I…actually like my MacBook Air…
It’s weird but the portability is nice. I’ve been lugging desktop replacements for so long that having something that can fit anywhere and not break my back is cool.
Now does EVERYTHING need to be like that, no.
iPhones are thicker then ever (except for the air but it flopped) and no ports, worst of both worlds 😒
Ports are just offline compatibility.
And we can’t have that, can we?
–Silicon Valley Giants That Force Design Paradigms
What’s this from?
Thinner (1996)
Got a Zenbook Duo last year. As thick as an old Thinkad.
But it has two screens; one under the keyboard. The keyboard pops off, then you prop it up with the kickstand to get one at eye level and the other below.
It’s friggin amazing.
I’m all for this on laptops. I’ve had external monitors for so long that when I have to work using only the laptop screen, it’s difficult to be effective. It’s great that laptops are small and light but I’ll sacrifice some of that for more screen size
My phone has a headphone jack. I never want to let it go
Headphone jack and removeable battery for me. I always have 3 batteries in rotation, and replace the oldest one every 2 years or so.
Carry a spare in my pack and have a 3rd charging on an external charger to swap out at home.
Im currently working full time doing solar installs. I do a lot of the EE and physical design, and can edit both from my phone, whole working off of existing plans. And I can’t exactly have my phone plugged in while up on a roof. So I just swap out my battery when it gets low.
The when I get home, I swap out the dead battery for the one on the charger, and plug my phone in while I sleep.
I also end up catering or ‘celeb’ bartending 2x a month or so during the season out here. On those days ill often swap to the 3rd battery before I go to work for the evening so I have a fresh battery and can run the music off my phone all evening, without having to worry about power.
I traded my headphone jack for a pen. I’m buying a new active USB-C-to-Jack converter every six month, because techbros fell in love with some futuristic concept image featuring a cyborg girl wearing what appears to be wireless earbuds. (At least the full transparent glass phone apocalypse is further away)
If they ever do that I will refuse to call them anything other than datapads
The iPhone Air would’ve been a really refreshing change if it was uniformly thin (i.e. like now, but without the camera bulge).
In the other extreme I wonder why there aren’t many phones that would fill up the space up to the protruding camera modules with battery - this way a smaller phone could have the battery capacity of a larger and thinner one.
Yeah, or along the same lines I would love to see
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Whole phone as thick as cameras, while still using good cameras.
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Much of that space taken up by battery
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Rest of that space taken up by some kind of compact cooling system that even has a thin little fan that can kick on when it’s docked
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Because of course i’m talking about a dockable Linux phone
(I’m already seeing problems, like the fan probably needs to be part of the dock and the phone use the outside surface of the case as its heat sink)
Yeah, I meant most of that with the second paragraph. I’m just doubtful that active cooling would happen on mobile - manufacturers seem generally averse to including any moving parts (remember popup front cameras?). The direction that makes more sense to me is to make CPUs more thermally efficient.
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I want smaller, not thinner, if I wanted a large phone, I would have used a tablet to take calls
Make components smaller so you can have it be more powerful, not so it can be smaller and the same power.
Give me a week long battery.
Give me an actual camera sensor.
Give me no more lag.
Give me real storage.
Give me a fucking headphone jack.
Give me a replaceable battery!
Give me smaller, dedicated buttons.
Give me a phone with a real frame, something I can sit on, jump on, lean on, and use as a hammer.
Give me a phone that doesn’t have components that slowly work themselves free over a few years.
No more planned obsolescence.
Give me texture! I want to be able to grip my phone and not have it constantly slide off tables and couches because glass is so smooth.
Omg yes that’s the worst. I’ve also had CASES that do this. Super annoying.
IR Blaster too!
YESSSSS those things were awesome. You didn’t need it until you did, and then it was incredible to just have one in your pocket. It was just an ir led, too, so not including it was like… Wtf why
This was awesome when it was just me and my family in a hospital waiting room with like a few other folks who were doing their own thing. The TV just blasting ads and maybe some talk show or something, as it does.
Boop. Lowered the volume and could finally hear myself think.
Felt Watchdogs AF lol.
OnePlus models sometimes have them.
Give me a week long battery.
I got a Chromebook that lasts like seven days sleeping and 30 hours that I booted with Linux. It has headphone jacks. It has three USB ports. It also cost like $300.
It was awesome for light coding and browsing, and lasted 10 years.
Still got sweats going, “Eww it’s notApple/isGoogle/cantplayCrysis/cant3DModelWhileWatching4K.”
Phone screens don’t really get more durable because as the tech improves, they make the glass thinner to cut on weight and overall thickness.
Does the screen at least stay as durable BECAUSE the tech improves? Or have the screens gotten weaker?
There’s some really cool ceramic tech that’s making it marginally better, but overall, sapphire is the best way to increase scratch resistance, but it’s brittle.
Hahaha yeah a little bit
Product R&D engineer here. I have a product manager who only knows how to give one piece of feedback: make it smaller and slimmer. What requirement is driving this? Can’t say. What user need are we trying to address? No idea. But smaller=better for some reason.
Have you considered arranging an office white water rafting trip or perhaps cave diving, where a terrible misfortune may befall this person?
One thing people who don’t build products tend to imagine is that PMs are constantly doing market research, data analysis, focus groups, etc.
That may be true at some companies, but IME they can be clueless beyond belief because their real job is to be salespeople. They sell dreams to executives. Whether those will actually sell is a much lower concern.
See also: AI being shoved down everyone’s throats.
I bet that once upon a time, this was standard operating procedure.
Ask them why then.
Can’t you just kill him? You know, for the greater good?
Just make sure you dispose of the body in the smallest, thinnest container possible.
A slurry can be made very, very thin.
“Fun” little tidbit, the Mexican cartels call the guy who reduces bodies to a slurry “un pozolero” (a soup-maker) when they need to get rid of a body. Actual Pozole is quite delicious though.
br0th
The greater good!
Crusty jugglers!
Thinner until I can shave with this thing.
At least they’d be adding a function to a phone for once.
You’re gonna have to hone it to keep its edge. Wonder if it’ll come with vendor locked honing stones
I think it’s because, on one hand, it’s an engineering feat (useful or not) but also it’s one that is immediately visible and measurable. It’s useless beyond the novelty, as we saw with the iPhone Air, but it’s still impressive.
Also there is a history of great functionality being born from miniaturization. I’m not sure we’ll see much of that happening anymore, the low hanging fruits and nearly every other avenues have been explored, and it’s much less a problem of engineering as much as it is chemistry and physics. Unless you sacrifice usability for the sake of the feat.
So I agree with you that it’s not bringing much to the table, but I think there is an interest in pursuing it for one’s career
I mean, that’s actually really fair.
But now, we’ve seen how small we can go… Bring back the features! Swiss army knife time!
Fuck that person. They don’t need to exist.
This is what it once looked like. 😭
Perfection
The consumers complained so much that they brought back thicker MacBooks with more ports.
I mean, it still has 3 USB C ports, headphone jack, MagSafe, HDMI, and SD slot.
The only thing I ever wish for - more than the HDMI port I’ve never used - is a foldable Ethernet port. Lenovo and Dell perfected them, they are very resilient. I’m not sure what Apple’s refusal has been, probably some rule that moving parts are abhorred. Anyway it’s not like they make a Pro version of the MacBook where you’d expect to see things like Ethernet.
Life can be beautiful and functional and perfect, we’ve witnessed it and tasted it.
Bigger battery, more ergonomic grip, less camera bump, better thermal regulation, less weight, nobody wants a thinner phone
The camera bump is insane. Scratching the lens every time you place your phone on a solid surface. I have to find a specific phone case where the lip around the camera is high enough that it’s at least the same level as the lens.
phone case where the lip around the camera is high enough
Same. I’ve actually cracked a camera lense from a very unlucky drop. This was before waterproofing, because that phone died in a pool.
The camera continued to work, mostly. There were certain angles that would cause lense flare that would make J.J. Abrams jealous.
Maybe the lense is harder now but why risk it.
And a screen small enough that I can reach the whole thing with my thumb — I have very large hands (and pockets) and find my phone very awkward to hold.
And no AI features.
And no AI features.
Best we can do is Liquid Ass.
It doesn’t check all of those points, however a good number of them fit the new Sony Xperia, they have two models, one that’s more powerful and expensive and a cheaper (€400) model.
I’m sick of my Samsung tbh, have had them for a while now, but as soon as I saw that the Sony phones have a headphone jack and Micro SD slot I’m sold for my next phone. No camera hole punch either (I’m not a fan of it, I can understand people liking it though).
Can you buy Sony phones in the US directly or do you need to import them, it’s sad how uncompetitive the US tech market is, the government has basically banned most Asian brands from selling in the US
I have the Xperia 1 VI and absolutely love it
We hear you, and added another Animoji meanwhile!
Next year we might allow you to change glass color OR opacity, who knows when the wonders will cease?
You want bigger everything and less weight.
???
Xperia VI (which is small and light for a modern phone) is heavier than the Galaxy S3.
The Xperia is much larger than an S3.
Xperia 162 x 74 x 8.2 mm weight 192 grams 98000 mm^3
S3 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm 133 grams 83000mm^3
The only thing that would significantly add to the weight is a bigger battery and even there new battery tech has come out that is lighter than the existing lithium ion battery tech so its possible to have a bigger battery with less weight
The only thing that would significantly add to the weight is a bigger battery
You said get rid of camera bump. That means making the entire device thicker because of the limits of optics. Batteries are already around 25% of the total weight so doubling battery life would increase weight 25%.
I want both options. So at least one person wants a thinner phone.
Ports and a slightly larger battery using the space in the shell created by the ports
And maybe a screen glass that is 3mm thicker but that won’t break if you drop it
I could be wrong, but I don’t think this has so much to do with thickness as it does hardness. Like how you can smash automotive glass extremely easily with a tiny chunk of ceramic from a spark plug.
There are temperature treatments that can be done to glass that purposefully induces permanent tensions and compression forces in the glass that makes it stronger. But you need a big enough piece of glass to do that.
Power users sure, but you’re average customer doesn’t give a shit.
Because they were already gaslit by techbros.
Do you even need that many ports on your PC? Maybe one or two is perfectly fine, we can make it thinner if we don’t have to put that many on it, and otherwise here’s this dongle for expanding the base ports. BTW you’ll need backlight in your keyboard, no opt out, it’ll change your life forever, just set a less flashy color scheme if rainbow vomit RGB is too much!
Eh, you’re average user doesn’t need many ports on their device honestly.
Is that why so many dongles are being sold? Don’t know a single Mac user without one.
You can be certain they would be using more ports if they had any.
Sounds like it’s the Mac users who are wrong. Save some money and throw your apple shit in the trash where it belongs if you don’t like it.
I work in a company that’s a couple thousand people, and the vast majority of them don’t plug anything into their laptops other than power and a phone charger.
Plugging things in to your work computer is a security risk and likely not allowed by the company if they have any sense.
Dongle is for the desk. More like dock than dongle. I don’t want to travel with a thicker laptop for ports some neckbeard on lemmy demanded that even he will never use
- Keyboard
- Mouse
- Headphones
- Game controller
- Occasional thumb drive
- since you’re talking average user, a printer
You’re average user is not using separate kbm for a laptop, and if they are they using Bluetooth ones. And there definitely not using a game controller, and even then they’re Bluetooth too. Printers are wireless. So only thing is thumb drive which in my experience most people would rather use cloud storage or airdrop
Yeah your average user today does their “computing” on a device that they never plug anything into except power. And some of them never plug anything in at all.
I love cables and mechanically rugged tech, but the mainstream does not.
YOUR
Lemmy users trying not to downvote a fact just because they don’t like that the fact exists in reality - impossible challenge.
Every time
