You don't have to "believe". If you can find data that indicate that the dollar has devalued 40% (or even 20%) since "Liberation" Day, I'd like to see it.
The smartphone is not a mere commodity but a part of an entire social system of production between banks, telcos, software houses. Alternatives seemingly must come from outside the system... possibly Huawei from China and their HarmonyOS, which happily enough is banned in the US.
Or any sufficiently hard-boiled alternative from the inside. IMO things like custom ROMs lack sufficient vertical organization and that is why they're not so relevant (but at that point, you're basically constructing something much like a corporation once again, if not an entire society stemming out of it).
(It was surprisingly hard to find any news articles covering this. Most media just don't care that one of the biggest manufacturers in the world won't let users control their own phones. So much for holding the powerful to account, or protecting liberties.)
I don't think phones were ever "user-controlled", each one is designed fundamentally to connect to corporate-run wireless networks. Thus they want a say in the types of communications you do, gating certain kinds like RCS behind attestation. To that end there will be never be an alternative without some channel control.
Not totally unlike the way Bell used to strictly regulate their own user endpoints in the 20th century.
Within that stage, I could be wrong, but I would expect a somewhat freer software ecosystem there, as it is an economy oriented around manufacturing, and it is useful to write many various applications around that end.
> I don't think phones were ever "user-controlled", each one is designed fundamentally to connect to corporate-run wireless networks.
And PCs connect to corporate-run wired networks. What you're saying is at best an argument for locking the only radio chip itself, at worst it's propaganda to justify stripping ownership rights from consumers - "The item you think you own can affect some corporate property, therefore the corporation will seize control of it."
Hell the ISPs, phone and wired, can already drop you as a customer, blocking your communications, if they detect you interfering with their network. So any arguments that they must also control your devices are simply lies, transparently so even if they were coming from someone with 1000-times the goodwill and honest record of ISPs.
Edit as reply because I'm "posting too fast, please slow down":
> your handset plays the role also of one of these unfree modems
No, only the cellular chip does. And non-free/locked firmware is nothing new, even in PC-land.
> but any alternative must rival what makes the telco system, for the most part, actually work.
But it worked (and still works) just fine with rootable phones on the network. So rootable phones are not in any way an "alternative" - they are the (dwindling) status quo.
A bit wrong, PCs usually connect to modems or ONTs that in turn connect to the wired telco network, which are deeply unfree.
The nature of RF as a channel means your handset plays the role also of one of these unfree modems.
Attempting to draw a line between the corporate part and "your part" doesn't necessarily make sense because one doesn't exist, and if it did, is always shifting, especially in different environments.
I'm not necessarily "arguing in favor" of this kind of organization by describing it, but any alternative must rival what makes the telco system, for the most part, actually work. It's not enough to demand freedoms (which doesn't work), they have to be enshrined in real organization, in the social sense and material too. Today that means people have to get paid.
> But it worked (and still works) just fine with rootable phones on the network.
If the definition of "the network" is connecting to some LTE, sure, if it means being able to use RCS, or Google pay, or a banking app, it is much more questionable.
You attempt to cut the cellular chip out as the sole telecomm relevant part, but it is a fiction. It's visible today in bandwidth constrained environments like aircraft wifi that certain types of supposedly application-level traffic are not permissible (video calls). Conversely improving the channel capacity in general will require higher control of the user environment.
In my case, it is because there aren't any left that don't do this. Two banks still provide web interfaces that work through normal browsers, but only for their business clients.
This trend started in China, spread to countries like mine, and (as recent history shows) the relatively free democracies have been more than happy to copy some pretty nasty ideas from autocracies like ours — we went through your current news cycle 10-15 years ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if removing the last few vestiges of having control over your computing also came to you in another five to ten years.
I'm not aware of a bank that is /only/ accessible with an App (maybe that is your point?), but obviously wanting to obtain the best financial offers, interest rates, etc., trumps software freedom for most people.
Part of the story is that it only takes a /single/ major scandal RE sideloading to seriously injure a bank's reputation, even if the vast majority of sideloading use cases are legitimate.
What banks only offer the best interest rates an offers through apps?
I’m very much a credit card point churner and I have an HYSA. The same rates and offers are on the websites and the apps.
And how would a bank know if you’re using a website on a rooted phone?
People are complaining about the app stores when they are choosing banks which are app only - which I would never do - you should be complaining about your bank.
Why would anyone expect Google to attest to the safety of a rooted phone for financial transactions where it is directly in the payment chain? No one in the payment chain would allow that.
They wouldn't, that is exactly what I am saying. A phone isn't merely a standalone "computing tool" but represents an ongoing relationship between many corporate parties. Reasoning about the phone that way, as something like a PC from the 80s being encroached on, is an error. It is derived from entwined corporate interest from the beginning. The only similarity is the payment structure, lump sum or finance to "own".
Monzo in the UK is basically app-only. They have an "emergency" web interface but it only allows read-only access (apart from un-freezing your card) and can only be used if you've used the app in the past 90 days.
I think that finding an aftermarket keyboard solution for a smartphone using the android virtualization framework to run a debian VM (i.e. the "Linux Terminal" on Android 16) is your best bet by far.
The economies of scale (and compactness!) in mainstream smartphones are very hard to match, and they tend to have superior power management.
Do heavy lifting by logging into a remote server for best battery life and compute power.
Not unlike web development, you're working against a contract (in this case, CPU instructions/features, storage formats, bus formats) defined by some megacorporate legacy. You also have support from pieces of embedded firmware running inside storage devices or other peripherals.
> Are we going to let those digital assistants be rented from our corporate overlords?
Probably yes, in much the same way as we rent housing, telecom plans, and cloud compute as the economy becomes more advanced.
For those with serious AI needs, maintaining migration agility should always be considered. This can include a small on-premises deployment, which realistically cannot compete with socialized production in all aspects, as usual.
The nature of the economy is to involve more people and more organizations over time. I could see a future where somewhat smaller models are operated by a few different organizations. Universities, corporations, maybe even municipalities, tuned to specific tasking and ingested with confidential or restricted materials. Yet smaller models for some tasks could be intelligently loaded onto the device from a web server. This seems to be the way things are going RE the trendy relevance of "context engineering" and RL over Huge Models.
I would love to learn more about the unit economics of groceries. How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? [0]
If the latter was functioning well in a competitive market, I would expect their play to be on lower margins but higher volume.
[0] Mostly I'm referring to offal TBF, which I think most firms are happy to make any money on at all.
The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to. In practice they adjust the margins in a data-driven way on individual goods.
UK supermarkets actually provide pretty cheap fresh produce, because the market is pretty competitive. I think the most ridiculous I've seen was a 1kg bag of carrots for 20p.
Many countries or locations do not have highly competitive supermarkets.
Oh, and there's both volume and self-discrimination effects at work. In my supermarket shopping in the Asian food section is often cheaper as they sell big bags of rice and spices, to more cost-conscious consumers. See also: Costco.
It’s just price gouging. There is an item I sometimes buy that is about $1.60 at supermarkets, but is consistently $.85 at nearly all rural Colmados. Same brand, same product , shelf stable , mass produced, large volume mover, imported product. Supermarkets have just collectively decided to sell it for 2x the “rational” market price because it went up with Covid and people kept buying it.
Colmados don’t do data driven pricing, and just do a flat markup on the stuff the suplicadoras bring them.
Data driven pricing is just selective price gouging under a different name.
Costco is an interesting one to me. They're widely touted as being cheaper, but most foods there have some sort of upscaling factor -- "organic", some sort of regional variation like "sockeye" salmon instead of farmed atlantic, a few extra steps of processing, etc. Rice, pasta, and fruit are all usually more expensive than other alternatives, even at bigco grocery competitors. You have to be a little careful if that's where you do all your shopping.
Costco used to be cheaper bc of the bulk factor, but nowadays I think of it as a good curator. The products are usually good quality. Even if more expensive
A good example of this is their meat department, specifically beef as an example. You will generally find that Costco is not any cheaper than your regular supermarket, but the product you’re getting is graded USDA Prime or better.
There was a great comment on Reddit from someone who worked in the meat department that highlighted this comparison with specific examples but alas I am unable to find it.
>curation . . . The products are usually good quality.
Costco has a strong record of getting me to buy food products that are appealing to me for a while, but that I now consider bad for my health.
About the only food products I will still eat that I can buy at Costco are boneless poultry white meat, Kerrygold butter, olive oil and fresh asparagus.
Costco stocks many fruits and vegetables, but most of them are much too high in sugar to be good for me, I now realize. (Berries are on the low side in sugar content, but Costco does not stock frozen raspberries or blackberries, and I avoid fresh berries because they're about 50 times as moldy as frozen ones.)
Examples of foods that I eat a lot of that I cannot get at Costco are cabbage, radish and (frozen) tart cherries.
In contrast, Whole Foods carries most of the 3 dozen or so foods that are good for me to eat according to my current understanding of nutrition (but not the tart cherries). I would probably be significantly healthier if many years ago I'd never become a Costco member and stuck to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.
I also largely go there for Kerrygold butter, meats, oils, and other bulk household goods. But the occasional furniture purchase, automotive thing, car rental, etc. It's a good deal for the price of the annual membership
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
Megacorps have overheads for managing insane supply lines and lots more stringent enforcement with their product, and generally have much more oversight for things like labor.
The tiny grocery store uses the kid as free labor after school to keep costs down (I was one of those kids), and generally cares less about the quality of the product at the individual level.
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
I frequent Asian markets everywhere I’ve lived for certain ingredients, but not for my main grocery shopping.
For regular groceries I don’t think there’s any secret. The markets with extra cheap groceries are just carrying different products at different price points.
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?
Mega corporations need to increase their returns to shareholders year after year. Mom and pops don't have anyone else to please but themselves - they're often ok with retaining same returns as last year
A lot of manual labor and optimization on the marginal things.
Ex: Raspberries start to get funky. Bad ones get picked out, good ones get regrouped into a new tray package. Ripe avocados with limited shelf life? Go into deep cold refrigerator overnight, back out the next day. Discount deal on volume, on everything ("2 for $X"). Cash only. etc.
Farmers markets are incredibly shitty inefficient ways of getting food from farm to consumer. Also the people who shop at them tend to be much much richer.
When you control most of the market it works out a little differently. People can only eat so much food, but you can price gouge them relatively easily.
And they do $150B - $200B of gross per year. It's a massive business. I worked at Kroger Central Marketing decades ago when they rolled out the savings cards (which was a way for them to raise prices across the board AND track purchases in real time per shopper) and the strategizing over milk prices for a 1/2 a cent per gallon change was insane.
Doesn't that also count the investment losses they made last year, the cost of gobbling up other companies, the interest from the debt they acquired with previous expansionary practices, etc?
You can get the same numbers out of small scale grocers too. It’s a brutal retail business with low margins and easy replacement. It’s probably the last industry I’d look to for price gauging accusations.
The typical argument against monopoly grocer situations is that they are problematic for how they deal with _vendors_ not customers.
Grocery stores have lots of operations costs. Real estate, employees (Kroger employs ~400k people), cold chains, logistics, etc.
Feel free to set the bar for price gouging via gross margin, but then you are just suggesting that you don’t want operational efficiency in grocery store price comparisons.
Either freedom or zip. I'd sooner bang rocks together than use a phone I can't compile the OS for. The number of required binary blobs is a foul enough insult already.
Did you spend a few thousand on a purism, tolerate the woeful hot and slow character of a pinephone, or something else?
Less sardonically: I am a Linux Person but couldn't imagine really using one of those things today. It would probably kneecap my whole life in subtle ways; in the US using android already does.
The writing's been on the wall for custom ROMs in general for a while, so I've been starting to think about a mobile phone vendor I could actually have a decent business relationship with. I.e. use their stock ROM and be fairly happy with it.
Any opinions? Samsung was a candidate for their somewhat unified ecosystem. Maybe even apple.
I still really like Sony phones. Excellent hardware. They have no online services they are trying to push, they just want you to buy their phones. As a result, the stock software is very clean Google Android without much extra. But they're not available in every region, and quite expensive. Used to have very short software support but now they do 4 major Android version updates / 6 years of security updates.
You get no ecosystem benefits though, it's really just plain Android.
I really wanted a Sony phone as it ticked all the boxes. Headphone jack, SD card slot and bootloader unlock with LineageOS support. AFAIK no one else does that in current phones.
But the sad reality hit when there were all kinds of hurdles around getting 5G/4G working in Australia. Was not going to risk ~$900 dollars on a phone that could end up being a paperweight and returned it.
It's a sad state and makes me miss the good old days.
Sony phones generally have a ok-ish hardware(their old 4k oled screen is still top-tier for watch videos to date in my opinion) and emmmm-ish software support. And depends on your region, the software support can be even worse. For example, TW-version sony phones have a serious delayed update schedule. You may get an update that others already received for half an year (and pixel phones have already got two years ago)
The last few years it's been tougher and tougher to get them. Even in Europe you can now only buy them directly from Sony, and Amazon in a few countries. Sony is not selling them via any other retailers or operators at all from this year onwards.
In this domain, things change so fast that I decided to just focus on my next phone, or like the following 2-3 years.
The future is as bleak for the custom ROMs as is their past. They are aftermarket modifications of the phone software, entirely dependent on the manufacturers and Google, and these release new things yearly.
Pixels are a good choice I think because they come with the least amount of bloat, and with Android, the connection to Google is always there anyways.
You still don't get any better support than with Pixel though. I wish it was different. And I'll be using my Pixel 9 with GOS until its no longer supported (so several more years), and if then there are no viable Android options? Well, so be it, iOS (which i despise but Android with Google pervasive surveillance is unusable. I know, iOS is not much better but at lease is about as secure as gos).
Samsung carries a lot of advertising crap, tracking, etc. Pretty much every phones is going to be worse than Pixel in that respect, since you get Google's tracking + whatever pile of crap the vendor added (which in the end they all seem to do).
So it's basically:
Pixel with GrapheneOS > iPhone >> Google Pixel with PixelOS
I wouldn't recommend anything else. Theoretically Fairphone + e/OS may have been an option, but the security is crap.
I guess there is Sony, you could even install Sailfish OS, no experience though.
> Theoretically Fairphone + e/OS may have been an option, but the security is crap.
Lack of current privacy/security patches and the current privacy protections in Android means having very poor privacy too. There's no equivalent to the privacy protections added by GrapheneOS either including ones also offered by iOS now such as iOS having a more basic equivalent to the GrapheneOS Contact Scopes feature since iOS 18 and iOS having better storage/media control than Android similar to Storage Scopes in GrapheneOS.
> I guess there is Sony, you could even install Sailfish OS, no experience though.
SailfishOS is much less private/secure than AOSP and is largely closed source. It's the opposite of a more open OS.
I've owned a few pixels but for whatever reason in my case the hardware had a habit of randomly dying just outside of the warranty period. But maybe I can revisit.
I'm not really convinced of this in the long term. Commodities like baskets or vases were something that were once made by each tribe individually but became industrial products made in relatively fewer places (relative to human settlement) at much larger scales.
The economies of scale of cloud computing seem to prescribe the same trajectory to computer services as well for completely material reasons, not ideological ones.
In any case, differentiation is only made possible by a base of de-differentiated socialized production. Electricity.
Edit: https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
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