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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the impact to the flashlight market was measurable.

I don't know, I have more flashlights now that smartphones are available.

Thanks to LEDs, flashlights are now cheaper, brighter and last longer than ever. Even cheap flashlights are better and more convenient than phones at lighting. Because they are cheap and small, you can have one in every place you might need it. And the slightly more expensive ones can be powerful enough as a substitue to mains powered light bulbs for places like garages and storerooms. Also, smartphones don't replace headlamps.

So maybe some people don't get a flashlight because they already have one on their phones, but some people (like me) actually buy more, because they are so cheap and effective.

>"Because they are cheap and small, you can have one in every place you might need it."

Exactly my case. I have those for each bike, in every room, couple in my car and few in my basement office. I am a sucker for those.

Adding to this, phones are really awkward and expensive flashlights. I run caseless on my phone and you wont find my phone on me when working on a car if I have someone with me, but you'll find an LED flashlight in my toolbox.

Its a common thing with multitools, lots of uses, not great at any of them.

At the very least drove it into a niche, same as with GPS devices (Garmin still makes devices for triathletes, boats and packs of dogs), and cameras. Flashlights just have to be tacticool now, market's flourishing.

I like the term tacticool, first time seeing it!

You can still buy alarm clocks too, even though your phone has one, just like it has a flashlight. Cheap alarm clocks are so cheap that only a slight benefit like always having it on your shelf is enough of a reason to buy one. (Expensive ones are decorations and not mainly bought in order to tell time.)

Watches have gotten less popular though.

Agree alarm clocks are cheap, but there's a very good reason to have one. Single use devices remove another area of phone dependence. Switching from waking up to phone alarm to dedicated clock alarm has been a huge help for me. It allows me to charge my phone in another room and create at least one no-phone zone in the house.

You're an outlier.

I still prefer a real watch – taking a peek at my wrist is easier than having to dig my phone out of my pocket, flipping open the lid of the case and turning it on. That's true both in summer (just need to lift my wrist) and winter, too (I might have to dig my watch out from underneath my jacket and gloves, but to take out my phone I'd have to take off my gloves, too, so still a more cumbersome procedure.)

Plus lock screen clocks rarely (never?) seem to come with a seconds display (even inside the full clock app I still need to flip a settings switch in order to turn the seconds display on) – while I don't necessarily need actual seconds accuracy that much, knowing whether it is xx:xx:05 or xx:xx:55 certainly does make a difference when I need to catch a train/tram/bus/… and am cutting it fine once again.

There was a silly horror movie called Crawl that came out a few years back. It's about killer alligators during a hurricane in Florida.

The least-believable part of this very silly movie was that, at the beginning, the main guy in it left his cell phone upstairs when he went to the dark basement to work on something in the house (pipes? I don't remember), which ended up causing the rest of the movie to happen. Of course he'd have taken it with him, for the flashlight if nothing else (and there are lots of other aspects of a smartphone that are super-handy when doing that kind of work).

Think of all the movie storylines that would just completely fail in the era of ubiquitous mobile phones.

Relatedly (sort of), I'm looking forward the day when they stop making movies whose storyline would be destroyed if the protagonist did the obvious thing and pick up the weapon used by their defeated attacker, so that they have a better defense against the next one.

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