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Your Phone is an Entire Computer (medhir.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 65 points 5 months ago (3 children)

They have been since the beginning.
That's literally why I got an OG Motorola Droid. I said to myself "I can have a full computer in my pocket!"

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  • [–] [S] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    The whole point of the article is that the new MacBooks are running on iPhone hardware. And that therefore there's no reason for you not being able to install MacOS on your iPhone. Even your old droid was locked down and you were not able to install a real OS which would have given you the freedom to run what you want without restrictions

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  • [–] 36 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    It wasn't locked down. I rooted it, installed a few OS's, it even ran Linux.

    I understand the point of the article. I'm saying since the very beginning, the only limits on what smartphones can do, have been what software 'they' want you to run.

    A CPU is a CPU. Some are faster or slower, but they can all do anything.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    This. But Marketing has been very good at saying "this: phone, that: computer. not same thing". So many times I heard "Oh but how do you want to do that on a phone?". It's not a phone. It has never been a phone.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The only difference is UI. I operate my phone in my hand with my thumb, not on my lap or on a desk from a keyboard.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    And the hardware. Your phone requires much harder power optimization in order to have a usable battery life. Same for size and heat dissipation.

    Also politics related to the radio connection. Public cellular is tied to identity. It is structurally hostile to user-controlled, fully open, deeply optimized devices because the radio stack is certification-heavy, operator-governed, and privacy-hostile.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    For the first point, that sort of engineering is more necessary for a smaller form factor, but can absolutely be done for other computer hardware. Applying these lessons to laptops yields some amazing laptopsz for example.

    As for the second point, that's just one component in the system. You can attach a cellular modem to a PC. They just don't tend to be built in directly.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I remember one time I had a coworker sit down next to me with her MacBook, iPhone, iPad and iWatch and that was an "aha!" moment for me. She had spent like 5x more than she would have if 1 or 2 devices could do all of those things.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I went to the Verizon store to buy an iPhone when the droid first launched, the rep said "you don't want that phone, check this one out" and showed me the droid. So glad I didn't get roped into that ecosystem.

    I still miss CyanogenMod dearly...

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I had an Atrix 4G back in the day.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    For me, it was around 2013 an iPad nano, thinking how awesome having an iPhone with unlimited internet would be, because I could listen anything on demand on the go Then I got my 4s as first self bought iPhone.
    I realised, how macOS like it is, as I had jailbroken it.

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