I remember, and I’m gen z. And some higher end laptops had two battery slots so you can hot swap the batteries without turning it off.

Those were the days. Everyone talks about how smartphones nowadays get people addicted to instant gratification and convenience, but IMO the ability to swap out the battery when it died was a level of instant convenience we had decades ago that modern devices are severely lacking. Having to tether your phone to a battery bank while on the go is nowhere near as good as just popping the back cover and replacing the battery.

  • ragebutt ( ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
    15·
    1 year ago

    More than that I remember when you could MOD your phone

    You had some money burning a hole in your pocket and/or were good at tinkering? You could change the casing of your phone, add gaudy flashing LEDs, etc

    Real nerds like me would wire LEDs into circuits on the phone so that when it rang they triggered. Combine that with some of the circuits from the “baby’s first circuits” book and then you have a ring of LEDs around the screen that chase each other like the knight rider car when it rings. You can see them because OF COURSE you swapped the case with translucent plastic like a 1998 N64 or gameboy color. The resale value is now $8

    Some designer asshole was like “b-b-b-b-but that’s not good design!!! My training says so! Myspace.com, livejournal, and geocities are a travesty! Soft edges and muted colors everywhere! All logos have to be a stupid flat piece of shit! Webpages should take much longer to load even though computers are literally hundreds of thousands of times faster! Now everything is BLAND and it SUCKS. I hate the future

    • HiddenLayer555 ( HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml ) OPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I wish I could still use a fairphone as a daily driver in Canada. I have a Fairphone 4, had it shipped all the way from Europe and used it for two years before my network suddenly stopped connecting to it so I ended up getting a new phone. still use it at home though.

  • cmnybo ( cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
    4·
    1 year ago

    I’ve got an old Motorola AMPS phone around somewhere that has a charging cradle that will fit either the whole phone or the battery on its own. Most commercial two way radios still work like that, I wish they would still make phones like that too.

    The dual laptop batteries are handy too. I’ve got a Thinkpad T480 and it can hot swap the external battery. The high capacity battery lasts so long that you rarely need to swap it, but if you use the slim batteries, you will need a couple to get through a whole day. Unfortunately, that’s the last Thinkpad model that can hot swap batteries.

  • glitching ( glitching@lemmy.ml ) 
    4·
    1 year ago

    what’s way more angering is the deliberate constant raising of prices. tech is supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time. what was thousands in '06 should be like $100 now. no, a desktop is still supposed to cost north of $1000 without a monitor.

    mentioned it a coupla times, RX 570, a midrange GPU, was introed in 2017 at $170. nowadays, midrange starts at like $700?

    that same year I bought a Redmi Note, a feature rich budget phone from a budget line for $140. nowadays, a comparable Snapdragon model with an insignificant performance and feature jump is $300+.

  • BlackSheep ( BlackSheep@lemmy.ca ) English
    3·
    1 year ago

    I had a Nokia flip phone in the 90s (no internet), and it was freaking amazing! I’m looking for a basic cell phone with no internet, and would welcome recommendations. I made this decision 2 weeks ago when I went for a walk with a friend around a lake. Beautiful walk, the lake, the spring flowers, water birds… and almost everyone we passed on the trail was on their phone. They didn’t even look up when we passed. I found it really disturbing, and I’m opting out.