All I want from a phone is to make and receive phone calls from people I know. I don't want texting. I don't want photos. I don't want apps. I have a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II burner phone if I need to receive an SMS.
I had high hopes for the PinePhone but the one I got can't even reliably make or receive calls so it sits in my desk drawer.
Will someone please sell me a simple phone that works without any smart crap?
For me use or mention of AI is a signal the manufacturer either doesn't care about quality or doesn't know or care that it's no longer special. It's plastic.
> So many "best practices" are truly repugnant like ...list of things
I have my own love/hate relationship with many of the things you list and I currently share many of your preferences. However I didn't always see things that way. Best practices start as informal approaches to address the problems of the day. After achieving a modicum of success they'll get enshrined by others as languages, features and cultural artifacts giving rise to new problems.
I find the broad tendency of unthinking "best practicification" more troubling than any particular "best practice".
Take OOP as an example. Stroustrup's early C++ presentations argued OOP meant more than "slow graphics" since people at the time were struggling to build graphical user interfaces for machines without much memory. The idea of melding state and behavior made it easier at the time to build complex user interfaces with imperative languages. But OOP isn't a silver bullet. Many attempts to apply the OOP ideas to other domains met with failure.
Fortunately we now have more powerful machines and better tools available to us.
As for me I've seen LLM based AI produce bland summaries¹ for a few years. Occasionally they generate something funny². But they cannot yet write anything I would spend my time or money to read.
I use SourceHut¹ to serve git for a few private projects.
I wanted to use their pages service as well to serve an SPA but their https://srht.site/limitations prevent SPAs from contacting external services I need.
I get why they do that but I need my SPA to let users login to their databases and there's simply no way to do that while adhering to SourceHut's policy.
Fortunately pico.sh², codeberg³ and GitLab⁴ (not GitHub) don't have that restriction.
I experimented with each of them last year.
All of them worked reasonably well.
Eventually I settled on GitLab which had the nicest CI/CD of the three at the time.
> Many will cheer the likely disappearance of political fundraising texts and robocalls around election season. But not all “unknown sender” messages are created equal.
Sorry but I do not pay for cellular service in order to receive unsolicited texts.
My daily driver is a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II (which uses a castrated Android under the covers). It's turned off most of the time. I don't use or want apps on it. My laptop satisfies those needs. My texting is limited to rendezvous with my family. A silent ringtone effectively blocks all unknown callers but I can't easily block unknown texts.
Apple is doing the right thing here if this feature works as described. Although I won't be switching any smartphone, I would immediately upgrade to a dumb phone that segregated texts this way and I hope to have that option in the future.
I had high hopes for the PinePhone but the one I got can't even reliably make or receive calls so it sits in my desk drawer.
Will someone please sell me a simple phone that works without any smart crap?