technotony
The desktop equivalent is “What happened to all my PCIe expansion slots?!”
(Note: processor PCIe lane count has gone up, used to be like 16 from CPU, 4 from chipset, since a GPU didn’t need an x1x6 in terms of bandwidth - see SLI/crossfire. These days, it’s just that many lanes go to M.2, with each using up to 4 lanes - vs having 6 SATA driven off the chooser)
Not even what it was once close to being unfortunately on the android side either.
Android users have also been losing features every year.
Flagships have seen the removal of:
-SD card expansion - what we could once count on to use phones like mirrorless cameras is now gone so they can rip you off for higher non expandable storage (128GB SD? $10. 128 -> 256 GB base? $200)
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3.5mm - why buy cheap wired headphones when you can force people to spend 10x as much on wireless! Coming up with a solution to a problem they invented.
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IR blaster - yes I used it since it worked on TV, receiver, DVD player, air conditioner, etc. Also super convenient if you have used stuff you bought without the remote
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FM radio - yes I used it again since no data needed! Can also be fun to listen to campus radio or when travelling
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notification led - The RGB led was pretty good when you had binds foe each app to know who texted you and why. Always on OLED draws substantially more power than the LED did
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Always unlocked bootloaders - the custom ROM scene was pretty big at one point, but has shrunk as more manufacturs have begun locking bootloaders ‘for safety’
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removable battery - phone no longer holding a good charge? $15 fix. Was also super convenient since I bought a spare that I kept charged and in my bag, meaning I could go 0% to 100% in 2 mins… better than fast charge!
List could go on for longer. Maybe it’s just nostalgia but I do miss some of those days.
RedoxOS! There’s been solid progress too, beyond just having a functional microkernel, they have many of the userspace tools/their version of coreutils, even a desktop environment already mostly implemented!
My understanding is that it shouldn’t be too bad to port some other things over as well. The main issue I had was just the lack of drivers, especially since it’s still tricky even on Linux, and the microkernel architecture (though more secure) also means there’s no way to reuse any of those from Linux