy, just prompt out the slop, get the views, move on.

> I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes, please shout them and I'll fix!

Depressing.

Author here, thanks for sharing.

The idea is that the smartphone is an incredible entry point to the history of technology for a general audience. A huge range of human needs were met by increasingly sophisticated tools over millennia, then collapsed into a single device over the last 30 years.

I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know any you spot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com