I actually think this is a good thing? Like, removing the headphone jack was terrible and shitty, but removing the charger literally creates less waste. Everyone* has eight million USB chargers already, or enough USB ports on computers, power strips, outlets, etc., or a wireless charging station, that this shouldn’t matter. Plus their pack-in headphones suck and mostly sit at the bottom of desk drawers before going to the landfill.
In a slightly better world, iPhones would have USB-C, a standard headphone jack, a replaceable battery, and nothing else in the box. The box would be made entirely of recycled materials. I dunno what smartphones would look like in a perfect world.
The Soviet smart phone weighs six pounds. You talk in to a handset attached by a cable. It has terrible call quality but gets reception anywhere on earth. If you open it up you'll find a replaceable wet cell battery, a complete circuit diagram, spare fuses, and a worrying sealed box with a nuclear trefoil on it. All parts are replaceable by hand. It has 70% parts compatibility with your microwave, your radio, and your lada.
Can you imagine how much more powerful, performant, and capable all existing technology would be without ads? Without constantly wasting resources digging through your whole life to feed your essence into a machine that just spits out an annoying message like “buy the new Carbon X2 Smart Toaster, now with AutoButter and Twitter integration. Burn your favorite tweets into your breakfast. Only 149.95 at Best Buy and Amazon”
take everything you like about the iphone and remove everything you don't. the public/government could just hire 300 engineers and pay them very good wages to develop and produce a smart phone, but tell them to make it without a profit motive in mind, make it as useful as possible, and that it should be as cheap and reliable as possible. (where as the engineers at google are told make it as profitable as possible, while maintaining enough usability to not hurt sales)
I've had to get new bloody chargers every phone (which admittedly isn't too often) because the Chinese phones I buy have significant increases in charge speed.
Charging for five hours isn't particularly attractive to save resources on a $20 charger. However if you had more expensive smarter chargers in the first instance that could have firmware updates and more repairability, then you'd avoid the need to update (e.g. the first 100W usb power delivery standard was agreed almost a decade ago).
I do wish phones were more repairable though - I've accidentally cracked a replacement screen and stabbed a battery in the past when replacing broken bits on my phone.
I haven't had a phone for years so this would fuck me completely. Why don't they do two models, one without the accessories and one with? Surely that's the actual best way to do this? But then they'd have two prices and wouldn't be able to charge the same I guess.
Lifehack: go to any hotel, explain to the front desk “I stayed here a few days/weeks ago and left my charger in my room. It was an [Android/iPhone] charger. Do you think you guys might have picked it up?”
Then you have to have two different models in the stores. Estimating how many of each to produce would be weird as well. I think Apple is amusing that most people are upgrading from an older iPhone and already have the lightning cable and wire
I actually think this is a good thing? Like, removing the headphone jack was terrible and shitty, but removing the charger literally creates less waste. Everyone* has eight million USB chargers already, or enough USB ports on computers, power strips, outlets, etc., or a wireless charging station, that this shouldn’t matter. Plus their pack-in headphones suck and mostly sit at the bottom of desk drawers before going to the landfill.
In a slightly better world, iPhones would have USB-C, a standard headphone jack, a replaceable battery, and nothing else in the box. The box would be made entirely of recycled materials. I dunno what smartphones would look like in a perfect world.
*everyone who is going to buy “the new iPhone”
The Soviet smart phone weighs six pounds. You talk in to a handset attached by a cable. It has terrible call quality but gets reception anywhere on earth. If you open it up you'll find a replaceable wet cell battery, a complete circuit diagram, spare fuses, and a worrying sealed box with a nuclear trefoil on it. All parts are replaceable by hand. It has 70% parts compatibility with your microwave, your radio, and your lada.
And 30 years minimum lifetime.
this is what they took from us
Unironically love this. The Pinephone and Fairphone are closer to that ideal, but not completely.
deleted by creator
Communist smartphone - open source software, components built to last minimum 30 years, easy to repair
Also, ban bloatware
Open source hardware too
If you're happy with a thicker phone, you can have separate PCBs you can switch out to improve components or for easier repairability
Needs a big enough of a production run that software devs are forced to optimize their software well enough to actually run on the things.
Also you can get a bunch of free CPU power on it and all other devices by ending advertising.
Can you imagine how much more powerful, performant, and capable all existing technology would be without ads? Without constantly wasting resources digging through your whole life to feed your essence into a machine that just spits out an annoying message like “buy the new Carbon X2 Smart Toaster, now with AutoButter and Twitter integration. Burn your favorite tweets into your breakfast. Only 149.95 at Best Buy and Amazon”
take everything you like about the iphone and remove everything you don't. the public/government could just hire 300 engineers and pay them very good wages to develop and produce a smart phone, but tell them to make it without a profit motive in mind, make it as useful as possible, and that it should be as cheap and reliable as possible. (where as the engineers at google are told make it as profitable as possible, while maintaining enough usability to not hurt sales)
I've had to get new bloody chargers every phone (which admittedly isn't too often) because the Chinese phones I buy have significant increases in charge speed.
The Xiaomi Mi Ultra 10 charges at like 100 watts.
You don’t have to charge it at warp speed, though. Everything still charges at the standard USB spec, it’s just slower.
Charging for five hours isn't particularly attractive to save resources on a $20 charger. However if you had more expensive smarter chargers in the first instance that could have firmware updates and more repairability, then you'd avoid the need to update (e.g. the first 100W usb power delivery standard was agreed almost a decade ago).
I do wish phones were more repairable though - I've accidentally cracked a replacement screen and stabbed a battery in the past when replacing broken bits on my phone.
I haven't had a phone for years so this would fuck me completely. Why don't they do two models, one without the accessories and one with? Surely that's the actual best way to do this? But then they'd have two prices and wouldn't be able to charge the same I guess.
Lifehack: go to any hotel, explain to the front desk “I stayed here a few days/weeks ago and left my charger in my room. It was an [Android/iPhone] charger. Do you think you guys might have picked it up?”
Boom, free charger.
Then you have to have two different models in the stores. Estimating how many of each to produce would be weird as well. I think Apple is amusing that most people are upgrading from an older iPhone and already have the lightning cable and wire