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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

> The only way this could be worse is if they started exploding, too.

Give it a few months.

This is like a 1980s plastic lunch box. The moulded hinge always snapped in half after about 3 months regardless of what you did. Cue optimus prime letting your lunch out all over the floor.

I think they are failing because it was a fucking stupid idea.

Edit: If anything I want NO mechanical components on any handheld device I own because in the last 40 years of my life everything has broken mechanically eventually. Home buttons, volume controls, connectors, battery holders everything.

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It's a valid point, if a bit grumpy: The big deal about smartphones is that in various different ways, they were able to replace the mechanical with the electrical, and replace physical design with software-based design. (Don't like where that button is? Tweak the code. Type of thing.) Adding a hinge is in some ways a step backward. I also agree with your grandparent comment though, that it's a bold idea and a neat gimmick. (EDIT: ...if it worked!)

Folding screens can certainly enabled more software based design. Its obviously a really exciting new form factor considering how prominent folding screens have been in sci fi. We all really want to have Westworld level tech. Even though we are still a ways away, its awesome to know that its becoming possible.

Westworld-level tech? Technology at a level of... going cartoonishly haywire and wantonly murdering all humans? I’m not sure I follow your point.

I'm talking about their folding screen they use.

> Edit: If anything I want NO mechanical components on any handheld device I own because in the last 40 years of my life everything has broken mechanically eventually. Home buttons, volume controls, connectors, battery holders everything.

Yes, but how have the electronic components fared over that time? I've definitely had devices where the mechanical components failed, but never a reasonable-quality device where the mechanical components failed first. For example, compare the times you've tried to input something on a dodgy public touchscreen versus the times you've tried to input something on a public physical keypad—I'll bet there're way more failures on the first than on the second; certainly that's been my experience.

> For example, compare the times you've tried to input something on a dodgy public touchscreen versus the times you've tried to input something on a public physical keypad—I'll bet there're way more failures on the first than on the second; certainly that's been my experience.

Well, anything with glass is prone to vandalism. A metal keyboard is hard to vandalize, a touchscreen needs only a piece of random rock or other debris to shatter.

Not even clear he's talking about vandalized glass. Sounds like maybe he's referring to those squishy resistive-touch displays found in ATMs and POS terminals and other kiosk-type applications, and early consumer devices. Did those ever work well, even when new?

How much of that is even hardware?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve used some big impressive digital map kind of thing at a mall or airport only to find it completely frozen (software), insanely laggy (potentially both, but likely software if a RPi could run it), and/or infuriating to use because I have to touch very hard exactly on the center of the icon, taking into account what I think the angle of the display is so that I’m hitting it exactly where the screen thinks it is, not where I see it through a layer of glass as being (most definitely software).

All of those complaints have applied to one degree or another to stupid tableside ordering apps that are running on an iPad or my own phone too, so I don’t think the hardware was ever to blame.

> "Edit: If anything I want NO mechanical components on any handheld device I own because in the last 40 years of my life everything has broken mechanically eventually."

your anecdote seems to suffer from cognitive bias. screens are non-mechanical (except in this galaxy fold) and yet they're still the most broken component in a phone.

We can pick conceptual holes in an argument until the universe implodes but lets consider that in normal use you won't break your phone screen. Until Samsung came out with this, which is the problem.

Well... Followed by buttons and charging ports. Y'know, the remaining mechanical parts. Perhaps the distinction is wearing out vs sudden damage.

A rock was kicked up on the interstate the other day and hit my windshield. It now has a delightful spider web pattern, but everything else about the car still operates perfectly.

Breaking the glass (a superficial and expected eventuality) is very different than the screen no longer functioning or responding to input (a mechanical failure).

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